COL Matt Benigni
Chief Data Officer
Army Futures Command
Colonel Matthew Benigni currently serves as Army Futures Command’s Chief Data Officer and Directs the Data and Decision Sciences Directorate (DDSD).
Colonel Benigni spent the last 4 years as the Chief Data Scientist for the Joint Special Operations Command’s Global Analytics Platform. His work advising forward deployed data scientists on Tactical Data Exploitation Teams (TDETs) won the 2019 USSOCOM Lambersten Award for Innovation in Support of Operations, and he directs the command’s central authority for operational data science, Skope Cell.
He was commissioned as an armor officer in the United States Army and serves as an Operations Research Systems Analyst. His assignments include commanding a company of tanks and infantry in Eastern Baghdad from 2004-2005, serving as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Military Academy, and providing strategic planning support at the United States Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, FL, USA.
He has a B.S. in operations research from the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY, a M.S. in applied statistics from the Colorado School of Mines, and his doctorate Societal Computing from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. His academic research in the area of online extremism and propaganda is highly cited, and he continues to focus on applied machine learning and data mining in support of current operations.