Phil Sage

Chief AI Architect, Special Operations Mission Area

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL)

Philip “Phil” Sage returned to Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in October 2023 to help lead up the Labs Autonomy and AI groups in QAT.
Prior to returning, he was at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where, through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), he was the Director of the Analytics Technology Office (ATO) at NGA Research. In this role, he lead the Image and Video, GEOINT Forensics, and Predictive Analytics thrust areas to provide advanced research to user organizations for operational mission impact. In addition, he brought to NGA a wealth of experience throughout DARPA, IARPA, and other DoD agencies in leading and solving technical challenges that demonstrate breakthrough technologies to anticipate, create, and thwart threats to national security.
Before joining NGA, Phil worked on Project Maven as the Lead Data Scientist at the Tactical Data Office, supporting the development and evaluation of advanced machine learning technologies to detect and classify targets within Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Electro-Optical/Infra-Red (EO/IR), and Multi-Spectral Imagery for military airborne systems and commercial satellites. He worked at DARPA as an SME, providing new program development support in AI to create new program concepts in bias detection, ethics, detection of fraud, and privacy protection. Phil created several programs in cyber security and homomorphic encryption. He developed the Cyber Hunting at Scale program utilizing machine learning, anomaly detection, and evidence linking to track adversaries within and across the enterprise.
Before moving into cyber security, Phil was the Chief of Staff to the DARPA Strategic Technology Office Director, providing technical recommendations and assessments of office development goals, requirements, plans, and progress.
Phil has been a Technical Research Director and Principal Investigator on the DARPA Nexus 7, DARPA Network Defense, and DARPA Cloud Analytics for Structured Extraction program (CASE), developing learning algorithms for entity detection, tracking, and summarization. He was also the chief systems engineer on the DARPA Wide Area Network Detection Program responsible for developing image processing, target tracking, and evidence extraction and link detection.
Phil is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Science and informatics. He holds an MS degree in information systems, electrical engineering, and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University.

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