Dr. Thomas Drayer

Augmenting Intelligence using Machines (AIM) iHub Director and Initiative Champion

Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)

Dr. Thomas Drayer serves as the ODNI’s Augmenting Intelligence using Machines (AIM) Innovation Hub (iHub) Director, leading efforts to enable Automation, Augmentation and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AAA) capabilities across the IC in order to accelerate development and maximize impact.

Dr. Drayer has a long history of scaling innovative ideas and projects to enterprise-wide capabilites with enduring results. He started his IC career in NSA’s Research Directorate, working in the areas of computer vision and human language technology. After leaving research he took a struggling startup peer-2-peer object storage program and scaled it for operational use and led the charge for distributed, fault tolerant cloud capabilities. He was called in to provide overall technical leadership of a high-risk program that deployed front-end capabilities that expanded NSA’s collection by two orders of magnitude in less than a year. After returning from a tour in Afghanistan, he was selected as the technical lead for NSA’s cloud computing efforts, taking what was a fractured set of individual capabilities and delivering a converged IC GovCloud for NSA and the IC. In that role he consolidated infrastructure and decommissioned about 20 different legacy stovepipe systems so that NSA and IC missions could benefit from the emerging cloud technology. Most recently he served as the Technical Director for the NSA organization that is responsible for all of its back-end mission data processing, compliance, dataflow, decryption, analytics, storage, and analyst toolsets.

Dr. Drayer has received the Meritorious Presidential Rank award and Meritorious Civil Servant award. Tom is also an inventor on two licensed patents, has published over 20 technical papers, and has organized and chaired several external conferences and workshops. He is a past recipient of the prestigious Pratt and Bradley Fellowship awards from Virginia Tech and was the lead engineer for the design teams of two industrial machine vision systems that received international design awards. His degrees are all from Virginia Tech in Electrical Engineering and he currently serves on the Executive Committee of their Electrical and Computer Engineering Department’s Advisory Board.

Dr. Drayer lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife Terri. He spends time enjoying the ever-expanding number of antique cars that he collects, restores and occasionally is able to drive.

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