Timothy McKinnon

Program Manager

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)

Dr. Tim McKinnon joined IARPA in August of 2021. He currently manages the BETTER, HIATUS, and BENGAL programs. 

Before joining IARPA, Dr. McKinnon worked in private industry as Lead Data Scientist at Quantitative Scientific Solutions and Data Scientist at Perfecta.  He also held academic appointments at the University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and University of Delaware. He was also a Fulbright scholar in 2010.  

Dr. McKinnon’s professional interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) with a focus on linguistic variation at dialect and idiolect levels. Throughout his career, Dr. McKinnon has published theoretical, descriptive and historic work on Malayic languages. Within NLP, his interests include information extraction, co-reference resolution, multilingual language models, adversarial machine learning, explainability, authorship attribution, and author privacy. 

Raised in Flagstaff, AZ, Dr. McKinnon holds a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Delaware, where his dissertation “The Morphosyntax and Morphophonology or Kerinci Word-Shape Alternations” received the Wilbur Owen Sypherd Prize for best dissertation in the humanities. He received a Bachelor’ degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2004 with a dual major in linguistics and Polish language and literature.

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