Yevgenia Pinelis, Director of Test and Evaluation at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center

Yevgenia Pinelis is the chief of test and evaluation at the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Her professional specialties include statistics, applied statistics, statistical consulting, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, machine translation, observational studies, design of experiments, quasi-experiments, and operational testing and evaluation.

Pinelis is the inaugural T&E chief of JAIC, helping oversee the organizations’ establishment in 2018. She is now running a high-profile government research program to ensure that the DOD builds assured and trustworthy AI-enabled systems, her LinkedIn profile shows.

Previously, Pinelis served with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as its director of algorithmic warfare test and evaluation. As an on-site representative to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, she led developmental and operational testing of AI algorithms, including computer vision, machine translation, facial recognition, natural language processing and human-machine teaming.

At one time, Pinelis was also the test science lead at the Institute of Defense Analyses. In that role, she led an interdisciplinary team in providing independent and objective support to the director of operational test and evaluation, as well as his chief scientist.

Pinelis earned her degrees in economics, statistics and mathematics from Michigan State University. She later earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in statistics from the same institution.