Senior Advisor for AI in the Information Technology Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Dr. Craig Schlenoff currently serves as the Senior Advisor for AI in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In this role, he advises the ITL Director and other NIST senior management on trends in AI and how NIST can best position itself to enable U.S. industry to lead in AI innovation. Prior to this, Dr. Schlenoff served as the NIST Acting Deputy Associate Director of Laboratory Programs (ADLP), where he advised the ADLP, provided operational guidance for NIST’s scientific and technical laboratory programs across six laboratories, led program and budget development, and coordinated interagency and outreach activities, accelerating U.S. innovation.
Prior to this, Dr. Schlenoff served as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office. In this role, he coordinated $11B of Federal Government IT R&D to identify, develop, and transition into use the secure IT, high-performance computing, networking, and software capabilities needed by the Nation, and fostered public-private partnerships that provide world-leading IT capabilities. He also served as the co-chair of the NITRD AI R&D Interagency Working Group, where he led the development of the 2023 AI R&D Strategic Plan Update.
Previously, he was the Group Leader of the Cognition and Collaboration Systems Group, the Program Manager of the Measurement Science for Manufacturing Robotics Program, and the Project Leader of the Agility Performance of Robotic Systems project and the Embodied AI and Data Generation for Manufacturing project in the Intelligent Systems Division at the NIST. His research interests include AI, knowledge representation/ontologies, intention recognition, and performance evaluation of autonomous systems and industrial robotics. He has led multiple million-dollar projects and programs addressing performance evaluation of advanced military technologies and agility performance of manufacturing robotic systems. He has published over 150 journal and conference papers, guest edited three journals, guest edited three books, and written four book chapters. He is currently the Associate Vice President for Standardization in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, has served as the Program Manager for the Process Engineering Program at NIST, and as the Director of Ontologies at VerticalNet Inc. He also teaches two courses at the University of Maryland, College Park: “Calculus” and “Building a Manufacturing Robot Software System” and “Mathematics for Engineers” at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Schlenoff received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland College Park, his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his PhD in computer science from the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France.
