Chief Computational Scientist
Office of Science & Technology

Dr. Svitlana Volkova is a recognized leader in the field of human-centered artificial intelligence (AI). Her scientific leadership and outstanding research profile cover a range of topics on natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, AI test and evaluation, computational social science, causal discovery, and inference.

At Aptima, she leads the development of AI-powered descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive decision intelligence and analytics to model and explain complex systems and behaviors to address national security challenges in the human domain and beyond. Svitlana has served as Principal Investigator and/or Project Manager on multiple DoD and DOE-funded projects focusing on advancing various aspects of AI for national security, including projects for DARPA, IARPA, and NNSA.

Svitlana has authored more than 70 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications. She serves as senior PC member and area chair for top-tier AI conferences and journals including AAAI, WWW, NeurPS, ACL, EMNLP, ICWSM, PNAS, and Science Advances and is a senior board member for Women in Machine Learning. She is regularly invited to present her research at universities and leading tech companies such as Google Research, Facebook, and Microsoft Research.

Svitlana holds a PhD in computer science from The Johns Hopkins University, where she was affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.