NGA’s first chief technology officer steps down

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s first chief technology officer, Anthony Vinci, will step down next month, about five months after his appointment, the agency said in a June 15 press release.

Vinci will leave NGA for the private sector, the agency said. He was appointed in February 2018.

As CTO, Vinci’s role focused on increasing NGA’s ability to use and integrate new technology.

“It is not enough to only focus on machine-learning, computer vision and augmentation technologies—we must be equally committed to the integration of these technologies with out people and processes,” said NGA Director Robert Cardillo when the NGA announced Vinci’s appointment.

In the position, Vinci served as technology adviser to the director and deputy director, chief evangelist who champions technology inside and outside the agency and tackled the technology transformation within the agency, he told C4ISRNET in April.

“I truly believe that agencies across the government need to have CTOs in strong leadership positions for the same reasons that companies have adopted them as direct reports to CEOs,” Vinci said. “You need someone in these agencies that’s thinking about the future, thinking quickly, bringing some of the new ideas from industry, working closely with chief information officers and chief data officers, taking that champion, evangelist approach.”

Prior to his role as CTO, Vinci served at NGA as the associate director for capabilities and director of plans and programs. He also was the founder and CEO of Findyr, a data crowdsourcing technology company.

NGA has not yet named a new person to the role.

In the same release, NGA also announced the appointment of Cindy Daniell as director of research. Daniell has previously served as director of advanced technology programs at SRI international, a research institution based in California.

Her expertise is in imaging sensors, signal processing and compression, chemical, radiological, nuclear and explosive sensors, solar energy an surveillance technologies to NGA.

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