Herndon, Va., USA - January 31, 2014, Herndon, Va., USA - SDL Government, a technology and services company, appointed Vice Admiral (ret.) Thomas Wilson, John Gannon, Barbara McNamara, and Daniel Marcu to board of directors.
Article continues below
Mr. Wilson served for nearly 34 years in the U.S. Navy, with his last position as Director, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where he served concurrently as Manager of the General Defense Intelligence Program, overseeing the planning, programming and budgeting functions for military service and combatant command intelligence centers and staffs.
Mr. Wilson also served as Director of Intelligence, U.S. Atlantic Command; Vice Director for Intelligence, the Joint Staff; Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support; and Director for Intelligence, the Joint Staff.
Among his many awards, Mr. Wilson received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal and the Defense Distinguished Service Medal and Navy Distinguished Service Medal. After retiring from the US Navy, he worked with Alliant Techsystems, Inc., eventually serving as President of the ATK Precision Systems Group.
Mr. Gannon has served in the most senior analytical positions at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and in the Intelligence Community, including Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and the first Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production.
Mr. Gannon headed the White House team on Intelligence for the Transition Planning Office for the Department of Homeland Security, and was the first Staff Director of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security. After leaving government service in 2005, he established the Global Analysis business area at BAE Systems, Inc., where he eventually became the first President of the nearly $2 billion Intelligence and Security Sector.
Mr. Gannon's awards and medals include the CIA's Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. President George W. Bush awarded him the National Security Medal, the nation's highest int elligence award. He is a founding member of the Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Preparedness Group. He serves on the Board of Engineering and Physical Sciences of the National Academies of Science and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ms. McNamara reached the highest civilian position at the National Security Agency (NSA) when she was named Agency's Deputy Director, becoming the second woman to attain this position. Beginning her 40-year career at the NSA as a Chinese linguist, Ms. McNamara held a variety of management and leadership positions, culminating with her appointment as Deputy Director.
Ms. McNamara brings in-depth technical knowledge to the issues of intelligence analysis. She has received several prestigious awards, including the Intelligence Community's highest award, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. Since retiring from government service, she has served on a number of Corporate Boards, including CACI, Detica (acquired by BAE Systems), Morpho Trust and SignalScape.
Mr. Marcu is the Chief Science Officer of SDL plc and has more than 30 patents awarded or pending in the field of Natural Language Processing. His most influential publications address machine translation, discourse parsing, natural language generation, and text summarization, receiving best paper awards for his work on Statistical Machine Translation and Summarization at ACL and AAAI. ■