Craig Schlenoff

Director, National Coordination Office (NCO)

Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program

(October 2023 – present)

Dr. Schlenoff served as Deputy Director for the NITRD Program since September 2023. Dr. Schlenoff joins the NITRD NCO from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he served as the Group Leader of the Cognition and Collaboration Systems Group and the Program Manager of the Measurement Science for Manufacturing Robotics Program in the Intelligent Systems Division. He also served as a co-chair for the NITRD Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Interagency Working Group.

While at NIST, Dr. Schlenoff led the Agility Performance of Robotic Systems project and co-led the Embodied AI and Data Generation for Manufacturing Robotics project. He has also led multiple million-dollar projects, dealing with performance evaluation of advanced military technologies and agility performance of manufacturing robotic systems. Previously, Dr. Schlenoff served as the Program Manager for the Process Engineering Program at NIST and the Director of Ontologies at VerticalNet. Dr. Schlenoff is the Associate Vice President for Standardization within the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the vice chair of the IEEE Robot Task Representation Working Group.

Dr. Schlenoff has research interests in knowledge representation/ontologies, intention recognition, and performance evaluation techniques applied to manufacturing robotic systems. He has published over 150 journal and conference papers, guest edited three journals, and written three book chapters.

Dr. Schlenoff received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland and Master of Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, both in Mechanical Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Burgundy, France.

Dr. Schlenoff succeeds Kamie Roberts and will become the 15th Director for the NITRD Program.