Intelligence Community Research Agency Gets New Director

Jason Matheny came to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity as a program manager in 2009 as a bit of a forecaster, designing tools that might help the military better predict worldwide events.

Now, Matheny is taking over as IARPA’s director, putting him at the helm of the intelligence community’s research arm.

“Jason brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the position and I’m confident that he will continue to maintain the high bar for technical excellence and relevance to our intelligence community mission,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a statement. “I look forward to him continuing to work closely with partners throughout the national security community to bring to bear our future capabilities.”

Matheny had previously been in charge of IARPA’s “Anticipating Surprise” office, overseeing efforts to develop new capabilities in predicting and forecasting events related to national security.

At the same time, he led the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition program and the Forecasting Science and Technology program as well as IARPA’s Open Source Indicators program.  

These programs are fascinating for scientists, technology buffs and futurists. OSI, for example, uses open source data streams to predict events like political unrest and disease outbreaks.

When successful, IARPA’s high-risk, high-payoff research efforts give the U.S. military and intelligence community major advantages over current and future adversaries.

Matheny “conceptualized, developed, managed and successfully transitioned technologies” to the intelligence community from the Aggregative Contingent Estimation and OSI programs, according to the statement. ACE, whose goal is to improve intelligence forecasts for a wide array of event types, like disease outbreaks or political degradation, has become the world’s largest forecasting tournament. According to a statement from Clapper, the ACE program’s geopolitical forecasts increased by more than 50 percent in accuracy.

Matheny previously held positions at Oxford and Princeton universities, the World Bank, the Center for Biosecurity, the Applied Physics Laboratory and co-founded two biotechnology companies.

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