Federal 100: Randel Torfin
Name: Randel Torfin
Title: Head, Engineering Maintenance Management Branch, Military Sealift Command
Agency: Department of the Navy
Ship-shape data. Flooded with decades of unstructured maintenance data on over 100 ships, the Navy’s Military Sealift Command couldn’t easily tap into that data to inform decisions. Working with the artificial intelligence experts at Abeyon, Torfin and his team built an AI-based text-analysis tool that pulled context and patterns from Word documents to turn nearly 30 years’ worth of data into a decision-making engine for ship maintenance. The technology learns as it works so that it can guide recommendations on equipment health and potential for failure. Thanks to Torfin’s efforts, officials can now predict problems and preempt them.