Rising Star: Taylor K. Chott

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Taylor Chott is a junior data scientist on a multidisciplinary team made up of other data scientists, statisticians, and software architects and developers — all focused on bringing deep learningsolutions to bear on the intelligence community’s most challenging missions.

The technology and research in this space are cutting-edge, and the IC’s missions needs present learning curves of their own. Chott has shown a talent for not only understanding the nuanced techniques described in academic journal articles, but also seeing opportunities to apply those techniques to intelligence use cases and build proof-of-concept prototypes.

Although she is not formally in a leadership role, Chott quickly established herself as an essential resource and a critical liaison between various project stakeholders. Sara Palmer, a technical director at CACI,said Chott’s understanding of the fundamentals of the research quickly propelled her to be the technical point of contact for the larger cross-company project team.

Chott has also established her own expertise around the use of deep learning techniques to automate event classification, anomaly detection and the generation of confidence scores. When complications arose with dataset curation, she was able to explain the problems and potential solutions to both technical and nontechnical audiences and kept essential work moving forward.

“Taylor’s contribution to the success of this project cannot be overstated,” Palmer said.