Mark Berman is GENI Project Director. As Project Director, he has overall responsibility for GENI’s technical direction and successful implementation. Mark works with the GENI community, which spans dozens of universities, government and industry partners, to ensure that GENI is well designed, technically feasible, and satisfies its research requirements.
Mark joined the GPO in 2009 as Experimentation Director. Through outreach to GENI experimentalists and advocacy for their requirements, he worked to facilitate the successful integration and execution of a rich variety of experiments that make meaningful use of GENI capabilities. He helped to catalyze the rapid growth of the GENI experimenter community from a handful of experimenters to hundreds.
As Vice President for Technology Development at BBN Technologies, Mark works to bring technical innovations into practical use. He has pursued this goal for more than a quarter century at BBN, beginning in the 1980s when he participated in a successful effort to bring new user interface technology and AI-based pattern recognition and rule-based systems to bear on a major sensor and processing system for the US Navy.
Mark has served as Principal Investigator or Project Manager for several research efforts, with emphases in the areas of user interfaces and distributed computing. As manager of BBN’s Intelligent Computing business, he exercised management oversight over numerous research and technology transition efforts, across a diverse set of disciplines. These include distributed computing tools (e.g., Cougaar agent infrastructure), learning systems, and game-based lightweight immersive training. In previous assignments, leading BBN’s Distributed Systems Technology Development and Distributed Mapping groups, Mark was responsible for oversight of research projects related to the development of distributed systems middleware. These projects include BBN’s QuO (Quality Objects) research area, and distributed geospatial data storage, retrieval, and display mechanisms, based on open distributed system standards, including the OpenMap™ toolkit.
Mark holds A.B. and S.M. degrees in computer science from Harvard. He has twice (1966, 2006) been named Time’s Person of the Year (shared).