Elham Tabassi is a Senior Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Associate Director for Emerging Technologies in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). She also leads NIST’s Trustworthy and Responsible AI program that aims to cultivate trust in the design, development, and use of AI technologies. 

As the ITL’s Associate Director for Emerging Technologies, Elham assists NIST leadership and management at all levels in determining future strategic direction for research, development, standards, testing and evaluation in the areas of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. She also coordinates interaction related to artificial intelligence with the U.S. research community, U.S. industrial community, international standards community, and other federal agencies; and provides leadership within NIST in the use of AI to solve scientific and engineering problems arising in measurement science and related use-inspired applications of AI.

Elham has been working on various machine learning and computer vision research projects with applications in biometrics evaluation and standards since she joined NIST in 1999. She is a member of the National AI Resource Research Task Force, vice-chair of OECD working party on AI Governance, Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Information Forensics and Security, and a fellow of Washington Academy of Sciences.

Taka is the first Chief Data Scientist and the Director of Innovation Lab appointed by the Comptroller General of the United States for the Government Accountability Office to help GAO adapt to the consequences of web 3.0 technologies and beyond. The mission of the Innovation Lab is to better understand inner workings of machine learning techniques, cloud services, zero trust controls, blockchains, extended reality, and other integrated cyber-physical capabilities. Taka is leading the exploration and experimentation of emerging technologies as a necessary and critical foresight function.

Taka is a current member of the federal Senior Executive Services and has over 23 years of consistent track record on delivering technology innovations sustainably and at scale by combining data science with with IT competencies. He is passionate about fostering a data centricity mindset as a catalyst to address complex policy, regulatory, risk, operational, and business intelligence challenges.

Taka is natively fluent in both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. In his spare time, he is also a serious classical chamber musician and a competitive tennis player.