ABOUT MISSION FOCUS
Mark Andrew Eick: Founder and CEO
Mark Andrew Eick is an ardent technology maven and thoughtful business pathfinder dedicated to composing scientific innovation into practical solutions that deliver real capability to the Intelligence Community (IC) and the Nation. With degrees in philosophy and computer science, Mr. Eick started his career at Ford Motor Company in 1995, quickly ascending to "bad-ass coder" and ultimately taking authority and responsibility for the company's entire content management system.
Driven by a desire to lead his own company, Mr. Eick leveraged his experience at Ford to create and grow a startup focused on bringing new visualization techniques to bear on stultifying problems in geo-spatial client-server applications in the IC domain. The recipient of multiple technology and patent awards, Mr. Eick then started a new company called MissionFocus. As MissionFocus CEO, Mr. Eick now orchestrates technology and operations at a much larger scale to develop mission focused applications for today's warfighter.
Suzanne Yoakum-Stover: Founder and Executive Director
Suzanne Yoakum-Stover is a visionary scientist and leader dedicated to developing the science, practice, and governance of intelligence at Ultra-Large Scale (ULS) – Modern Intelligence. Since earning her Ph.D. in experimental atomic physics from Stony Brook University in 1992, she has contributed, both as a research scientist and as an educator, to a range of technical fields including atomic, molecular, and optical physics, artificial intelligence, medical imaging, computer graphics and simulation, statistical and natural language processing, data management, and knowledge representation. An explorer at heart, driven by a thirst for insight, the thread that unifies all of her work is an enduring penchant for scientific computation.
The diversity of Dr. Yoakum-Stover's experience now culminates in her work as the Executive Director of the Institute for Modern Intelligence (IMI) where she leads a team developing a practical, ULS systems solution for data storage, exploration, enrichment, and exploitation that can accommodate the diversity of current and future intelligence data, semantics, and perspectives in one unified DataSpace without information loss or distortion. Through her innovation, which provides a generic interface to all data, she and the IMI are working to enable all manner of intelligence processing to be put into production together over the DataSpace and upon that foundation, execute a broad ULS systems research agenda with specific application to intelligence. Indistinguishable from the IMI, she aspires to transform the "data problem" into a sublime intelligence asset for the defense of our Nation and, to give Modern Intelligence its birth place.