NGA‘s Mark Munsell Secures 1st Wash100 Award for Project Maven, Tech Innovation Leadership
Executive Mosaic is pleased to announce that Mark Munsell, chief artificial intelligence officer and director of the Data and Digital Innovation Directorate at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, has won his first Wash100 Award for his transformative work in bringing advanced technology to the NGA in response to evolving mission needs.
The Wash100 Award is given annually to 100 government and government contracting industry leaders for their past achievements while anticipating their future successes.
If you think Munsell should win the 2025 Wash100 Awards’ popular vote competition, head to Wash100.com today and vote for him. Voting ends on April 30.
“Mark’s return to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as chief AI officer marks a pivotal moment for the agency’s AI and geospatial efforts. Now leading Project Maven, he’s bringing decades of expertise to the mission of harnessing AI to analyze vast archives of satellite imagery and enhance national security,” said Jim Garrettson, CEO of Executive Mosaic and creator of the Wash100 Award.
“Mark’s deep understanding of both the technology and the agency’s needs makes him the perfect leader to drive this next wave of AI-driven geospatial intelligence. With Mark at the helm, NGA is positioned to turn data into actionable insight faster and more effectively than ever before,” added Garrettson.
Who Is Mark Munsell?
Munsell spent a good chunk of his career at the NGA. He joined the agency as a software engineer in 1995, then left in 1997 to work as a technical director at Northrop Grumman. Following his brief stint in the private sector, he returned to the geospatial intelligence agency, where he held various leadership roles for over 15 years.
He held the role of deputy director for data and digital innovation before he was appointed to his current dual-hatted positions of head of the Data and Digital Innovation Directorate and chief AI officer. Munsell is in charge of existing and future geospatial intelligence AI initiatives and crafting an in-agency framework to ensure the responsible use of the technology. The official also advised the NGA leadership executive team on matters related to AI.
Munsell’s resume also includes roles at Amazon Web Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and IMAPS, a small technology business he co-founded.
NGA Embraces Advanced Technologies
Munsell sees great potential in AI aiding the NGA’s geospatial intelligence work. In an August event, the technology leader pointed out that the agency is sitting on a trove of well-labeled, carefully organized and thoroughly vetted data collected over decades. The data can be used to train algorithms and, unlike more common generative AI models, deliver more accurate and reliable results.
“We’re sitting on two big sets of data, a gold mine of data, where we have images that nobody else in the world has, and … experts that have described what’s on those images in expert language and text,” he shared at the INSA Intelligence & National Security Summit.
He also revealed that the NGA is in the early stages of an experiment that combines the visual record of the Earth captured from space and human-generated description of objects in the images.
In September, the agency issued a request for proposals for data labeling services for training AI-powered computer vision models. The $700 million project aims to build AI models capable of identifying targets of interest from satellite imagery.
In an interview in November, he stated that the agency will unveil in early 2025 a retrieval augmented generation of a large language model trained on “every NGA report ever written.”
He added that the technology will be able to answer any question on any report ever written at the agency.
Mark Munsell’s guidance ensures that NGA reaps the full benefits of AI to support warfighters and policymakers, making him deserving of his spot in Wash100’s class of 2025. Do not forget to vote for Munsell on Wash100.com.