Vice President & Director, Technology Strategy for Information
Sharing and Homeland Security
Hatte Blejer helps shape the strategy of SRA's information
analysis and knowledge infrastructure solutions for intelligence
and homeland security. Throughout her career at SRA, Blejer has
held leadership roles related to text and data mining, knowledge
management, and advanced analytical systems. She helped direct
the technology and business strategy for SRA's commercial text
mining products. Blejer was responsible for more than a decade
for SRA's emerging technology program, corporate-wide research
and development, and nationally known centers of excellence in
natural language processing (NLP), text mining, data mining, and
knowledge management.
For a decade, Blejer managed a horizontal profit-and-loss center;
customers included US government and private sector organizations
whose mission required managing and exploiting large volumes of
digital information, both textual and structured. She oversaw
the development of new technologies and products and complex production
systems to fuse, index, categorize, summarize, navigate, analyze,
share, and visualize digital information.
Under Blejer's direction, SRA has become a national leader in
text and data mining. SRA was a top performer in NLP in several
US government benchmarks, and the company's text and data mining
solutions won The American Association of Artificial Intelligence's
(AAAI’s) Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence
Award in 1998 and 2000.
Blejer joined SRA in 1986, serving as a computational linguist
and subsequently as project manager on several early NLP systems.
She was the company's manager of the natural language processing
department for three years. She holds a PhD in linguistics from
the University of Texas in Austin, with a minor in Arabic linguistics
and spent 17 years studying Islamic History and Arabic in the
Middle East and the US.