Exploring AI's Many Facets with Catherine Ordun

AI has been a force throughout Catherine Ordun’s life. It’s the subject of her just-completed sci-fi novel. It’s helping her garden grow. And she’s on the board of the Mark Cuban Foundation’s AI Bootcamps, helping the next generation discover its potential. 

AI is also all in a day’s work. Catherine’s an AI executive advisor at Booz Allen and a newly minted Ph.D. whose career spans natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, machine learning, generative AI, and beyond. 

Read more about Catherine’s journey, and why the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers (SASE) named her 2023 Information Technologist of the Year.

Catherine joined Booz Allen for the first time in 2011 as a data scientist, supporting the firm’s work in the intelligence community.  

Since then, she has worked on projects for an array of civil and defense clients and helped launch internal efforts in areas like NLP. She has also led the testing, evaluation, research, and development of algorithms for computer vision—a prototype she’s building in her own backyard to monitor plant growth and soil conditions.

“I’ve always been interested in the potential AI applications in agriculture, areas like pest, water, and moisture control—all the parts in agriculture that increase costs and make human labor more daunting,” she says.  

When Catherine had to relocate with her family overseas, she left the firm to start her own consulting service. Two years later, top leadership in Booz Allen’s AI business invited her back. She’s been going full speed ever since, from talking about AI at The Helix, Booz Allen’s Center for Innovation, to exploring how generative AI can be used for healthcare and defense.

Her current position as an AI executive advisor has Catherine serving in many roles, educating Booz Allen leaders and clients about AI, leading development teams in state-of-the-art generative AI applications, and more. And she has been doing it all while earning her Ph.D.

“My career has a lot of inflection points. I’m grateful for all the ‘right time, right place’ moments that have led me to where I am now,” she says.

One highlight in Catherine’s career has been AI research for the National Cancer Institute, specifically using multimodal modeling techniques to identify and evaluate chronic pain. 

Analyzing data to detect acute pain is relatively easy. Acute pain typically uses just one type of data, a facial expression like a grimace, at one moment in time.

Data modeling to detect chronic pain is a more complicated story, however. The information must cover a period of time, not just a snapshot, and different data types factor into the analysis.

“You have to discern voice, tone, words, face movement, and psychological scores,” Catherine says. “Then you have to fuse it all together.”

Using a custom neural network and machine learning techniques, Catherine and her team were able to extract multiple types of data and incorporate them into the modeling process. This includes thermal-visible biometrics. “Thermal imagery gives more information on pain,” Catherine points out. This could include, for example, heat waves beyond the visible spectrum that could show signs of inflammation.  

The next step is using generative imaging to operationalize the hardware and scale the solution for use by research and oncology departments.

In August, Catherine joined Booz Allen Executive Vice President Jennie Brooks on the firm’s Unstoppable Together podcast. The topic: making AI more equitable, from the technology itself and its outcomes to the workforce shaping it.

For women interested in an AI career, Catherine offers the same advice she gives to her 11-year-old daughter: “Be fearless and just go do it.”

“You can’t allow other people to tell you what you can and can’t do,” she says. “Only you know what you can do.”

In AI, Catherine notes, “There are no traditional career pathways.” Her own background is one example. While Catherine’s recent doctoral studies focused on generative networks for healthcare AI and deep learning, her earlier degrees are in biology, public health, and business. 

“Find a project that gives you on-the-job experience,” she advises. “Start now, have faith in yourself, and don’t take no for an answer.”