Mikel D. Rodriguez is the director of The Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy Innovation Center at MITRE labs and leads the AI Red Team for the Department of Defense. Being part of a not-for-profit in the public interest Dr. Rodriguez works with a team that can look beyond the bottom line of any particular product or organization and focus harnessing AI to help address national and global challenges. For the past twenty years his research has focused on exploring how artificial intelligence and in particular Computer Vision can be used to help solve problems for a safer world. He obtained his PhD at UCF's Center for Research in Computer Vision.

He was a visiting researcher at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon and a post-doctoral fellow at INRIA at the Département d'Informatique of Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Dr. Rodriguez is the editor of the ACM Journal for Responsible Computing. Dr. Rodriguez was the chair of the ODNI Video Analytics Research Working Group and is a senior technical advisor for the Pentagon's Project MAVEN. He has served in the program committee for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.