Page 62 - FCW, November/December 2019

Rising Stars
DHS and Mitre. And Castro, who is from Brazil and the first member
of his family to attend college, completed his project while working full-time and raising two children.
Trujillo pointed out that Castro quickly picked up the necessary technical and teamwork skills
after being exposed to American technology and business. “I think he will go far,” she said. “He embodies the [American] dream, and he’s proven to be successful at it.”
4,000 simultaneous users, stores almost 900 million documents and provides constant access for U.S. veterans around the world. VA’s My HealtheVet portal, which is used by 82 percent of veterans, has also successfully migrated to VAEC.
Those are just two of the more than 40 systems that he has helped the VA migrate to the cloud. Others include VA’s Community Care Provider Profile Management System, the Online Patient Self-Scheduling system and the White House VA Hotline.
In addition, Catanoso led the effort to close a major VA data center in Culpeper, Va. He avoided $50 million a year in operating costs by decommissioning four systems and successfully migrating 14 others to VAEC ahead of schedule.
curves of their own. Chott has shown a talent for not only understanding the nuanced techniques described
in academic journal articles, but
also seeing opportunities to apply those techniques to intelligence use cases and build proof-of-concept prototypes.
Although she is not formally in
a leadership role, Chott quickly established herself as an essential resource and a critical liaison between various project stakeholders. Sara Palmer, a technical director at CACI, said Chott’s understanding
of the fundamentals of the research quickly propelled her to be the technical point of contact for the larger cross-company project team.
Chott has also established her own expertise around the use of deep learning techniques to automate event classification, anomaly detection and the generation
of confidence scores. When complications arose with dataset curation, she was able to explain the problems and potential solutions
to both technical and nontechnical audiences and kept essential work moving forward.
“Taylor’s contribution to the success of this project cannot be overstated,” Palmer said.
DAVID CATANOSO
Director, Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office, Department of Veterans Affairs
David Catanoso has made significant strides on a pioneering VA Enterprise Cloud initiative that seeks to give the agency the agility, scalability, security and cost-effective services that are essential to its digital transformation and IT modernization strategies.
VA has set an aggressive schedule for migrating to VAEC, with a goal of moving 350 applications, or half of its IT portfolio, by 2024. Thanks to Catanoso’s efforts, some of the agency’s premier mission-critical applications have already moved to the cloud.
For instance, VAEC absorbed the Veterans Benefits Management System, which supports as many as
TAYLOR K. CHOTT
Data Scientist, CACI
Taylor Chott is a junior data scientist on a multidisciplinary team made up of other data scientists, statisticians, and software architects and developers — all focused on bringing deep learning solutions to bear on the intelligence community’s most challenging missions.
The technology and research in this space are cutting-edge, and the IC’s missions needs present learning
60 November/December 2019 FCW.COM