Colonel Matthew Benigni currently serves as Army Futures Command’s Chief Data
Officer and Directs the Data and Decision Sciences Directorate (DDSD).
Colonel Benigni spent the last 4 years as the Chief Data Scientist for the Joint
Special Operations Command’s Global Analytics Platform. His work advising
forward deployed data scientists on Tactical Data Exploitation Teams (TDETs) won
the 2019 USSOCOM Lambersten Award for Innovation in Support of Operations,
and he directs the command’s central authority for operational data science,
Skope Cell.
He was commissioned as an armor officer in the United States Army and serves as
an Operations Research Systems Analyst. His assignments include commanding a
company of tanks and infantry in Eastern Baghdad from 2004-2005, serving as an
assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United
States Military Academy, and providing strategic planning support at the United
States Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, FL, USA.
He has a B.S. in operations research from the United States Military Academy at
West Point, NY, a M.S. in applied statistics from the Colorado School of Mines, and
his doctorate Societal Computing from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of
Computer Science. His academic research in the area of online extremism and
propaganda is highly cited, and he continues to focus on applied machine learning
and data mining in support of current operations.
