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About Me

Dr. Viechnicki is a Research Scientist who recently completed his five-year term as Academic Center Director at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering with a passion for enabling teams of smart people to deliver key research outcomes. Over the course of his twenty-year career he has led progressively larger teams of research scientists, engineers, linguists, and data scientists at a Tier-1 research university, in the consulting industry, and in government. As a phonetician and computational linguist Dr. Viechnicki pursues fundamental empirical research on how humans use language, with an emphasis on speech production. He has a particular interest in developing new empirical techniques to investigate questions of long-standing interest to the disciplines of linguistics and cognitive science, such as cognitive representations of speech production targets and global assessments of rates of linguistic change.

Location: Washington, DC

Education

University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Ph.D. Linguistics, cum laude (2002)

Major Field: Phonetics  |  Minor Field: Phonology

Thesis: “Composition and Granularity of Vowel Production Targets.”

Committee: Howard Nusbaum (chair), Karen Landahl, Ken de Jong

Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

B.A. Classics and Linguistics (1992)

Class of 1992 Salutatorian

Academic Employment History

Director, Human Language Technology Center of Excellence

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

Years: 2020–2025

Non-departmental appointment as senior staff reporting to Executive Vice Provost Gange.

Director, WSE-Human Language Technology Center of Excellence

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

Years: 2025–Present

Non-departmental appointment as Research Scientist reporting to WSE Dean Schlesinger.

Private Sector and Government Employment

Member, Maryland Responsible AI Council (MRAC)

Years: 2024–Present

Advises the State of Maryland Governor’s Office and key departments on AI policy decisions and procurement.

Co-chair of the Public Sector MRAC Committee.

Specialist Leader, Deloitte Consulting

Years: 2019–2020

  • Co-led natural language processing sales and solutioning for Government and Public Sector.
  • Mentored and coached project teams of junior practitioners in data science techniques.

Analytics Manager, Deloitte Consulting

Years: 2017–2019

  • Led teams of data scientists, data engineers, and cloud architects to deliver insights to government clients.
  • Directed junior staff on implementation of machine learning solutions.
  • Built predictive models to help clients lower operating costs of key business processes.
  • Developed analytics platform to help a state government combat the opioids epidemic through data.
  • Led successful business development efforts including an $11.5M plus-up.

Chief Data Scientist, Deloitte Center for Government Insights

Years: 2014–2017

  • Delivered analytic insights for Deloitte’s Federal and Public Sector practices.
  • Authored highly rated Mission Analytics studies.
  • Directed quantitative research for the AI in Government campaign.
  • Developed impactful dashboards and data portals, including DataUSA.

Counterterrorism Analyst & Executive Assistant, National Counterterrorism Center

Years: 2010–2014

  • Conducted national-level all-source assessments of terrorism trends.
  • Developed and applied new methodologies for quantitative geospatial analysis of terrorism.
  • Briefed research results to customers at the highest levels of government.
  • Managed NCTC responses to Congress, the White House, and foreign partners.

Regional Analyst & Branch Chief, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Years: 2004–2010

  • Supervised ten direct reports in the Innovation and Technology Branch.
  • Proposed, directed, and published innovative research methods in human terrain analysis.
  • Served as project manager for R&D contracts on geospatial and text analysis technology.

Private Sector and Government Special Assignments

Technology Mentor, DCODE.io Government Emerging Technology Accelerator

Years: 2017–2022

Coached CEOs and CFOs of tech startups on how to adapt their offerings to government needs.

Geography Mentor, Afghanistan Geography and Cartography Head Office, Kabul

Year: 2009

Taught Afghan civil servants basic digital cartography to build indigenous capacity.

Co-Chair, Director of National Intelligence’s Language Technology Experts Group

Years: 2007–2008

Convened subject matter experts in foreign language technology and managed interagency collaboration opportunities.

Staff, United States Board on Geographic Names

Years: 2004–2010

Developed and implemented national and international policies for geographic name standardization.

Software and Data

DataUSA

Advanced data visualization platform from the Deloitte Center for Government Insights and DataWheel, Inc.

Geonames Server

The definitive catalogue of foreign place name spellings and metadata for use by the United States Government, produced by the United States Board on Geographic Names.

ParaBLoCC: Parallel Basic Locative Constructions Corpus

Public dataset hosted on Hugging Face.

External Funding

Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Core Program Award

Multi-year, multi-million dollar annually renewed academic center grant.

Years: 2020–2026

National AI Research Resource Pilot Grant

“Advancing Scientific Discovery through Multilingual Summarization at SCALE 2025” (NAIRR250176)

Amount: $214,000

Years: 2025–2026

Honors

Best Presentation Award

International Conference on Speech and Language Processing (ICSLP)

Year: 2025

National Intelligence Council Distinguished Analysis Award

Year: 2014

CIA Career Analyst Program, Distinguished Briefer Award

Year: 2012

NGA Joint Civilian Service Award

Recognized for deployment to Afghanistan

Year: 2009

Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terrorism

Year: 2009

Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholarship Program Recipient

Year: 2004

University of Chicago

Graduated cum laude

Year: 2002

Salutatorian

Princeton University

Year: 1992

Publications

Thomas Thebaud, Yen-Ju Lu, Matthew Wiesner, Peter Viechnicki, and Najim Dehak. (2025, in press). “Enhancing Dialogue Annotation with Speaker Characteristics Leveraging a Frozen LLM.” Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2025).

Tong Qi, Vera Andersson, Peter Viechnicki, Vince Lyzinski. (2025, in press). “Asymptotically perfect seeded graph matching without edge correlation (and applications to inference).” arXiv:2506.02825.

Peter Viechnicki, Alexandra Eberstadt, and Barbara Landau. (2025). “Spatial Terms in English plus Twelve Languages: Evidence for Functional and Geometric Classes.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47.

Peter Viechnicki. (2025). “Measurement of the Granularity of Vowel Production Space by Just Producible Difference (JPD) Limens.” ICSLP 2025. (Best presentation award).

Peter Viechnicki and Anthony Kostacos. (2025). “ParaBLoCC: Parallel Basic Locative Constructions Corpus.” NAACL 2025 Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.

Peter Viechnicki, Kevin Duh, Anthony Kostacos, and Barbara Landau. (2024). “Large-Scale Bitext Corpora Provide New Evidence for Cognitive Representations of Spatial Terms.” Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), St. Julian’s, Malta.

William Eggers, David Schatzky, and Peter Viechnicki. (2017). “AI-Augmented Government: Using Cognitive Technologies to Redesign Public Sector Work.” Deloitte University Press.

Peter Viechnicki. (2015). “Understanding Millennials in Government: Debunking Myths about our Youngest Public Servants.” Deloitte University Press.

Vivek Seghal, Peter Viechnicki, and Lise Getoor. (2006). “Entity Resolution in Geospatial Data Integration.” GIS '06: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems.

Ken Rasinski, Peter Viechnicki, and Colm O'Muircheartaigh. (2005). “Methods for Studying Stigma and Mental Illness.” In P. W. Corrigan (Ed.), On the stigma of mental illness: Practical strategies for research and social change (pp. 45–65). American Psychological Association.

Peter Viechnicki. (2003). “Composition and Granularity of Vowel Production Targets.” University of Chicago, Ph.D. Dissertation.

Peter Viechnicki. (2001). “Properties and Availability of the Union Army Life-Cycle Sample.” National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER Report.

Peter Viechnicki. (1998). “A Performance Evaluation of Automatic Survey Classifiers.” In: Honavar V., Slutzki G. (eds) Grammatical Inference. ICGI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1433. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Peter Viechnicki. (1996). “The Problem of Voiced Stops in Modern Greek: A Non-linear Approach.” Studies in Greek Linguistics, 16, 59–70.

Get in Touch

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to collaborate or just say hello!

Email: pviechnicki2@gmail.com