Founded in 2004, Vadum delivers cutting-edge solutions to customers in the competitive field of national defense research and development. Vadum got its start developing innovative tools and techniques to protect personnel from improvised explosive devices used in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Vadum has grown to tackle larger and more complex defense challenges in a range of mission areas and is now at the leading edge of technology development in areas such as electronic warfare and missile defense.  Many of Vadum’s solutions employ machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to improve automatic inference and decision making.  This talk will be both an overview of Vadum and an industry perspective on some of the technical and non-technical issues faced when applying ML/AI to real-world problems.