Napoleon Paxton

Dr. Napoleon Paxton is Chief Innovation Officer at AI Squared and a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where he teaches in both the Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) and Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) programs. His expertise sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity, and he is known for explaining AI from the audience's seat: what it can actually do for your team, where the real risks are, and how to put it to work today.

Napoleon's career spans more than 20 years across the military, government research, and industry. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a satellite systems technician and chief, then earned a Ph.D. in Information Technology from UNC Charlotte with a focus on cybersecurity, where he was a NASA Harriet G. Jenkins Fellow and won the university's inaugural Explainable Research Award. As a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory he led DoD-funded research, was granted a U.S. patent for tracking network packets across translational boundaries, and was one of two NRL scientists selected to present at a NATO conference in Tallinn, Estonia. He later served as Director of Innovation at IOMAXIS and as a senior contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, where he was Deputy Branch Chief of the AI/MLOps branch of Advana, the largest analytics platform serving the Department of Defense.

At AI Squared, Napoleon leads innovation for a company focused on integrating AI into the everyday applications people already use. He completed UC Berkeley's MIDS program in 2022, and has continued to study AI strategy through executive programs at MIT Sloan and Berkeley Haas. In 2025 he moderated the Cal Alumni Association's Berkeley Forward panel "Democratizing AI Through Platforms" with Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica, Jupyter creator Fernando Pérez, and AI Squared CEO Darren Kimura, and was the first guest interviewed on the Boldly Berkeley series. His 2026 survey paper on the theorems of Dr. David Blackwell traces how the work of the pioneering Black statistician underpins modern machine learning, from Monte Carlo inference to the alignment of large language models.

Napoleon has delivered more than 100 presentations to federal and commercial audiences and has authored numerous articles, conference papers, and book chapters on cybersecurity, cloud computing, AI/ML, and IoT. He is a founding board member of the nonprofit REACH and is committed to creating learning environments where every voice is heard.

Signature Topics

Democratizing AI: From Fear to Fluency A practical look at AI adoption from the audience's seat: how non-technical teams can move past the hype and the anxiety to actually put AI to work in their day-to-day.

Ethical AI Is Everyone's Job Ethics in AI isn't just a boardroom or policy issue. This talk gives every attendee, regardless of role, a concrete framework for spotting risk, asking better questions, and helping AI advance responsibly.

Evolving Education in the Age of AI How educators and learners can use AI as an augmentation, not a crutch, with creative approaches that deepen critical thinking instead of replacing it.