Leadership | Compass Blue, LLC

Meet the Team

Compass Blue is Warfighter technology focused small business started by two veterans of Air Force mission and technology requirements. We pair warfighter experience with technical excellence to support RDT&E and prototype efforts to bridge the research “Valley of Death” for DoD customers. Automation, artificial intelligence, digital engineering and quantum are necessities for the delivery of Human Machine Teamed (HMT) as we might have imagined from science fiction as children. Our strong multi-INT fusion experience contributes to our operational perspectives.

We have broad access to the right operational and technical talent needed to develop solutions. Our experience includes deep understanding of tactical and operational C2 with the wisdom from numerous operational command tours. We have been directly involved in the shaping and evolution of ABMS inside government, university-affiliated research centers (UARC) and industry. Our pedigree includes successful development and delivery on several major defense technology weapons systems employed by the Air Force and the Army. We have the ability to move fast, and a track record to enlist the right academic and contractor partners.

CEO

Emil Filkorn

Emil had a 31 year career in Air Force command and control, and several leadership positions in command, as well as a role on the team that stood up ABMS, before retiring from the military and joining industry supporting DevSecOps teams, and completing a brief employ with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab – Air and Missile Defense Sector. His leadership within the tactical C2 community for Homeland Defense brought voice and visibility to their needs and connected them to the interests of Air Force ABMS solution architects.

His roles as commander of several Air Defense units ensured their focus on delivering solutions and processes, where none existed before, by exploring and engaging with the right communities of experts in gov’t, industry and academia. This included advancements in operational cyber defenses, accelerated counterair kill-chains, information dominance, domain awareness and improvements in automating C2 tactics, techniques and procedures against peer-adversary threats. Nothing in these domains succeeds in addressing challenges more than empowering the right diversity of operational and technical talent, and unleashing their power to solve important problems through traditional and non-traditional means.

Emil’s vision for Compass Blue is to combine the right operational and technical talent to accelerate RDT&E efforts and develop solutions through the “valley of death” to deployed and commercialized outcomes.

CTO

Michael Wheeler, PhD

Dr. Michael Wheeler has a 26 year career in finance, energy, and defense. Among other jobs, he was Information Technology (IT) manager for a US hedge fund in Tokyo, was a co-architect for a major oil company developing a worldwide trading and hedge system trading across three time zones, and was program manager for GeoVISTA studio which combined machine learning, cartography and multi-dimensional visualization tools for solving challenging problems in science and technology.

In the defense and intelligence world, he has been principal investigator (PI) or project manager (PM) for projects in countering improvised explosive devices (C/IED), developing activity based intelligence (ABI) to get "left of blast", and modeling US critical infrastructure vulnerabilities with a large Department of Energy (DoE) lab. Most recently, he has been very involved in artificial intelligence (AI) applied to multi-INT fusion and command & control (C2) with projects in computer vision (CV) applied to full motion video (FMV), adapting Air Force C2 tools for disconnected ops at the edge, and support DevSecOps pipelines for AI/ML models for Air Force and IC customers.

Dr. Wheeler has bachelor degrees from Brown University in computer science and history. His masters are in international relations / strategic studies (Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies) and business administration (SUNY Oswego). For his PhD in geospatial visualization from Syracuse University, he developed novel, three-dimensional (3D) mapping scenarios for visualizing historical transportation patterns.