As President Obama’s first chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra fostered greater collaboration by opening up government data and encouraging its use in a growing number of commercial products and services. Despite the widespread economic benefits of open collaboration, Chopra understood the importance of protecting sensitive data from growing cybersecurity threats and worked to address them in the Administration’s open innovation strategy. Drawing on his experiences, Chopra shares his expertise and unique perspective on many of the complex, urgent issues balancing the economic benefits of greater collaboration with the potential costs of rising cybersecurity threats in this informative and thought-provoking presentation. How do we bring together the private sector and government in order to identify common threats? How do we deal with these threats without undermining privacy? Chopra tackles these tough questions and addresses the most pressing topics of the day, including the current challenges in our legal framework, options to mitigate cybersecurity threats, and what each individual and organization can do to make our networks more secure and reliable today.
About Aneesh Chopra
Aneesh Chopra is the former (and first) U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO). As an assistant to the President, he designed the National Wireless Initiative, helped launch Startup America, and executed an “open innovation” strategy focused on better public-private collaboration as described in his 2014 book, “Innovative State: How New Technologies can Transform Government”.
Chopra is the co-founder and executive vice president of Hunch Analytics, a “hatchery” incubating ideas that improve the productivity of health and education markets, including NavHealth, an open data intelligence service. He serves as a member of the council on Virginia’s Future and in 2015, served as the inaugural Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 2011, Chopra was named to Modern Healthcare’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” and in 2008, to Government Technology magazine’s “Top 25” in their Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers issue. He is a senior advisor to The Advisory Board Company, a health-care consultancy, and to Albright Stonebridge Group, a premier strategic advisory and commercial diplomacy firm.
Upon Chopra’s departure as U.S. CTO, President Obama noted, “As the federal government’s first chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra did groundbreaking work to bring our government into the 21st century. Aneesh found countless ways to engage the American people using technology, from electronic health records for veterans, to expanding access to broadband for rural communities, to modernizing government records. His legacy of leadership and innovation will benefit Americans for years to come, and I thank him for his outstanding service.”
Chopra earned his Master’s of Public Policy from Harvard University in 1997 and his bachelor’s degree from The Johns Hopkins University in 1994.
