Thursday, March 31, 2022 at 2 PM Eastern.

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is an approach to digital identity that gives individuals control of their information online. The ideology has been around for more than a decade, but has seen a surge in demand recently as the world has moved more of our lives online, driving many to realize the need for additional privacy and improved authentication of data. The methodology becomes necessary in the emerging Web 3.0 world. This session will cover both the business use cases of SSI as well as how technology enterprises can use it to solve complex data verification and user consent challenges. Followed by how companies commercialize and deploy these Trusted Digital Ecosystems (TDEs) to allow scaling of these solutions across industries and partners, to authenticate and exchange high-value information and develop trusted, secure relationships.
 
Presenters
 
Heather Dahl 
Heather C. Dahl is the co-founder and CEO of Indico. Through her vision and leadership, Indicio has become a global leader in decentralized identity, launching a blockchain-based distributed network on five continents, creating the first implementation of a complete ecosystem for sharing privacy-preserving digital health credentials, which was donated to Linux Foundation Public Health for use by public health agencies across the world, and developing a series of innovations in software to manage identity and data sharing.
 
Ken Ebert
Ken Ebert is the CTO for Indicio where he leads a team of over twenty expertly trained and experienced architects, developers, and senior leaders actively leading the decentralized identity community. Under his supervision, Indicio has contributed crucial technologies needed to make mobile digital identity wallets function, launched three networks, and led the creation of Cardea, a complete ecosystem for the transmission of digital health credentials, as a project to Linux Foundation Public Health.
 
Please mark the event on your calendar and register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0INd9lPkQ_uiFA978IU23A

​At our next virtual CTO Roundtable, we are partnering with Greenspring Associates to schedule a session to understand recent innovations in Precision Directed Energy. The event is being held on Wednesday, October 27, 2021, from 11 AM – 12:30 PM.
 
The discussion will be led by Bo Marr (CTO) of Epirus. Epirus has created Leonidas, the world’s most power dense phased array in terms of Watts per unit area. Bo will explore several important discoveries and technological innovations that have enabled the creation of Leonidas. He will also review measured results and videos of Leonidas in the field producing the world’s first software definable electromagnetic pulse (EMP) beams, using digital beamforming on transmit technology to take out swarms of drones. The latter half of the talk will dive into other applications of this technology and will include discussion of Epirus’ power density law, recently published in the December 2020 edition of Microwave Journal, which shows that power density of solid-state devices has been doubling every 18 months for the past 20 years and explains how this trend will continue.
 
We will understand how Epirus is utilizing solid-state, software-defined microwaves to disable electronics and to shoot down drones.
 
Our partners: Greenspring Associates
We are partnering with Huff Millard and Greg Kotchick of Greenspring to host a web-conference on Zoom. Details of how to join the meeting would be shared in a future email.
 
Please mark the event on your calendar and RSVP by sending an email with a Yes or NO in the subject line to cto@chieftechnologyofficer.org.

The DC CTO Roundtable, Blu Venture Investors, and OODA present a virtual event on Cyber Security and getting early indicators of a Solar Winds type breach. The event:  Cyber Protection Through Early Indicators & Impact, would be held on Thursday, June 10, 2021, from 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM.
 
We all have to protect our infrastructures/applications, but how do we account for ensuring that with the tools and partners we rely on to keep our enterprises running.  Join us for an in-depth look at Indicators of Compromise (IOC), threat intelligence, deception/decoys, and compliance that can potentially be harnessed to minimize exposure or missing deviant activity within your systems. The talks will cover :

2:00 - 2:10:  Welcome  - Velan Thillairajah (DC Area CTO Roundtable) 
2:10 -  2:25:  Venture View on Cyber - Blu Venture Investors (Mike Denning or other)
2:25 - 3:10: Discussion covering Solar Winds, (Early) Indicators of Compromise (IOC), threat intelligence, deception/decoys, and compliance
      -  Matt Devost  - OODA
      -  Jonathan Couch - ThreatQuotient
      -  Robert Johnston   - Adlumin
3:10 - 3:30: Open Discussion with Q&A

Our partners: 
We are partnering with Blu Venture Investors and OODA to host a web conference on Zoom.

The DC CTO Roundtable and Greenspring Associates present a virtual event on the state of the "Low Code" space. The event: Low Code App Dev - Drag and Drop Programming a Reality? will be held on Thursday, February 11, 2021 from 3:30 PM – 5 PM (Note the earlier start than usual).
 
Promises of drag and drop programming have been around for some time. Join us to see how this emerging technology can impact and streamline enterprise application development. We are including a diverse set of perspectives from an VC and two rising low code tool providers combined with real-life customer examples:
 
3:30 – 3:35: Welcome
Yuvi Kochar & Huff Millard

3:30 – 3:50: Venture View on Low Code
Luca Bocchio, Accel

3:50 – 4:15: Tray.IO ad use by Airbnb
Alistair Russel, CTO, Tray  & Hoon Kim, Airbnb

4:15 – 4:40: Bryter and use by Customer
Michael Grupp, CET, Bryter

4:40 – 5:00: Open Discussion with Q&A
 
 
Our partners: Greenspring Associates
We are partnering with Huff Millard of Greenspring to host a web-conference on Zoom. 

Enterprises are deploying AI-driven solutions at a rapid pace. A large number of startups are delivering innovative technologies to further simplify the development and implementation of new capabilities. During our recent CTO Roundtable, we heard from two such startups.

Ankur Goyal of Impira and Alex Ratner of Snorkel AI discussed how AI-based technologies are helping CTOs make their organizations more productive and efficient.

Impira is an AI powered automation platform that helps you leverage valuable data trapped in pdf documents, images, and other files. Fortune 500 companies use the platform to reduce operating costs by up to 90%, automating the arduous processes associated with application forms, order forms, invoices, insurance claims, and more. Impira is different from RPA firms, OCR applications, and simple data extraction tools, which all deploy pre-trained solutions that can be people intensive, expensive, and time consuming to implement.

Ankur Goyal is the Founder & CEO of Impira. Previously, Ankur built and scaled the engineering team at MemSQL. He received his B.S. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and holds several patents in database and AI technology.

Snorkel AI is an early-stage company developing Snorkel Flow, a new data-first platform for enterprise machine learning aimed at making AI adoption fast, practical, and adaptable. Snorkel Flow's end-to-end approach solves one of the greatest blockers to enterprise adoption of AI today — the labeling and management of the "training data" that fuels modern AI — using a new programmatic approach developed at the Stanford AI Lab, and deployed at places like Google, Intel, Apple, Dept. of Justice, FDA, DARPA, and others.

Alex Ratner is the co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI. He also serves as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he was supported by a Stanford Bio-X fellowship. His research focused on applying data management and statistical learning techniques to emerging machine learning workflows, such as creating and managing training data, and applying this to real-world problems in medicine, knowledge base construction, and more.

Our partners: Lightspeed
We partnered with Saqib Awan of Lightspeed to host the web-conference on Zoom.

The discussion would be kicked-off by Guru Chahal. Guru will give us an overview of the rapid innovation underway in the areas of networking, security, DevOps, observability / ops tools, cloud infrastructure, and application development. Guru will give us an overview of the rapid innovation underway in the areas of networking, security, DevOps, observability / ops tools, cloud infrastructure, and application development.
 
Guru’s talk would be followed by a discussion of next-generation networking by Devesh Garg, founder and CEO of Arrcus. Arrcus is focused on interconnecting people, machines, and data by developing software-powered next-generation networks. The company is democratizing networking by providing best-in-class software, the most flexible consumption model and the lowest total cost of ownership.
 
Devesh is a seasoned technology executive with global entrepreneurial, strategic, and operational experience in early stage start-ups as well as private and public market leaders. Devesh has been at the forefront of several technology and business market inflections including the EDA industry, digitization of broadband communications, multi-core processing, and the emerging markets of Asia. He is a passionate builder of teams, businesses, and world-class companies.
 
Devesh has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University. A sports enthusiast and avid adventure traveler, Devesh has trekked to base camp at Mt. Everest and with his family has explored over 40 countries and countless cities.
 
Our partners: Lightspeed
We are partnering with Saqib Awan of Lightspeed to host a web-conference on Zoom.

We are excited to announce our first on-line event:

• Chaos Engineering
• Thursday, June 4, 2020 from 4 PM – 5 PM

Per Wikipedia: “Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a software system in production in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent and unexpected conditions. Given the current environment, this is a very relevant topic for us to discuss.
 
Kolton Andrus is the CEO of Gremlin, the first company focused on delivering Chaos Engineering as a Service. Kolton is an early pioneer of Chaos Engineering, with a decade of experience doing this 'in production'. He has built Chaos Engineering platforms for Amazon, Netflix, and now for the world with Gremlin to resolve internet scale outages.
 
Kolton will discuss how much reliability is enough reliability and share his experience, from not just Amazon and Netflix, but also from working with Gremlin's customers to scale their reliability. He’ll describe what each level of availability looks like, the challenges faced at each stage, and the tradeoffs required to achieve the next nine of uptime.
 
Our partners: Greenspring Associates
We are partnering with Huff Millard of Greenspring to host a web-conference on Zoom.

Our next CTO Roundtable on Applied AI: Process Optimization will be held on Thursday, Nov 7, 2019 from 8 to 10 AM.
 
Process Automation is one of the primary areas where IT has delivered significant value to all business over the past several decades. Business and IT professionals are very comfortable with acquiring and implementing new technology solutions to continue to streamline processes and create efficiencies. Therefore, it is not surprising that this is where we are seeing quick adoption of ML / AI technologies. During our next Roundtable, 3 very knowledgeable speakers would review two generalized solutions in the space and discuss the broader use of this new technology in Process Optimization.
 
I expect this to be a valuable discussion with immediate applicability within your business. If you are looking for a way to introduce ML / AI solutions to your organization, this is where you might wish to start. You should make it a point to attend!
 
We have a packed agenda and need to start the presentations earlier than usual (please arrive at 8AM!):

• 8:00 AM: Networking & light breakfast
• 8:10 AM: Introduction, Sphere of Influence (our hosts)
• 9:00 AM: UIPath
• 9:40 AM: Discussion

 
About our Presenters

• Thad Scheer (we all know Thad!), Partner at Sphere of Influence, has been focused on developing bespoke AI/ML solutions longer than anyone else I know.
  
  Thad will share examples of where ML/AI technologies are delivering significant value.

• Justin Greenberger, VP – Customer Success, Americas, UIPath
  Justin is an experienced technology executive with a demonstrated history of operational transformation utilizing software & systems. He is responsible for ensuring customer success at UIPath.
  
  Prior to joining UIPath, as VP and CIO of GE Digital, Justin led the enterprise Digital Technology (DT) strategy for GE’s software business, responsible for driving simplified data and streamlined systems for the company.
  
  Justin would share with us the reasons for the rapid growth UIPath, making it the latest hot startup, and provide a technical view of their solutions.

 
The team at Sphere Of Influence has again graciously agreed to host us at:
1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level
McLean, VA 22102

​After our very successful and well received 3-part series on Serverless Technologies, our next session would be a review of the Patent Landscape for CTOs on Friday, September 27, 2019 from 8 to 10 AM.
 
The session will be led by Hussein Akhavannik, a Partner at BakerHostetler, one of the nation’s largest law firms.
 
Today, CTOs should have a solid understanding of intellectual property issues. One of the core items that needs to be well understood is how the Patent system works in the US and globally. During the session, we will review the different types of patents and protection that can be utilized for different technologies. We will cover the some of the newest changes to Patent Law, Open Source and Trade Secret elements.
  
Thad Scheer and the Management team at Sphere Of Influence have again graciously agreed to host us at:
Tysons Corner Studios – Conference Center
1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level
McLean, VA 22102