There is currently a lot of excitement surrounding Blockchain. Is a hot new transformational technology or just a hammer looking for a nail beyond crypto-currency? Paul Chang, Leader for Blockchain for Distribution & Industrial Markets at IBM, will broadly discuss use cases, benefits, new consortiums being formed, adoption paths, and lessons learned from hundreds of engagements over the past several years. At the event, Paul will lead an open discussion to help us evaluate if Blockchain is a good fit for our specific business challenges.
 
Paul is responsible for the evangelism, enablement, and business development of IBM’s Blockchain offerings targeting Supply Chain, Operations, Finance, and Sales & Marketing functions.  Paul has deep expertise in the Retail, Consumer Products, Wholesale/Distribution, Automotive, and Industrial sectors and is a globally recognized expert in supply chain.
 
Paul has more than 27 years of experience the market development of new technologies such as traceability, biotech, IoT and optical networks.  Most recently, Paul has led the global initiative at IBM in the product tracking technology for pharmaceutical, food, and retail sectors.  He has also been actively involved with the US FDA's drug anti-counterfeiting and food safety initiative since 2003.  Prior to joining IBM 13 years ago, Paul worked with several venture-back startup companies developing brand new markets leveraging innovative technologies.

WHEN: December 15, 2017 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: 1751 Pinnacle Dr Ste 1600, McLean, VA 22102
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We have collaborated with Greenspring Associates and Ignition Partners to bring leading entrepreneurs backed by top-tier VC firms, primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area. Each entrepreneur will spend a few minutes introducing their technology and follow it up with a short Q&A session. Here is a list of the participating companies and the participating executive:
 
Moogsoft – Richard Whitehead, CTO
Moogsoft develops AIOps technology that helps enterprise ITOps and DevOps teams become faster, smarter and more effective. Moogsoft AIOps’ real-time machine learning algorithms reduce operational noise and allow operators to proactively detect and remediate issues that impact their customers’ experience. Investors include Wing Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. For more information, please visit https://www.moogsoft.com/
 
Acalvio - Ram Varadarajan, CEO
Acalvio provides Advanced Threat Defense (ATD) solutions to detect, engage and respond to malicious activity inside the perimeter. The solutions are anchored on patented innovations in Deception and Data Science. This enables a DevOps approach to ATD, enabling ease of deployment, monitoring and management. Acalvio enriches its threat intelligence by data obtained from internal and partner ecosystems, enabling customers to benefit from defense in depth, reduce false positives, and derive actionable intelligence for remediation. Investors include Ignition Partners and Accel. For more information, please visit http://www.acalvio.com/
 
Aviatrix - Steven Mih, CEO
Aviatrix develops software that enables enterprises to build secure hybrid clouds and enable networking for CloudOps for enterprise SaaS vendors. The Aviatrix Cloud Services Gateway is the first scale out and highly available VPN access solution with multi factor authentication and User Profile based access policy. Investors include Ignition Partners and CRV. For more information, please visit http://aviatrix.com/
 
Bromium – Sherban Naum, VP East & Federal
Bromium delivers the benefits of micro-virtualization and hardware based security to enterprise desktops, reducing the enterprise attack surface for all users without the need for new management tools or skillsets. The company’s solutions enable an exceptional end-user experience with its protect-first design, isolating threats before they can harm the enterprise.try™. Investors include Ignition Partners, Lightspeed, and Meritech. For more information, please visithttps://www.bromium.com/
 
Nymi – Karl Martin, Founder
Nymi develops biometric and authentication technologies and applications for consumer electronics. The Nymi Band is a wearable, multi-factor authenticator that can be used with any application, device or service to deliver Always On Authentication™. Investors include Ignition Partners. For more information, please visit https://nymi.com/
 
Tempered Networks – Jeff Hussey, CEO
Tempered Networks provides connectivity solutions for critical infrastructure, industrial control systems, and the industrial Internet of Things applications in water, energy, petroleum, manufacturing, and other industries. The company offers HIPswitch Conductor, a scalable orchestration engine that coordinates configuration, security policies, trust relationships, monitoring, and analytics between the SimpleConnect management console and distributed HIPswitches. Investors include Ignition Partners. For more information, please visit http://www.temperednetworks.com/
 
Hacker One – Marten Mickos, CEO
HackerOne is the #1 vulnerability management and bug bounty platform. Our products and services - along with our community of more than 100,000 hackers who have earned more than $14M in bounty payouts as a result of their creative, intelligent work - empower security teams to take a proactive approach to protecting their applications, networks, and customers. HackerOne's mission is to make the Internet safer for everyone and was founded by the pioneers behind bug bounty programs at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Investors include Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. For more information, please visit https://www.hackerone.com/
 
Aporeto – Dimitri Stiliadis, CEO
Aporeto is a cloud-native security startup that offers comprehensive security solutions for applications, containers, and microservices. The company offers Trireme, an open-source project that simplifies application segmentation for distributed applications. Investors include Wing Venture Partners. For more information, please visit https://www.aporeto.com/
 
Tigera – Ratan Tipirneni, CEO and Founder
Tigera is solving the networking and security problems inherent in deploying and enforcing policy in large private, public, and hybrid enterprise clouds. Tigera’s founders combine extensive networking and security experience with a track record of engagement with the cloud native, open source developer and user communities. Investors include Wing Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates. For more information, please visit https://www.tigera.io/

WHEN: August 11, 2017 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

3D printing has gone from the hobbyist’s workbench to playing a significant role in the manufacturing supply chain. With an increased role for innovation and reduced time to market, Additive Manufacturing (3D printing) may be the way that our nation recaptures its leadership role in this industry.
 
Greg Paulsen, Director of Applications Engineering at Xometry, will lead the discussion including a quick overview of the state of the art of 3D printing, examples of additive manufacturing (3D printing) applications, and challenges with the technology and its adoption. Xometry is a custom manufacturing company that specialized in advanced technology including 3D printing to shorten production cycle and reduce costs.
 
Greg’s Applications Engineering team at Xometry handles special case projects that require attention on material selection, design-for-manufacturing, or technical engineering resources. Greg also plays a vital role in vetting new technologies and materials to add to Xometry's manufacturing portfolio. Greg’s background is in product development using rapid prototyping, focusing on the various applications of industrial 3D printing and advanced manufacturing.

WHEN: July 14, 2017 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

Establishing trust and trustworthiness among two or more computing entities has always been a challenge, but a necessary step prior to secure interaction. This challenge is further complicated in human-machine learning applications where parties to an interaction can dynamically learn and alter their behaviors. Dr. Levitt has developed techniques to establish trust in a machine learning setting. His techniques draw from methods that people use to establish trust and formalize these methods with probabilistic modeling. The resultant techniques can be used in a variety of commercial applications in autonomy such as driverless cars. Please join us for a discussion of trust and trustworthiness in machine learning applications.
 
The discussion will be led by Dr. Tod Levitt, Research Professor at George Mason University. Here is a link to his CV.
 
Dr. Levitt is an acknowledged leader in development of advanced capabilities for evidential reasoning in large-scale, high dimensional model analysis including operations applications in multi-sensor fusion, SAR, IR, and EO image understanding, ground robot vision, air to ground surveillance systems and C4ISR systems supporting multiple military intelligence, planning and command and control applications.
 
He has led the development of a diverse family of advanced information software systems built to handle real world data under complex operating conditions. These systems include a fully automated middle-Eastern armor unit detector for the U.S. Army that was evaluated to perform at expert imagery analyst levels on wide-area, low resolution Desert Storm SAR, and a system for automated diagnostic measurement from digital x-rays of the hand that was employed in clinical care at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center.

WHEN: April 21, 2017 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

This talk will survey advancements in Watson and cognitive computing since the Jeopoardy! Challenge of 2011. It will include a recap of how Watson works, what it does, how Watson implementations are built, and how they are deployed, followed by a discussion of various use case categories that have emerged, citing examples in public sector and health care. New capabilities on the horizon will also be covered in the context of use cases.
 
The discussion will be led by Christopher F. Codella, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, IBM Cognitive Solutions. Chris had reviewed the Watson architecture with the Roundtable in early 2012. His current activities center around complex data analytics, particularly applying IBM’s Watson technology to build solutions that support the missions of government agencies at all levels. Dr. Codella earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1984 and first joined IBM in 1979 at the East Fishkill, NY semiconductor lab working on advanced memory devices. In 1989 he became a Research Staff Member in the Computer Science Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he managed the Virtual Worlds Group developing software for collaborative, networked virtual environments. Later, as Senior Manager of the Enterprise Middleware department, he led a team in development of object-oriented application server technology, distributed systems, reusable software components, component architecture, and web services. He has received IBM's Invention Achievement Awards and Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards for his contributions to Enterprise Java and J2EE, and for leading the development of IBM Research’s Global Technology Outlook. From 2003 to 2008 Dr. Codella served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of IBM Federal. Dr. Codella is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, author of numerous of professional publications and conference papers, and holder of several US and international patents.

WHEN: January 26, 2016 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

Three Roundtable members will lead the discussions on three very interesting topics:
 
Shahid Shah
Conversational User Experiences (CUX): How should CTOs design technology for a world without normal screens, “apps” or voice-only mobile experiences? We will discuss how Chatbots, messaging and AI-infused conversations are changing how consumers are acquiring products and services.
 
Patrick Gartlan
Managing Cloud Infrastructure: Organizations have migrated significant workloads to the cloud. Virtual Machine Sprawl and Cybersecurity in the cloud are real issues. We will discuss best practices in managing cloud deployments from security and cost perspectives.
 
Thad Scheer
#noprojects: The #noprojects movement is taking the industry by storm as an emerging trend in world-class software production. For the first time, we have a legitimate answer to the question, “what comes after Agile”? While the name is somewhat self-illuminating and the philosophy is an extension of Kanban, there are surprising aspects to the movement that anyone working in IT today should be aware of. We will discuss what #noprojects is, who is behind it, and what parts are practical (or impractical) in a 2017 timeframe.

WHEN: December 14, 2016 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

Many software issues and bugs are rooted in the design and architecture of the product. However, it is very hard to evaluate the quality of software design. Silverthread has developed a technique to objectively evaluate Software Design Quality.

The session will be led by the founders of Silverthread. Silverthread has developed CodeMRI, a suite of tools that help organizations objectively visualize the Architecture and Design quality of software to understand the long-term maintainability of a system. The company has thousands of benchmarks and provides statistical projections to help estimate the future maintainability, agility, cost, and risk of working in a codebase base. Silverthread also has tools to help an organization determine whether a codebase should be left alone, refactored, or rewritten and to estimate the ROI of different scenarios.
 
Over the past 15 years, the founders researched the topic at Harvard Business School and MIT, creating measures of design quality using network analytic techniques, and measuring the impact of process agility on business and operational outcomes.  Early research done by the team lays out methods for capturing and benchmarking design quality (modularity, hierarchy, layering, commonality, etc) in large and complex software codebases. The technology can be applied to analyze systems developed with a broad range of programming languages.
 
The discussion will be led by Dr. Dan Sturtevant, Co-founder and CEO of Silverthread.

WHEN: July 15, 2016 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

Given the intense focus on Encryption and Privacy in the recent months, it is a great time for us to better understand the largest encrypted network and the currency used in that environment.
 
Matt Devost, an international security expert specializing in cybersecurity, counterterrorism, critical infrastructure protection, intelligence, and risk management will lead the discussion. Thank you Bob Gourley for the introduction to Matt!
 
Matt is currently the President & CEO of FusionX, LLC, a global cybersecurity, technology, and risk management solutions company. He helps a global clientele identify and manage dynamic cyberthreats in complex operational environments.
 
Matt holds an appointment as a special government advisor to counsel the U.S. Department of Defense leadership on a variety of security issues. He is also on the Black Hat advisory board, helping to shape the agenda for a series of world-class information security conferences. Additionally, Matt serves as a Senior Advisor to CrucialPoint, has been an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University since 2002 teaching the flagship graduate course entitled “Information Warfare and Security”, and is a Founding Director of the Cyberconflict Studies Association.
 
WHEN: May 13, 2016 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early-stage top Silicon Valley VC firm focused on enterprise tech, will be joining us along with two of their hottest analytics startups.
 
Ajeet Singh, Co-founder and CEO of ThoughtSpot and Tomer Shiran, Co-founder and CEO of Dremio will lead a discussion on the next frontier of data analytics and user experience:

• Tomer Shiran is the CEO and co-founder of Dremio, which is revolutionizing data analytics by enabling business users and analysts to discover, explore and analyze any data at any time. Prior to Dremio, he was VP Product at MapR, where he was responsible for product strategy, roadmap and new feature development. As a member of the executive team, Tomer helped grow the company from five employees to over 300 employees and 700 enterprise customers. Prior to MapR, Tomer held numerous product management and engineering positions at Microsoft and IBM Research. He holds an MS in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in computer science from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, as well as five U.S. patents.
  
  
• Ajeet Singh is Co-founder and CEO at ThoughtSpot. Driven by his passion for creating impactful businesses, Ajeet has had the experience of creating billion-dollar technology companies from scratch. Prior to starting ThoughtSpot, he was Co-founder and Chief Products Officer at Nutanix, an IPO-worthy company that’s revolutionizing the enterprise data storage industry. Ajeet and his team defined a “No SAN” market segment that is changing the landscape in the $20B storage market.
  
  Prior to Nutanix, Ajeet learnt the ropes of enterprise technology startups at Aster Data (acquired by Teradata for $300M), where he was Senior Director of Product Management. Prior to Aster Data, he worked at Oracle where he was part of the team that first launched Oracle Database to the Amazon EC2 cloud. Ajeet holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he graduated at the top of his class.

WHEN: March 31, 2016 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

Witness how data science is about to feed 300 million new people by fundamentally transforming agriculture. The self-driving tractor in fields today places millions of seeds at millimeter accuracy in three dimensions while running at 10 MPH. As a planter traverses the field we dynamically control every variable about seed placement, including spacing, depth, and down force. On precision sprayers we independently vary the amount of product sprayed by nozzle-section. At harvest, every grain moves through an array of onboard moisture and mass sensors to precisely measure yield as the combine advances. Data generated by a single farm operation is staggering. A massive tonnage of real-time target rate and actual measurement data is wirelessly streamed to the cloud through a mesh-network infrastructure. At this month’s CTO Roundtable see how a data science pipeline activates the world’s largest ‘internet of things’ telematics streams to fundamentally transform an industry. This isn’t exploratory data analytics. We’ll talk about how data science is weaponizing digital assets to create otherwise unreachably high yields, low costs, and new competitive footholds in adjacent marketplaces for ag companies.
 
The discussion will be led by:

• John Sipple, the Chief Scientist at Sphere of Influence, a local analytics studio known for ground-breaking innovation using machine learning and advanced data science. John has applied his skill to aerospace, the intelligence community, agriculture, automotive, and cyber-security – just to name a few domains.
• Thad Scheer (CTO Roundtable Member) directs innovation for Sphere’s digital business strategy portfolio in Agriculture and Automotive. Thad will explain how data science combines with digital product development, making the case that data science without product innovation is like soup without a bowl.

WHEN: February 5, 2016 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: John and Thad have graciously agreed to host us at:
Sphere of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102