Today the Aspen Institute, CNBC, and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) announced the first-ever “Cambridge Cyber Summit” on October 5 at Kresge Auditorium on the MIT campus.
The one-day summit will bring together C-suite executives and business owners with public and private-sector leaders in security, technology and defense to discuss ways to combat urgent cyber threats and secure America’s future. (Registration is now open on the CNBC site.)
Comprised of interviews and live demonstrations, the event will focus on critical issues such as the next wave of cyberattacks and their perpetrators, countermeasures, privacy and security, public-private cooperation and information sharing, and the latest trends in technology. Attendees will also get to see the latest research from MIT as well as eye-opening live demonstrations from leading technologists and “white hat” hackers.
The summit will be coupled with special digital content from both CNBC and The Aspen Institute, with live coverage on CNBC before, during and after the summit.
“If you look back at the history of cybersecurity, you will find that MIT has been there every step of the way, from creating the world’s first passwords for early time-sharing computers to developing data-encryption systems that keep our online information safe,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. “Building off of this rich history, we are excited to explore the future of this field through substantive dialogue at this new collaborative event.”
“This partnership brings together three organizations that are the absolute leaders in their respective fields for a dynamic one-day summit,” said Nikhil Deogun, SVP and Editor in Chief, CNBC Business News. “The conference will tackle the ever-important issue of cyber security which is paramount not only to the companies we cover every day on CNBC, but to everyone using technology.”
“Cybersecurity is really important. We have an internet now that’s basically insecure. It’s driven productivity and innovation for the past 50 years. But now, so many bad things are happening, so many hacks, the notion that our electricity grid or our electrical system can be hacked,” said Walter Isaacson, President & CEO of The Aspen Institute and CNBC contributor. “This summit in Cambridge will be interesting because we’re bringing together government, industry, as well as academic people to say, ‘what can we do to make the internet more secure?’”
Speakers include:
• Stewart Baker, Partner, Steptoe & Johnson LLP; former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy
• John Carlin, Assistant Attorney General for National Security
• Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Rajesh De, Partner, Mayer Brown LLP; former General Counsel of the NSA
• Thomas A. Fanning, President & CEO of Southern Company
• Walter Isaacson, President & CEO of The Aspen Institute
• David Kennedy, The White Hat Hacker, TrustedSec
• Tom Leighton, Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies
• Stuart Madnick, MIT Sloan School of Management and Founding Director of MIT’s Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity
• Etay Maor, Executive Security Advisor, IBM
• Matt Olsen, President and Co-Founder of IronNet Cybersecurity; former National Counterterrorism Center Director
• Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab and Founding Director of MIT Connection Science Research Initiative
• Howard Shrobe, Executive Director of CyberSecurity@CSAIL
• Suzanne Spaulding, Under Secretary, National Protection and Programs Directorate, Department of Homeland Security
• Starnes Walker, Founding Director of the University of Delaware Cybersecurity Initiative
• Daniel Weitzner, Founding Director of MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative and Principal Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL
• Maggie Wilderotter, Former CEO of Frontier Communications