Speakers

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Don Adams
Admiral Gary Roughead
Christopher Ahlberg
Robert Beckett
Shelly Blake-Plock
Damon Centola
Lee Gunn
Alexander Howard
Leslie-Anne Levy
Robert J. Murray
Yee San Su
Tom Waldman
Clarence Wardell

Don Adams is Vice President, Chief Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer - Government at TIBCO. In this position, he provides expertise in security, government strategy and emerging technologies related to the TIBCO family of software solutions and service offerings. Prior to TIBCO, Don was the Chief Technology Officer of TriStrata Inc. where he helped set the overall security philosophy, design and systems architecture for the revolutionary TriStrata Secure Information Management System. Don spent six years at Sun Microsystems prior to TriStrata as Principal Architect, Security and Networks. He led programs generating over $4.5 billion for Sun. He also spent a highly decorated 23-year career in the United States Air Force. Don holds a bachelor degree in computer technology from Chaminade University in Honolulu and a master’s degree in business from Central Michigan University. Don was a contributing author of the McGraw Hill Homeland Security Handbook, and its second edition coming out this year. Back to top

Admiral Gary Roughead is a 1973 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He became the 29th Chief of Naval Operations in September 2007 after holding six operational commands. He is one of only two officers in the history of the Navy to have commanded both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. Ashore, he served as the Commandant, U.S. Naval Academy, where he led the strategic planning effort that underpinned that institution’s first capital campaign. He was the Navy’s Chief of Legislative Affairs, responsible for the Department of the Navy’s interaction with Congress. Admiral Roughead was also the Deputy Commander, U.S. Pacific Command during the massive relief effort following the tsunami of 2004.

As the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Roughead successfully guided the Navy through a challenging period of transition in fiscal, security, and personnel matters. He stabilized and accelerated ship and aircraft procurement plans, accelerated the Navy’s capability and capacity in ballistic missile defense and unmanned air and underwater systems, and directed the service’s investigation of climate change and alternative energy. He reestablished the 4th and 10th Fleets to better focus on the Western Hemisphere and cyber operations, respectively. Admiral Roughead introduced bold programs to prepare for the primacy of information in warfare, and was in the forefront in using social media within the Navy. He also led the Navy through changes in law and personnel policy to draw more inclusively than ever before upon the Navy’s greatest strength, its Sailors.

Admiral Roughead is the recipient of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Meritorious Service Medal, Navy Commendation Medal, Navy Achievement Medal, and various unit and service awards. He has also received awards from several foreign governments. He and his wife Ellen have an adult daughter, Elizabeth. Back to top

Christopher Ahlberg is the CEO of Recorded Future, Inc., is an independent director of Hult International Business School (Education) and Fina Technologies (Hedge fund), and advises a series of start-up companies. Earlier, Ahlberg was the president of the Spotfire Division of TIBCO, which he founded as an independent company in 1996 and in 2007 sold to TIBCO (Nasdaq: TIBX) for $195M in cash. Spotfire was founded based on his groundbreaking research on information visualization. Dr. Ahlberg earned his doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology, has worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Maryland, and has lectured and consulted extensively for industry, academia, military, and intelligence communities. He has also published and lectured in computer science, psychology, linguistics, biology, and chemistry. He has three granted software patents, and multiple patents pending. In 2002, Dr. Ahlberg was named one of the World’s Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT’s Magazine of Innovation. Back to top

Robert Beckett is the CEO of Creative Radicals, a consulting firm specializing in early stage technology design and development. Robert is a technical advisor for the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community, primarily in the area of geospatial information collection, visualization, analysis, and dissemination. His recent work has focused on emerging technologies in social media and the use of location-based services in support of both tactical and analytic functions. Some of the capabilities his team is currently pursuing include the automation of open-source collection, tip and queue of sensors systems from social media, and non-traditional tracking and surveillance tools using geo-referenced user-generated content.

Previously, Robert was the Chief Software Architect for a field intelligence element within the Department of Energy, where he led the development of technology solutions to support a variety of missions including WMD non-proliferation, CBNRE detection, and surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence collection. His prior government work has also included a technology advisor role to FEMA, Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and other local and state governments for a wide range of topics, from emergency response to bird flu to terrorism. In addition to his work with government, Robert has been actively involved in the private sector as an entrepreneur, consultant, and executive across a diverse range of organizations and industries, from start-ups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Back to top

Shelly Blake-Plock is Co-Executive Director of the Digital Harbor Foundation (DHF), a Baltimore-based nonprofit leveraging education and technology initiatives to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, especially among urban youth. From 2009 to 2012, Blake-Plock was blogger-in-chief at TeachPaperless, an online resource that featured an international cast of contributing educators discussing the impact of social and participatory technologies on learning and teaching. Blake-Plock himself was a secondary educator for a decade; he is currently a faculty associate at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, where he designs and leads a course on social-tech-integrated pedagogy for Baltimore City Public Schools teachers. Back to top

Damon Centola is an Assistant Professor of System Dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on the diffusion of collective behavior, including social movements, cultural differentiation, and social epidemiology. Centola was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Brookings Institution, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Mediterranean Institute for Complex Systems. He was awarded the 2006 American Sociological Association’s Award for Outstanding Article in Mathematical Sociology, and his work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Physica A, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Back to top

Lee Gunn is President of CNA’s Institute for Public Research. CNA’s talented, experienced staff specializes in defense and national security research, as well as education, homeland security and justice, health research and policy, air traffic management, and energy and environment.

Gunn served in the U.S. Navy for 35 years prior to his retirement from active duty in 2000. His last Navy assignment was Inspector General of the Department of the Navy, managing the department’s overall inspection program and its assessments of readiness, training, and quality of service for Sailors and Marines. Gunn’s awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, six Legions of Merit, two Meritorious Service Medals, the Navy Commendation Medal (with Combat Distinguishing Device), the Navy Achievement Medal, the Combat Action Ribbon, and numerous theater and service awards.

Gunn also serves as President of the American Security Project, Chair of the Board of Advisors to the Presidents of the Naval Postgraduate School and the Naval War College, Advisor to the Global Perspectives Initiative at the University of Central Florida, and an Executive Board member of the Surface Navy Association. He served as National President of the Surface Navy Association from 2001 to 2006. Back to top

Alexander B. Howard is the Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, where he chronicles how technology is being used to help citizens, cities, and national governments solve large-scale problems. He is an internationally recognized expert on the use of collaborative technologies in open government and digital journalism. Howard has written and reported extensively on the intersection of the Internet and society, including big data, open innovation, technology policy, cybersecurity, mobile health, open data, electronic privacy, and open source software.

In addition to the O’Reilly Radar, he has contributed to National Journal, Forbes, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, Govfresh, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, CBS News’ What’s Trending, Govloop, and the Association for Computer Manufacturing, amongst others. He also maintains a global audience of more than 200,000 followers and subscribers on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress, YouTube, and Google+.

Howard is a frequent public speaker, including talks at Harvard University and the National Congress of Brazil, and highly sought-after moderator and facilitator at conferences and workshops, including the Open Government Partnership, SXSWi, Stanford University, Columbia University, the New America Foundation, World Bank, Club de Madrid, the National Archives, and the State Department, among many others. In 2011, he was a Visiting Faculty member at the Poynter Institute.

Prior to joining O’Reilly Media, Howard was the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com at TechTarget, where he wrote about how laws and regulations that affect IT are changing, spanning the issues of online identity, data protection, enterprise security, and risk management. He is a graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Back to top

Leslie-Anne Levy has been involved in public safety and security policy development, research, and implementation in the public and private sectors since 1998. At CNA, Ms. Levy currently serves as a Managing Director for the Safety and Security Division. She is responsible for several major multi-year projects with FEMA, including assessing and reporting on national preparedness and developing a national training curriculum on homeland security risk management for state and local public safety officials. While with the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Ms. Levy managed the program development team for state and local preparedness grant programs. She also led the development of technical assistance services for state and local homeland security program personnel to support effective program management, capability analysis, and investment planning. In that capacity, she facilitated stakeholder engagement sessions at national after-action conferences and led technical assistance workshops in the field.

Prior to DHS, Ms. Levy worked in the private sector at Titan Corporation, where her primary customer was the then-Office of National Preparedness within FEMA. Her project work there focused on preparedness assessment and evaluation. As a research associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, Ms. Levy researched and published on such issues as domestic preparedness for unconventional terrorism and international arms control agreement implementation. Back to top

Robert J. Murray is President and CEO of CNA. Before joining CNA, Murray was a teacher, first at the Naval War College in Newport, RI, where he was Dean and Director of the College’s Advanced Research Center and creator/director of the Strategic Studies Group; and from 1983-1990, a faculty member at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and director of the School’s national security program.

Murray served in government in various capacities before his stint in teaching. He was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate as Under Secretary of the Navy in President Jimmy Carter’s

Administration. He previously held an appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs), where he participated in the Camp David negotiations that resulted in the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Earlier, Murray was the Special Assistant to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense, first under Elliot Richardson and then under James Schlesinger. Following this assignment, Murray was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower and Reserve Affairs). In these two assignments, Murray was particularly involved in the redesign and implementation of a new NATO strategy, the transition of the armed forces following Vietnam, and the implementation of the All-Volunteer Force. Murray had several prior assignments in government—in the Defense and State Departments. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps before entering civilian government service.

Murray is a graduate of Suffolk College (1961) and Harvard University (1967). He is a Principal of the Council for Excellence in Government, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the National Institute for Public Affairs, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Back to top

Dr. Yee San Su is a Research Scientist within the Safety and Security division at CNA. Dr. Su has over a decade of experience applying quantitative models in support of evaluations and assessments.

During his tenure at CNA, Dr. Su has been a senior analyst on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Strategic Preparedness Analysis and Reporting contract, in which he served as a core member of the team responsible for the first National Preparedness Report and authored the article, “Application of Social Network Analysis Methods to Quantitatively Assess Exercise Coordination.” Back to top

Tom Waldman became Director of Communications and Media Relations for LAUSD on July 1, 2011. From 2007 to July 2011, he was chief of staff to LAUSD Board Member Tamar Galatzan. Tom previously served as Public Information Manager at the Los Angeles Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2000-2004). From 1992 to 1999, he was District Director to San Fernando Valley Congressman Howard Berman.

Tom currently reviews theater for the website nohoartsdistrict.com. He is the author of four books, including Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock and Roll from Southern California (University of New Mexico Press, 1998, second edition, 2009) and Not Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America (University of California Press, 2008). Back to top

Dr. Clarence Wardell III is a Research Analyst in the Safety and Security division at CNA. Since joining CNA in 2009, Dr. Wardell has supported FEMA’s National Preparedness Assessment Division on various analytical efforts, including development of the 2012 National Preparedness Report.

In addition to his work with FEMA, Dr. Wardell has supported the Department of Health and Human Services and several local governments on projects ranging from exercise, to after-action reporting on real-world events, to scenario-based capability modeling and gap analysis.

As lead author of the report, “2011 Social Media + Emergency Management Camp: Transforming the Response Enterprise,” Dr. Wardell has led CNA’s research efforts related to the adoption and use of new media technologies by emergency management professionals. Dr. Wardell earned his doctorate in 2009 from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Back to top