Aspen Tech Policy Hub January 2020 972 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA www.aspentechpolicyhub.org Looking Ahead to 2020 Recruiting For Summer 2020 San Francisco, CA We encourage those interested in joining our fellowship program to apply for our Summer 2020 session. Applications are due on February 13th; between now and then, director Betsy Cooper will be hosting three informational webinars. For those living in the Seattle area, an introductory event will be taking place on January 24th. Applicants should have significant professional experience with technology and the potential to apply their technology experience to affecting policy and social change. More details can be found online. About the Hub At the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, we take tech experts, teach them the policy process through an in-person fellowship program in the Bay Area, and encourage them to develop outside-the-box solutions to society’s problems. We model ourselves after tech incubators like Y Combinator, but train new policy thinkers and focus the impact of their ideas. We’re building new ideas for policymaking — every fellow must complete one practical policy output during their time with us — The Winter Cohort Begins! and an alumni base of San Francisco, CA | January 2nd, 2020 technologists who understand A new year means new fellows at the Aspen Tech Policy Hub! Once they policy and want to engage with it. finished setting their resolutions and celebrating the new decade, the 15 members of our cohort found their way to our office along the Social Media Embarcadero for the first day of the new session. This group is very Twitter: @AspenPolicyHub diverse and filled with political and technological leaders. Our new LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ cohort members are urban planners, incubator directors, and company/aspentechpolicyhub cybersecurity engineers, and we’re excited to help them add new skills to their already impressive resumes. © The Aspen Institute Aspen Tech Policy Hub January 2020 972 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA www.aspentechpolicyhub.org 2019: An Exciting Start For the Hub San Francisco, CA - 2019 was a year of firsts for the Hub. Our first class of 15 brilliant academics, businesspeople, engineers and nonprofit leaders completed the inaugural summer cohort program. First, they finished a three week technology policy bootcamp: an innovative crash course on the intricacies of government and the unique challenges technologists face when they engage with it. Second, teams worked together to produce twelve final projects that leveraged media, design, and technology to attack policy problems and spread valuable knowledge. We’ve highlighted these projects on our website and highly encourage you to take a look. Finally, fellows visited and connected with the people and places that are setting the course for our technology future. Below, we highlight three places where fellows made a difference in 2019. Sacramento Stanford Washington, D.C. Connecting with Leadership Fighting Deepfakes Helping Older Adults Online The Hub took a trip to Sacramento The fellows were tasked with finding One of our fellowship teams, led by to meet with the Lieutenant solutions to an important threat to Ginny Fahs, uncovered that older Governor, the director of the our nation’s election integrity: adults were struggling to report California Department of deepfakes. They presented these when they were being scammed Technology, and others to express ideas to a council of cybersecurity online because the government their thoughts about the state’s and policy experts from the forms being utilized were not technology policy and learn how Transatlantic Commission on user-friendly. Fahs’s team designed their expectations about Election Integrity. As a result, former a new form and shared it with government differed from reality. fellows Ora Tanner and Erica Greene government agency stakeholders Politicians in turn had the chance to were invited to join the Commission in Washington. The Hub recently meet the technologists building the as nonresident fellows to continue announced that the team’s form companies that shape California. their work. will be used as v1 of a pilot redesign being run by the Cybercrime Support Network. 1 Aspen Tech Policy Hub - Fellows and Staff Winter 2020 Fellows Elizabeth Allendorf is an artificial intelligence engineer at Northrop Grumman specializing in natural language processing (NLP). During the last two years at Northrop, she spent the evenings studying for her Master's degree in computer science from the University of Southern California, and will be graduating this December. She also holds a B.A. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles. In her free time she loves to read The New Yorker and hunt for the best taco in LA. Jessica Cole is the Head of Innovation and Economic Development for the City of Walnut Creek, CA. She builds civic infrastructure across sectors: most recently as a Code for America Fellow, as a startup founder, and as Director of Outreach for ed-tech startup Panorama Education. Jessica holds an Urban Studies degree from Yale University, where she was a Yale Entrepreneurial Fellow and a Zigler Fellow in Child Development and Social Policy. Find her hosting citizen onboarding workshops, organizing poetry jams, or co-designing behavioral interventions for her friends. Liv Erickson is an open source engineer and Senior Product Manager in Mozilla's Emerging Technology group. She has spent her career developing virtual and augmented reality software applications with a focus on exploring shared 3D environments. Previously, she worked at Microsoft and co-founded a virtual reality educational non-profit. In her free time, Liv enjoys SCUBA diving in Monterey Bay and snowboarding at Lake Tahoe. Nidhi Hebbar is an ed-technologist passionate about equitable, learner-centered redesign and spent the last six months working with innovative learning communities in India and Kenya. Most recently a global product lead for Apple in education, Nidhi builds technologies to enable creative and relevant modes of learning. While at Columbia University, Nidhi co-founded Youth for Debate, a non-profit that encourages students in low-income communities to find their voice through debate and public speaking. In her free time, Nidhi travels the world to challenge her assumptions and learn how different communities dream of redesigning learning. Madison Jacobs is a technology marketing expert and Editor-in-Chief at Google for Startups. She previously worked on product marketing initiatives at Apigee, which was acquired by Google Cloud in 2016, as well as several other startups throughout the Bay Area. She has a journalism degree from The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Madison has a deep love for mentoring startups and spends time in her personal and professional life working to help Black founders get the resources they need to build and scale their companies. Cecilia Donnelly Krum is a developer at the Minnesota Senate. Previously, Cecilia worked at Open Tech Strategies as an open source consultant for clients such as the American Red Cross, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the World Bank. She graduated from the University of Chicago. Cecilia enjoys Minneapolis' parks in all seasons, particularly for canoeing and cross-country skiing. 2 Aspen Tech Policy Hub - Fellows and Staff Winter 2020 Fellows Mariah Lichtenstern works at the intersection of technology, entertainment, and venture capital, accelerating social, economic, and environmental impact through entrepreneurship. Mariah is the Founding Partner of DiverseCity Ventures and Managing Director of the Founder Institute, Sacramento Chapter. She is a member of UCLA Ventures, and serves as an advisor for CalSEED CleanTech Fund, Berkeley SkyDeck, and Village Capital Finance Forward US 2019. An alumna of UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA, she is passionate about solving the wealth, wage, and funding gaps by building equitable bridges between those with privilege and those with valuable, but underutilized perspectives. Anjana Rajan is a technology entrepreneur with expertise in applying cryptography to social justice issues. She is the former CTO of Callisto, a nonprofit that builds technology to combat sexual assault. Previously, Anjana lived in London and worked at Palantir Technologies, where she built and deployed products in the Middle East. She was a Knight Scholar at Cornell University's Engineering School and received her bachelor's and master's degrees in Operations Research and Information Engineering, and is also an alumna of Y Combinator. Anjana is a former elite triathlete who raced for Team USA. Alexander (RoRo) Romero is a Digital Services Expert at the Defense Digital Service and is the technical lead for the Hack the Pentagon Program. He was previously the CISO at the Defense Media Activity at the Department of Defense, and served in the Marines as an Electro-Optical Ordnance Repairer. Alexander has a Masters Degree in Information Systems with a focus in Computer Security from Strayer University. In his spare time he likes to run cybersecurity conferences, pick locks, punk self driving cars, and build electronic gadgets. Matthew Schroeder is currently a security engineer at Salesforce. Previously, Matthew served in a variety of Security engineer and management roles at Facebook, Gap Inc., Visa, and Booz Allen Hamilton. Matthew has a MS and a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. In his free time, Matthew enjoys escaping the digital world (briefly) to go on long runs. Matt Sievers recently finished 12 years of military service where he specialized in cybersecurity and network operations. In his last position, he taught and developed curriculum for the undergraduate computer and cyber science programs at the US Air Force Academy. Matt has a MS in Cyber Operations from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a BS in Computer Science from the US Air Force Academy. He can often be found running the trails around Pikes Peak and other Colorado mountains.