2017 FUTURES ASSEMBLY OPENING KEYNOTE SESSION ANNOUNCEMENT
Keynote Speaker: Alec Ross
Alec Ross is one of America’s leading experts on innovation. He serves as an advisor for both the political and technological elite to help them better understand the implication of factors emerging at the intersection of geopolitics, technology, and innovation. Ross brought these two select worlds together for President Obama for his first presidential campaign. He did the same during his time as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, a role created for him to maximize the potential of technology and innovation in service of America’s diplomatic goals. In this role, Ross advanced the State Department’s interests on a range of issues including Internet Freedom, cybersecurity, disaster response, and the use of network technologies in conflict zones. Currently, he continues to educate various world leaders and top CEOs about these topics. Ross’s New York Times best-selling book, The Industries of the Future, released February 2016, will give readers an understanding of the next wave of innovations that are going to disrupt markets and workplaces around the world, for better and for worse.
AR_Industries of the FutureRoss currently serves as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and sits on the board of directors or advisors for companies in the fields of technology, media, telecommunications, education, health care and cybersecurity. Ross provides a blueprint for the future of business, deconstructing topics including cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the coming impact of digital technology on money and markets. He pulls from his firsthand experience as an entrepreneur and from implementing strategies at the State Department to provide actionable insights on emerging issues that audiences can’t hear from anyone else.
After graduating from Northwestern University, Ross started his career as a sixth grade teacher through Teach for America in inner-city Baltimore. In 2000, he and three colleagues co-founded the nonprofit organization One Economy and grew it from modest origins in a basement into a global organization serving millions of low-income people, with programs on four continents.
During his time at the State Department, Ross led an effort to increase the diversity and level of problem-solving abilities in the foreign service. He managed a large-scale process for making the U.S. Department of State a more innovative institution. A 2012 study by Deloitte and the Partnership for Public Service scored the State Department as having the most innovation-friendly culture of any cabinet-level agency. An advocate for Internet Freedom, he established a global Internet Freedom agenda that became the first distinctly 21st century human rights agenda, deploying $100M in funds for cutting-edge projects that keep the internet open and help protect citizens and activists in authoritarian environments.
Understanding the growing importance of social media, Ross conceived a system of public diplomacy through social media that now reaches 15 million people a day. He is largely responsible for creating the system of using text messaging codes to donate to relief funds. Ross also served as Convener for the Technology, Media & Telecommunications Policy Committee on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and served on the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team.
Ross has been awarded many recognitions for his work, including “Top 100 Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy Magazine, Huffington Post’s “10 Game Changers in Politics,” the 2010 Middle East/North Africa Technology Person of the Year by the Union of Arab ICT organizations, and the Department of State Distinguished Honor Award.
Ross has served as a guest lecturer at numerous institutions, including the United Nations, Harvard Law School, and the London School of Economics His writing has appeared in publications including the Johns Hopkins SAIS Review of International Affairs and the NATO Review. Ross lives in Baltimore with his wife and their three young children.
