About the Speaker

Mr John C. Mallery is the CTO of WFA Group LLC. Since 1980, he has been a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and its successor the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in various capacities from graduate student to research scientist. He is also an Oxford Martin School Associate, a Senior Fellow at the Security and Defence Research Centre of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris, and an affiliate of the Digital Society Institute at the European School for Management Technology (ESMT) in Berlin.

He is a frequent speaker on cyber topics in the United States, Europe, and Asia.  To fight the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, he founded and leads an international Biosecurity Analysis Group together with an associated weekly seminar. His recent research involves cyber impacts on world order, military cyber stability, cyber norms and CBMs, national cyber strategies, countering cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, cyber impacts on world order, economics of information assurance, and technical strategies for cyber defense.

Mallery served as a member of the red team for the Cyber Solarium Commission in 2019-2020, and argued for the creation of an Office of the National Cyber Director and for technologically grounded cyber strategy. Since 2016, he has organized track 1.5 conferences with like-minded allies on cyber norms and related topics. In 2015, he co-organized a G7 track 1.5 conference on intellectual property protection in Paris. Since 2010, he has participated in track 1.5 dialogues with Chinese and Russian cyber experts with a focus on escalatory dynamics of cyber conflict and cyber risk reduction via functional confidence building measures and norms. Since 2016, he has organized a series of roundtables on military cyber stability with Russia and China. He has participated in a number of NATO activities, including serving SPS as a co-director for a Science for Peace and Security project with Jordan 2014-2016.

From the early 1990s, he has advised governments on Internet strategy, digital communications, cyber strategy, advanced architectural concepts for cyber security research, and transformational computing.  In 2008, he initiated an early research program in cyber policy at MIT and Harvard with DoD Minerva funding. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, he served on Obama’s cyber policy team and helped craft his July 16, 2008 cyber platform.  Since 2006, he organized a series of national workshops on technical and policy aspects of cyber. His interests span a variety of fields from artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer science and information assurance to cyber defense, economics and international relations.

In 1988, he conceptualized the field of computational politics as he developed the Relatus Natural Understanding System and non-rectangular machine learning techniques for analyzing international relations using the SHERFACS Conflict and Cooperation data set. After fielding the first experiment in Internet politics during the 1992 Presidential election, he was the principal architect and developer of the White House Electronic Publications System that served the Clinton Administration from 1992-2001. In the process of helping drive early US Internet strategy, he created and fielded the first large-scale wide-area collaboration system for the Vice President’s 1994 Open Meeting on the National Performance Review with 4000 Federal workers, pioneered online survey research in 1992 leading up to hierarchical adaptive surveys in 1996, and implemented the first production HTTP 1.1 Web server and URN resolver, among many other firsts.

Dr Karthik Nachiappan is Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on India’s Geoeconomics, how issues like trade, technology, and climate change affect Indian foreign policy and how India’s positions on these issues affect security dynamics in the Indo-Pacific.

About the Moderator

Benjamin Ang is Head of CENS, Future Issues in Technology, and Digital Impact Research, at RSIS. He leads the policy research think tank that focuses on national security aspects of Cyber, Hybrid Threats, Disinformation, Foreign Interference, Extremism, Emerging Technologies, AI, Quantum, Space, Biotech, Energy, and Smart Cities.