From October 10-12, SphereOI participated in the Association for the United States Army’s (AUSA) annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The AUSA is a nonprofit educational and professional organization that connects the Army with industry partners. At the annual meeting, over 33,000 attendees gathered to see the latest capabilities of Army organizations and to participate in panel discussions and seminars on various military and national security subjects.
SphereOI attended the annual meeting in partnership with CyberWorld, a new event that brought together industry leading experts in all things cyber, from counterterrorism to preventing ransomware. Industry leaders convened to present, discuss, and debate digital challenges to the Army and the Government at-large. The event included speakers such as Tony Scott, Former CIO of the Federal Government, and Matthew J. Cronin, Director of National Cybersecurity at the White House.
Thad Scheer, a partner at SphereOI, spoke about using AI capabilities throughout the DoD to harness next-generation innovation. Scheer stressed the importance of developing billion-parameter models, before the adversary does, to gain a competitive advantage on the battlefield:
“The costs of training these models are coming down,” Scheer said. “You’re seeing a lot more people having the capability to train a large model. The idea that somebody could train a 175 billion parameter model… that has a certain scare factor… What if they train it to be something bad?”
Chris Kauffman, also a partner at SphereOI, participated in panels about creating resilient networks to thwart hackers and terrorists. Kauffman discussed how zero trust is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all security solution and suggested extensive penetration testing as an easy first step for organizations to find security vulnerabilities in their networks.
“We talk about layered solutions to cybersecurity because we have layered problems in IT and OT,” Kauffman said. “And even if you do all the right things, including zero trust, when you design and build out your networks and other systems, that changes next week.”
“The way companies become more resilient… is you attack them and fix the problems you find,” Kauffman added. “One of the best ways to understand your own system is to test.”
Casey Friedman, a 23-year-old software engineer who has worked at SphereOI for 1.5 years, spoke on a panel about retaining talent in the current job market. Discussing what he looks for in a role, Friedman said he wants clearly defined goals and constant feedback.
“It’s not necessarily clear how you’re going to fit into a new organization from the job listing, what your responsibilities will actually be,” Friedman said. “I want to be given the tools to succeed.”
Friedman also spoke about the importance of work life balance in the new generation of workers.
“Work life balance is definitely important to me,” Friedman said. “It’s kind of a red flag to me if an organization describes itself as ‘work-hard-play-hard’… That sounds like it’s only going to be work hard, it comes off as if they don’t know the boundaries between when I’m working and when I’m playing, that they’re going to try and blur those boundaries.”
SphereOI is honored to have participated in this event and is grateful to CyberWorld for assembling industry leaders to talk about all things cyber! To see any of the talks from CyberWorld, check out the CyberWorld YouTube page.
