Obama to guest-edit Wired magazine's November issue
To solidify his legacy of STEM initiatives and tech innovation in the White House, Obama plans to guest-edit an issue of WIRED and host a technology and innovation conference before leaving office.
President Obama poses with 6-year-old Girl Scouts from Tulsa, Okla., during the 2015 White House Science Fair. Mr. Obama plans to cap his technology legacy with a science and technology conference in October and as a guest editor for Wired magazine's November issue.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File
From the White House Science Fairs to The United States Digital Service, President Obama has made significant strides in encouraging the intersection of technology and government. As he prepares to exit the White House, Mr. Obama plans to further solidify that legacy by hosting a .
The October 13 conference will focus on 鈥渇rontiers鈥� 鈥撎齪ersonal, local, national, global, and interplanetary 鈥� including topics听such as artificial intelligence, robotics, climate change, space travel, and how communities are using data to improve quality of life.
鈥淭he conference will focus on building US capacity in science, technology, and innovation, and the new technologies, challenges and goals that will continue to shape the 21st century and beyond,鈥� wrote Megan Smith, US chief technology officer, and John P. Holdren, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, .
In conjunction with the conference, to be hosted by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University,听Obama will guest-edit the frontiers-themed November issue of WIRED Magazine.
鈥淲e want to wrestle with the idea of how today鈥檚 technology can influence political leadership,鈥� wrote WIRED editor-in-chief Scott Dadich in a . 鈥淎nd who better to help us explore these ideas than President Obama?鈥�
But not everyone is impressed with Obama鈥檚 tech history, particularly when it comes to data protection or regulation.
A survey at South By Southwest (SXSW), where Obama spoke this past March, found that 69 percent of people believe that 鈥渃ustomers' private and encrypted data must be protected and never shared with the government,鈥�.听
Granted, SXSW came right after the FBI v. Apple debacle, in which the FBI asked Apple to create a way to bypass the security features of phones involved in the San Bernardino shooting and a drug case and Apple refused, stating that would create a backdoor that could compromise the security of all iPhone users. Understandably, many SXSW attendees were wary of Obama鈥檚 message that the government and tech companies should work together to solve the biggest global and national challenges.
Nonetheless, the Obama administration is leaving a sizable technology and innovation legacy.
In 2014,听Obama founded the United States Digital Service, a sort of technological SWAT team who come to the rescue when the government encounters tech problems, such as the launch of healthcare.gov. He also founded the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, in which experts from fields outside the government work with federal offices on projects, and he greatly expanded Data.gov, which now houses 193,000 publicly available federal data sets.
The Obama administration has also worked hard to encourage the next generation of STEM field innovators, as well as current STEM teachers, through the Educate to Innovate program, which is responsible for the annual White House Science Fair.
鈥淚n many ways, his tech legacy is a talent legacy,鈥� Mitchell Weiss, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, who has , tells the Monitor in an email. 鈥淚t鈥檚 been innovation as invitation; a bigger and broader call to people with skills and ingenuity to help solve big public problems. A new generation of public entrepreneurs are responding to that call. The President, his programs, and the people that have come out of them are an important part of why they are.鈥�