Obama’s CTO

Introduced as the Indian George Clooney, Aneesh Chopra kicked off the GTS today:

“We are very much committed to the cloud. DARPA has a private cloud called RACE, so you can download any of 20 translation tools. Let there be an ecosystem. Let the warfighter choose which translation tool to use in the field.”

“I am particularly excited about the mobile broadband revolution. Cloud computing needs broadband.”

“Interoperability and online authentication are two of the next improvement aspects that we will grapple with in the cloud.”

He pointed us to his recent OSTP blog post with Kalil on a call for students to “build the apps that need a 1GB pipe. Today there are not a lot of apps — except climate modeling — that need that kind of pipe. Maybe they will discover the next browser.”

“The President will speak explicitly about a new vision for NASA in April in Florida.”

Q: What keeps you up at night?

“Anything that requires legislation!
With no new laws, and no new budget (in aggregate), can we move the needle?”

I met several interesting Russians after lunch. The State Dept. and major U.S. banks have recently taken a freakishly friendly posture to Moscow, which they cynically considered a countermeasure to the recent Chinese dustup.