The Pentagon’s acting chief information officer, John Zangardi, was in San Diego last week to tour eight San Diego tech companies. More than 20 senior military, government and international leaders in information warfare also participated in the tour Aug. 14-15.
Stops on tour included Qualcomm, AttackIQ, Qubitekk, Webroot, Illumina, iBoss, FICO and KnuEdge. Topics up for discussion included cybersecurity, machine learning, commercial quantum computing and data analytics.
Participants also had the chance to tour UC San Diego and hear about research related to big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
San Diego’s Cyber Center of Excellence as well as the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. hosted the tours.
The Pentagon has its own sizable cyber workforce in town at SPAWAR, the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, as well as SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific.
“This is the first time where San Diego is being recognized as an up-and-coming ‘Silicon Valley’ by several influential leaders,” said Ken Slaght, the retired SPAWAR commander who now leads the Cyber Center of Excellence.
