The Aspen Institute

Featuring Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners, and Dr. Jason Matheny, Director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The conversation will be moderated by Garrett Graff, Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Cybersecurity & Technology program.

The panel will explore current trends in artificial intelligence technology, where the R&D focus lies, and how that investment will shift as the technology becomes more advanced. The panel will discuss the ways in which the arc of technology can be bent with intent and the role of different stakeholders in changing the trajectory. The panel will also share insight into the inevitable shift the nature of the workforce and the economy at large due to the prevalence of artificial intelligence and speak about opportunities and risks that exist.

The Morris Series is made possible by a generous donation from Aspen Institute Trustee Diane L. Morris. This Series brings the mission and work of the Institute to an invited group of supporters, friends, and new audiences in the San Francisco area. The Series addresses innovation and technology with an underlying theme of leadership based on enduring values and nonpartisan exchange.

Panelist Biographies

Jocelyn Goldfein is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners where she invests in the intelligent enterprise – early stage startups applying AI to solve business problems. She is particularly excited about the potential of AI to optimize infrastructure, security, supply chains, and worker productivity. Jocelyn is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure and organizational scale. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook, where she helped convert a News Feed to Machine Learning and spearheaded the transition to a “mobile first” product organization, and VMware, where she built core virtualization technology and created VMware’s Desktop Business Unit.

Jason Matheny heads IARPA, a unique government agency tasked with tackling high-risk, high-payoff research for the nation’s intelligence community. Modeled on the groundbreaking Pentagon’s DARPA, Dr. Matheny’s agency works at the cutting-edge of technologies from artificial intelligence and genomics to facial recognition and biosecurity. Before joining the agency, Dr. Matheny worked at Oxford University, the World Bank, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Center for Biosecurity and Princeton University, and is the co-founder of two biotechnology companies.