Marjory S. Blumenthal is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Marjory S. Blumenthal was a senior fellow and the director of the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her career has focused on technology trends, impacts, and policy, with an emphasis on information and communications technologies and extending to biotechnology, health, and more. As a scholar, team leader, or convenor of experts, she is a connector of ideas and people.
Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Blumenthal led the experimental Science, Technology, and Policy Program as a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, before which she was the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology at the White House. Her PCAST work addressed such topics as cybersecurity, biosecurity, big data and privacy, and technology for education, health, and cities. Earlier, she built and ran the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—addressing the full range of information technologies and related issues. She then led a sciences initiative as part of a broad strategic portfolio as associate provost at Georgetown University, where she also pursued personal research and taught on cybersecurity, cloud, and Internet policy.
Among her many publications, examples include a pair of RAND reports on the safety of motor vehicles that depend on artificial intelligence, Safe Enough: Approaches to Assessing Acceptable Safety for Automated Vehicles and Measuring Automated Vehicle Safety: Forging a Framework, and another pair of RAND reports on citizen science, Community Citizen Science: From Promise to Action and The Promise of Community Citizen Science. She has written a series of articles on the evolution of the cloud, “Finding Security in the Clouds” in Regulating the Cloud (MIT Press), “Is Security Lost in the Clouds?” in Communications & Strategies (81:1), and “Hide and Seek in the Cloud” in IEEE Security & Privacy (8:2); and a series of articles on the Internet, “The Future of the Internet and Cyberpower” in Cyberpower and National Security (National Defense University and Potomac Books, Inc.), “The End-to-End Argument and Application Design: The Role of Trust” in Federal Communications Law Journal (63:2), “End-to-End and Subsequent Paradigms” in The Law Review of Michigan State University – Detroit College of Law (3:3), and “Rethinking the design of the Internet: The end to end arguments vs. the brave new world” in ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (1:1). She also explored the intersection of computing and the arts through Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity (National Academies Press), a book that helped to guide an international community seeking to integrate art with science and engineering.
Chips—the building blocks of all electronic devices—are the backbone of today’s interconnected society. The technological and geopolitical importance of chips, which are now in short supply, is at the center of discussions in the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council.
The dependence of automated vehicles on software exposes them to significant cybersecurity challenges. To fundamentally change transportation in the twenty-first century in a safe and secure way, AVs must place cyber at the center of their risk management.
The Chinese government has unveiled plans to reshape a vast array of technical standards that shape the products and services that consumers around the world rely on, but Beijing’s designs could spawn unintended consequences.
Producing automated vehicles (AVs) that are, and can be shown to be, safe is an ongoing challenge.
It is time to ensure that security for smart cities is addressed early and often, including by engaging city residents in the process.
