We sat down with Antonio Calderon to find out more about the tech dimensions of this year's edition NATO Edge.
What is your role in NATO Edge 24?
As NCIA's CTO, I am responsible for all matters related to technology strategy, experimentation, innovation, architecture and engineering, including topics such as cloud adoption, artificial intelligence, data science, cybersecurity and space, which are the main key topics of the event.
My role at NATO Edge 24 is to share and moderate some of our sessions, engage and learn from the variety of participants attending, and deliver upon NCIA's strategic goals and NATO's objectives of fostering collaboration with industry and other stakeholders.
Having worked in industry before starting my career at NATO has given me a better understanding of their environment, and how teams, processes, and technologies can work together to better serve our customers and achieve our strategic goals. In these dynamic times of geopolitical and technological change, we must keep our core NATO mission unchanged: ensuring the freedom and safety of one billion citizens.
A key point for this year's conference is the launch of the NCIA Technology Strategy. Can you explain what to expect and why it is important?
NCIA recognizes the critical role that technology plays in delivering reliable and secure mission-critical services to NATO operations and stakeholders. The NCIA Technology Strategy outlines our vision for leveraging technology to drive innovation, efficiency, and effectiveness across NATO and improve our services to our NATO customers. As a testimony to our commitment to a closer open dialogue, we will be sharing the first version of the strategy with industry to help us modernize our infrastructure, optimize our operations, and enhance our service delivery experience.
One of the most visionary concepts we will introduce for the first time, is the NATO Digital Foundry, an open, yet secure, innovation platform that interconnects existing and future NATO labs, test environments and engineering platforms, at different security classification levels, both physical and virtually, for all NATO stakeholders. The NATO Digital Foundry is presented as a place where diverse communities can experiment and validate the future technologies for NATO.
Which emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs) have the potential to revolutionize NATO's defence capabilities? And how are those integrated into NATO Edge this year?
NATO Allies, alongside defence ministries, industry and academia, have identified and reviewed a list of EDTs pivotal to the future of our defence capabilities. With NCIA serving as the digital solutions provider to NATO, our soon-to-be published Technology Strategy captures our focus areas across six pillars on which the future technology of NATO's capabilities will be built: data exploitation and artificial intelligence, space, quantum, cloud, cybersecurity, and next generation communication networks.
During NATO Edge 24, you will see a focus on artificial intelligence, space, and cloud adoption in recognition of the maturity, relevance, potential, and critical mass of innovation that these technologies bring, especially when they are securely integrated as force multipliers supporting our ultimate goal of multi-domain operations.
How is NATO leveraging partnerships with the private sector to drive innovation and technological advancement? How does NATO Edge contribute to it?
NATO has a growing number of channels for partnership with the private sector. In the domain of digital innovation, NCIA has developed, and continues to develop strong partnerships with industry through robust acquisition vehicles and framework agreements. Our Not-For-Profit-Framework continues to engage with academia and technology research organizations to bolster technological advancements in NATO's defence capabilities.
The Allied Command Transformation (ACT) also engages with industry through the Innovation Continuum and the NATO Innovation Network, and NCIA is an active player in both. Additionally, DIANA and the NATO Investment Fund are also active in strengthening the start-up ecosystem across NATO, focusing on dual-use technologies and deep-tech to ensure that the most promising technological breakthroughs find their way into operational capabilities. Industry will have the opportunity to engage with these stakeholders as NATO Edge will see the participation of representatives from all these NATO bodies.
How does NATO facilitate the transfer of technology and innovation from industry partners into military applications? What is NCIA's role on this?
NCIA engages across the lifecycle of technology transfer, from facilitating multinational projects to ensuring military applications of cutting-edge commercial dual-use technologies, to collaborating with industry on standardization and identification of capabilities of high military relevance and experimenting its use cases during NATO exercises.
Additionally, NCIA is strongly involved in ensuring secure and reliable integration of industry solutions within NATO, and provides services and support for integration and interoperability testing, validation, and verification. We intent to make this much easier and faster with the creation of our new NATO Digital Foundry initiative.
NCIA also provides a critical bridge in making industry solutions available in a military context through our experience and expertise in deployability, cybersecurity, and service operations. As part of their Board, we also engage closely with NATO Science and Technology Organisation, for our awareness of the scientific studies being conducted, as well as with DIANA, which focus on the identification and acceleration of promising dual-use and deep-tech start-ups.
What type of companies are you particularly interested in engaging with at NATO Edge 24?
I am very keen to engage with all current and future industry partners, academia, and not-for-profit partners with a focus on collaborating on emerging and disruptive technologies, digital transformation, and technology innovation. Every relationship and partnership we can establish to expand NATO's technological edge and accelerate NATO's digital transformation, is of immense value to the security of all Allies. Openly sharing openly our experiences, challenges and solutions is key for our joint success.
NCIA is looking to engage with a broad variety of organizations, from small start-ups to well established companies, as well as industry from each and every NATO Nation, which has recently expanded to include Sweden and Finland since the last edition of NATO Edge.
Although for this edition we have a thematic focus on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, space, and cloud adoption, NATO Edge 24 is just as much about engaging with technology partners on emerging technologies whose importance will grow over the coming years - like quantum or next generation communication networks.
Ultimately, I am looking forward to discover novel innovative products, services, architectures, engineering approaches, people and joint-ventures to overcome our multi-domain challenges and help us in transforming them into win-win opportunities underpinning our NATO mission. Together in NATO Edge 24, we can define when the future starts.