Cyberspace is an interconnected digital environment. It is a type of virtual world popularized with the rise of the Internet. The term entered popular culture from science fiction and the arts but is now used by technology strategists, security professionals, governments, military and industry leaders and entrepreneurs to describe the domain of the global technology environment, commonly defined as standing for the global network of interdependent information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks and computer processing systems. Others consider cyberspace to be just a notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs. The word became popular in the 1990s when the use of the Internet, networking, and digital communication were all growing dramatically; the term cyberspace was able to represent the many new ideas and phenomena that were emerging. As a social experience, individuals can interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, direct actions, create artistic media, play games, engage in political discussion, and so on, using this global network. Cyberspace users are sometimes referred to as cybernauts.
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as rapid system prototyping and demonstration. Its core competencies are in sensors, integrated sensing, signal processing for information extraction, decision-making support, and communications. These efforts are aligned within ten mission areas. The laboratory also maintains several field sites around the world.
Alberto Abadie is a Spanish economist who has served as a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2016, where he is also Associate Director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). He is principally known for his work in econometrics and empirical microeconomics, and is a specialist in causal inference and program evaluation. He has made fundamental contributions to important areas in econometrics and statistics, including treatment effect models, instrumental variable estimation, matching estimators, difference in differences, and synthetic controls.
Robert Owen Keohane is an American political scientist working within the fields of international relations and international political economy. Following the publication of his influential book After Hegemony (1984), he has become widely associated with the theory of neoliberal institutionalism in international relations, as well as transnational relations and world politics in international relations in the 1970s.
Dr. Randall Caroline Forsberg led a lifetime of research and advocacy on ways to reduce the risk of war, minimize the burden of military spending, and promote democratic institutions. Her career started at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in 1968. In 1974 she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to found the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) as well as to launch the national Nuclear Freeze campaign.
Laura DeNardis is an American author and a scholar of Internet governance and technical infrastructure. She is the Professor and Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society at Georgetown University. DeNardis is an affiliated Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School and served as its executive director from 2008 to 2011. She previously served as a Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Director of Research for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. With a background in information technology engineering and a doctorate in Science and Technology Studies (STS), her research studies the social and political implications of Internet technical architecture and governance. Domestically, she served as an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy (ACICIP) during the Obama Administration. She has more than two decades of experience as an expert consultant in Internet Governance to Fortune 500 companies, foundations, and government agencies.
Melissa Hathaway is a leading expert in cyberspace policy and cybersecurity. She served under two U.S. presidential administrations from 2007 to 2009, including more than 8 months at the White House, spearheading the Cyberspace Policy Review for President Barack Obama after leading the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) for President George W. Bush. She is President of Hathaway Global Strategies LLC, a Senior Fellow and member of the Board of Regents at Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada, and a non-resident Research Fellow at the Kosciuszko Institute in Poland. She was previously a Senior Adviser at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center.
Suzanne Doris Berger is an American political scientist. She is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. A leading authority in comparative politics and political economy, she has pointed to the centrality of politics in mediating and redirecting ostensibly transcendent forces, such as economic modernization and globalization.
Peter M. Haas is a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Karl Deutsch Visiting Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.
Cyber insurance is a specialty insurance product intended to protect businesses from Internet-based risks, and more generally from risks relating to information technology infrastructure and activities. Risks of this nature are typically excluded from traditional commercial general liability policies or at least are not specifically defined in traditional insurance products. Coverage provided by cyber-insurance policies may include first and third parties coverage against losses such as data destruction, extortion, theft, hacking, and denial of service attacks; liability coverage indemnifying companies for losses to others caused, for example, by errors and omissions, failure to safeguard data, or defamation; and other benefits including regular security-audit, post-incident public relations and investigative expenses, and criminal reward funds.
R. David Edelman is an American policymaker, author and academic who currently directs the Project on Technology, the Economy, and National Security (TENS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as Special Assistant to President Barack Obama on issues of the digital economy and national security. In that role, he led policy development around technology, artificial intelligence and related issues for the National Economic Council. He also served in the Office of Science & Technology Policy, and as the first Director for International Cyber Policy on the National Security Council.
David Simchi-Levi is an American academic working as a Professor of Engineering Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the founder or co-founder of several companies. Simchi-Levi's research focuses on supply chain management, revenue management, and business analytics.
Nicole Starosielski is an American author, researcher, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions.
Taylor Fravel is an American political scientist. He specializes in international security.
Ibrahim "Abe" Moussa Baggili was named the Chair of the Division of Computer Science and Engineering at Louisiana State University and the Roy Richardson Professor in 2024. He is also a digital forensics and cybersecurity scientist with a joint appointment between the college of engineering and the Center for Computation and Technology. Before that, he was the founder and director of the Connecticut Institute of Technology (CIT) at the University of New Haven. Baggili was also a full professor and Elder Family Endowed Chair at UNewHaven. He has a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Technology from Purdue University's Purdue Polytechnic Institute. Baggili is a Jordanian/Arab American first generation college graduate and a well-known scientist in the domain of Cyber Forensics and Cybersecurity with seminal peer-reviewed work in the areas of Virtual Reality Forensics (VR) and security, mobile device forensics and security, application forensics, drone forensics and memory forensics.
Gregory Falco is an American inventor and researcher. Falco is a professor at Cornell University. He is a pioneer in the field of cybersecurity research and its aerospace applications. Falco is the founding chair of IEEE's Standard for Space System Cybersecurity and the NATO Country Project Director for the NATO Science for Peace and Security effort to reroute the internet to space.
Fotini Christia is a Greek political scientist. She is the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lateral Pressure refers to any tendency of individuals and societies to expand their activities and exert influence and control beyond their established boundaries, whether for economic, political, military, scientific, religious, or other purposes.). Framed by Robert C. North and developed with Nazli Choucri, the theory addresses the sources and consequences of such a tendency.
Frank Biermann is a German political scientist and professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research interests are in "global institutions and organisations in the sustainability domain". He was the founder in 2006 and first chair of the Earth System Governance Project. From 2018 until 2024 he directed a 2.5-million EUR research programme on the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. This was funded through a European Research Council Advanced Grant.
