Dr. Burt Kaliski Jr., Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, leads Verisign’s long-term research program. Through the program’s innovation initiatives, the CTO organization, in collaboration with business and technology leaders across the company, explores emerging technologies, assesses their impact on the company’s business, prototypes and evaluates new concepts, and recommends new strategies and solutions. Burt is also responsible for the company’s industry standards engagements, university collaborations, and technical community programs.
Prior to joining Verisign in 2011, Burt served as the Founding Director of the EMC Innovation Network, the global collaboration among EMC’s research and advanced technology groups and its university partners. He joined EMC from RSA Security, where he served as Vice President of Research and Chief Scientist. Burt started his career at RSA in 1989, where, as the founding scientist of RSA Laboratories, his contributions included the development of the Public-Key Cryptography Standards, now widely deployed in internet security.
Burt has held appointments as a guest professor at Wuhan University’s College of Computer Science and as a guest professor and member of the international advisory board of Peking University's School of Software and Microelectronics. He has also taught at Stanford University and Rochester Institute of Technology. Burt was Program Co-chair of Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems 2002, Chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers P1363 working group, Program Chair of CRYPTO ’97, and General Chair of CRYPTO ’91. He has also served on the scientific advisory board of QEDIT, a privacy-enhancing technology provider.
Burt is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society, and a member of Tau Beta Pi.
Burt received his PhD, Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focused on cryptography.
One of the highlights of my first seven months at Verisign was attending the annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum(IGF) in Nairobi, Kenya last September. I had the pleasure of serving with industry, policy and technical leaders from around the world on several panels concerned with how to manage the internet as a shared and connected global resource. It was my first trip to Africa, and similar to my experience at each of the other new continents I’ve visited over the course of my career, what once seemed so far away became much closer to home – especially as I sat in the conference room and tweeted and emailed over the wireless network!
Attending IGF was a strong reminder that the world has become so much more connected, with internet access a huge enabler of the global economy. People are learning, companies are forming, and society is changing in new ways as a result of an interconnectedness that puts Kenya and every other country in the same, virtual neighborhood.
As a technology leader whose career objective is to help build a connected digital world, it’s hard for me to envision a better place to be at this time in internet history than Verisign.
That’s what I needed to be convinced of earlier this year when I decided to leave a good job with great people at another leading IT company to become Verisign’s CTO. Seven months later, I haven’t been disappointed.
