- November 20, 2020
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- June 20, 2025
On November 20, 2020, Aspen Germany hosted the fourth event of its series “Virtual Road to the Laboratories of Democracy Initiative” to discuss the role of tech in the COVID-19 response. Breakout sessions addressed opportunities for technological innovation in combating the health crisis, cybersecurity threats, and privacy concerns amid COVID-19. How can technological innovations like AI, 3D printing, and big data support the COVID-19 response and recovery efforts? How has telemedicine evolved during the pandemic and will it permanently alter how medical practitioners provide care to patients? How are cybercriminals taking advantage of the current health crisis and how are governments, states, and the industry dealing with increased cyber vulnerabilities and risks? How can governments, companies and users guarantee that contact tracing apps, symptom monitoring technology, and other technologies are safeguarding hard won data protections? For this webinar, participants were joined by three experts from Baden-Württemberg and California, the featured states in this exchange round. Following opening remarks by Steffen Braun, Head of Urban Systems Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart, Peter Liebert, Chief Information Security Officer at Cerner Government Services and Commander for California State Guard Cyber Operations, and Maria Wilhelm, Head of the Europe Department at the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Baden-Württemberg, the group identified best practices in Germany and the United States and discussed how these efforts can be advanced by state laws and policies.
This webinar series is part of the “Laboratories of Democracy Initiative” which brings together German and American state legislators to facilitate a values-based discussion and an exchange of ideas about how to tackle current international policy challenges on a subnational level. In 2020 due to COVID-19, Aspen Germany holds a series of webinars as part of a “Virtual Road to the Laboratories of Democracy Initiative” providing a virtual platform for exchange for the 2020 cohort. The webinar series explores subnational governance in the United States and Germany amid COVID-19, leadership in times of crisis, the role of tech in the COVID-19 response, and prospects for German-American cooperation. The project is supported by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany, funded by the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi).
