Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has appointed Angus Davis, a Rhode Island native and expertise entrepreneur with ties to Newport, to serve on the federal government’s newly established Science and Technology Innovation Board, in accordance with an announcement from the division.
The board was fashioned by a restructuring that merges two longstanding advisory our bodies — the Defense Innovation Board and the Defense Science Board — right into a single panel designed to offer sooner, extra unified steering on rising applied sciences and complicated nationwide safety challenges. Officials say the consolidation is meant to cut back overlap, streamline suggestions and pace the transition of new applied sciences from idea to real-world use.
Mr. Davis has spent a long time working within the web and software program industries, courting again to the early days of the business net. As an adolescent, he labored for one of the nation’s early web service suppliers earlier than becoming a member of Netscape, the place he labored on the Navigator net browser throughout a pivotal interval within the development of the web.
He later co-founded Tellme Networks, an organization targeted on bringing internet-powered providers to the telephone by advances in speech recognition. The firm was acquired by Microsoft, the place Davis went on to assist information speech-recognition technique.
In Rhode Island, Mr. Davis based the restaurant expertise firm Upserve. Under his management, the Providence-based agency grew into one of the nation’s largest point-of-sale platforms for the hospitality trade, serving hundreds of companies nationwide earlier than being acquired by Lightspeed.
Beyond working roles, Davis has labored as a enterprise investor with Foundation Capital, specializing in early-stage corporations in monetary expertise, synthetic intelligence and enterprise software program. More not too long ago, he co-founded an funding agency aimed toward revitalizing housing in Puerto Rico.
A local Rhode Islander, Davis has remained energetic in civic and academic causes. He has served on training and preservation boards and performed a task in serving to set up Rhode Island’s Teach For America corps, together with supporting different initiatives tied to colleges and group growth.
He lives in Dorado, Puerto Rico, along with his household, whereas sustaining connections to Newport and the state.
Earlier this yr, Hegseth appointed one other Newport resident, Mike Cadenazzi, as Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy.
The new board is anticipated to advise senior leaders on synthetic intelligence, superior manufacturing, digital engineering, rising business applied sciences and different areas thought-about vital to sustaining the nation’s protection capabilities in a quickly evolving technological panorama.
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