Speaker details

Ammar Alkassar has been appointed as State Commissioner for Strategy and Chief Digital Officer by August, 1st 2018. In this function, he is responsible for digitization and the innovation, technology as well as the long-term structural policy of the state. Since October 2019, he is also Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Saarland State Government. Until then, Mr. Alkassar served since 2015 as CEO at Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity, Munich, Germany’s major Cybersecurity provider. From 2006 to 2015, he was co-founder and CEO of Sirrix AG security technologies, a world-wide technology leader in Cybersecurity.

Before founding Sirrix AG, Mr. Alkassar was senior researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, and before that he was a researcher at Stevens Tech, NJ and HUT, Helsinki. Ammar Alkassar holds a M.Sc. from Saarland University and a B.Sc. in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Ammar Alkassar is board member of the Permanent Stakeholder Group at the European Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) and was director of the European competence network for IT security eurobits.