Stanford University

Two shifts for crop mapping: Leveraging aggregate crop statistics to improve satellite-based maps in new regions

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Subtitle
Crop type mapping at the field level is critical for a variety of applications in agricultural monitoring, and satellite imagery is becoming an increasingly abundant and useful raw input from which to create crop type maps. Still, in many regions crop type mapping with satellite data remains constrained by a scarcity of field-level crop labels for training supervised classification models. When training data is not available in one region, classifiers trained in similar regions can be transferred, but shifts in the distribution of crop types as well as transformations of the features between regions lead to reduced classification accuracy. We present a methodology that uses aggregate-level crop statistics to correct the classifier by accounting for these two types of shifts. To adjust for shifts in the crop type composition we present a scheme for properly reweighting the posterior probabilities of each class that are output by the classifier. To adjust for shifts in features we propose a method to estimate and remove linear shifts in the mean feature vector. We demonstrate that this methodology leads to substantial improvements in overall classification accuracy when using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to map crop types in Occitanie, France and in Western Province, Kenya. When using LDA as our base classifier, we found that in France our methodology led to percent reductions in misclassifications ranging from 2.8% to 42.2% (mean = 21.9%) over eleven different training departments, and in Kenya the percent reductions in misclassification were 6.6%, 28.4%, and 42.7% for three training regions. While our methodology was statistically motivated by the LDA classifier, it can be applied to any type of classifier. As an example, we demonstrate its successful application to improve a Random Forest classifier.
Journal Publisher
Remote Sensing of Environment
Authors
David Lobell

Marietje Schaake Included in POLITICO’s Tech 28: Class of 2021

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

POLITICO has announced their annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s tech revolution. In addition to an overall No. 1, the list is divided into three categories — rulemakers, rulebreakers and visionaries — each representing a different type of power. The Cyber Policy Center's Marietje Schaake is included on the list as a visionary and "voice to listen to on both sides of the Atlantic."

From the announcement:

The 42-year-old Dutch native has become a leading voice of European philosophy on how to regulate technology, especially in the U.S., where she’s been teaching at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center since leaving European politics.

Her message — that the internet’s early leaders have grown into all-too-dominant behemoths unable to subdue their own vices and are violating human rights — might have seemed out of whack in the U.S. a few years ago. But it has since become mainstream, in part thanks to Schaake’s work to reshape the American conversation on technology and inject some of Europe’s criticism on the sector.

In Europe, too, Schaake’s star keeps rising and rising. Once one of Brussels’ most visible politicians, she has now turned her attention to taming algorithms and the growing issue of cyber threats. In 2019, she launched the CyberPeace Institute in Geneva, a group focused on getting European policymakers to care about the human victims of cyberattack.

READ MORE

Marietje Schaake

Marietje Schaake

International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center
FULL BIO

Read More

cyber turns two graphic
News

The Cyber Policy Center Turns Two

A look back at the launch of the CPC and the work of our programs
The Cyber Policy Center Turns Two
Hero Image
illustration of Marietje Schaake Politico
All News button
1
Subtitle

POLITICO’s annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s tech revolution includes the Cyber Policy Center's Marietje Schaake. The list is divided into three categories — rulemakers, rulebreakers and visionaries — each representing a different type of power.

How to Protect Critical Infrastructure Fom Ransomware Attacks

Paragraphs

Whether the targets are local governments, hospital systems, or gas pipelines, ransomware attacks in which hackers lock down a computer network and demand money are a growing threat to critical infrastructure. The attack on Colonial Pipeline, a major supplier of fuel on the East Coast of the United States, is just one of the latest examples—there will likely be many more. Yet the federal government has so far failed to protect these organizations from the cyberattacks, and even its actions since May, when Colonial Pipeline was attacked, fall short of what’s necessary.

Read more 

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Commentary
Publication Date
Subtitle
Op-ed in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by Gregory Falco and Sejal Jhawer
Authors

Strengthening Democracies In The Digital Age

-

German Consulate logo and Stanford Logo

Technological cooperation is one of the key topics of the transatlantic agenda. The capacity of nations to innovate and to regulate will define impact their future relevancy. Beyond setting incentives to enhance innovation, Regulation and setting standards is at the forefront of the geopolitical dimension of tech policy.
 
On June 24 from 12:00 to 1:00 pm Pacific Time, Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Emily Haber, International Policy Director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake, and Chris Riley, Senior Fellow for Internet Governance at the R Street Institute, will discuss the opportunities and challenges of the digital transformation for the US and the EU with respect to strategies to strengthen democratic public spheres, restore digital trust and promote liberal liberal-democratic values through a global digital order. Nathanial Persily, co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, will introduce and moderate the event.
 
This event is part of the series “Meeting America,” virtual talks with the German Ambassador and American stakeholders across the United States.
 
This event is co-sponsored by the German Consulate General San Francisco and the American Council on Germany.

REGISTER

 

About the Speakers

 

Dr. Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018.   Prior to her transfer to Washington, DC, she served in various leadership functions at the Foreign Office in Berlin. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary, the first woman to hold either post. Thereafter, she was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary in charge of homeland security and migration policy from 2014 until 2018.   Emily Haber has many years of experience with Russia and the former Soviet Union. She held various posts at the German Embassy in Moscow, including Head of the Political Department. At the Foreign Office in Berlin, she served as Head of the OSCE Division and as Deputy Director-General for the Western Balkans, among other positions.   Emily Haber holds a PhD in history and is married to former diplomat Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons.

Chris Riley is R Street’s senior fellow of Internet Governance. He will be leading the Knight Foundation-funded project on content moderation, running convenings of a broad range of stakeholders to develop a framework for platforms managing user-generated content. Chris will also be doing policy analysis around content regulatory issues related to that project, including work on Section 230 in the United States and the Digital Services Act in the European Union.

Prior to joining R Street, Chris led global public policy work for the Mozilla Corporation, managing their work on the ground in Washington, D.C., Brussels, Delhi and Nairobi from Mozilla’s San Francisco office, and worked with government policymakers, stakeholders in industry and civil society, and internal teams at Mozilla to advance their mission. Prior to that, he worked in the U.S. Department of State to help manage the Internet Freedom grants portfolio designated by Congress to support technology development, digital safety training, research and related work as a part of advancing the expression of human rights online in internet-repressive countries.

Chris received his bachelor’s in computer science from Wheeling Jesuit University, his PhD in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and his JD from Yale Law School.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.

Marietje Schaake is the International Policy Director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. 

 

Nathaniel Persily

Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
0
James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
headshot_3.jpg

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

CV
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

Marietje Schaake

0
marietje.schaake

Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of The Tech Coup.


 

Non-Resident Fellow, Cyber Policy Center
Fellow, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Emily Margarethe Haber
Chris Riley

Assessing National Digital Identity Systems: The Risks And Rewards

-

With the rise of national digital identity systems (Digital ID) across the world, there is a growing need to examine their impact on human rights. While these systems offer accountability and efficiency gains, they also pose risks for surveillance, exclusion, and discrimination. In several instances, national Digital ID programmes started with a specific scope of use, but have since been deployed for different applications, and in different sectors. This raises the question of how to determine appropriate and inappropriate uses of Digital ID programs, which create an inherent power imbalance between the State and its residents given the personal data they collect.

On Wednesday, June 23rd @ 10:00 am Pacific Time, join Amber Sinha of India’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS), Anri van der Spuy of Research ICT Africa (RIA) and Dr. Tom Fischer of Privacy International in conversation with Kelly Born, Director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative and fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, to discuss the challenges and opportunities posed by digital identity systems, a proposed framework for assessing trade-offs and ensuring that human rights are adequately protected, and a discussion of experiences in translating and adapting new digital ID assessment framework by CIS and RIA to different contexts and geographies.

REGISTER

Amber Sinha 
Anri van der Spuy
Dr. Tom Fischer 
Kelly Born

The Autocratic Middle Class

-

About the Event:

The Autocratic Middle Class studies the post-communist middle classes – not as a force for democracy, but as a source of support for autocracy and authoritarian resilience. It helps to explain why authoritarianism deepened across the ex-Soviet region over a period when the middle class was rapidly expanding; why anti-Putin protests in Russia have thus far failed to achieve a critical mass; and why it has been so difficult to consolidate democracy in Ukraine. Drawing on attitudinal surveys, unique data on protest participation, and extensive fieldwork in the former Soviet Union, this book shows that state dependence weakens the middle classes’ incentives to prefer and pursue democracy and sheds light on why development doesn’t necessarily lead to democratization.

 

About the Speaker:

Bryn Rosenfeld
Bryn Rosenfeld is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. Her research interests include political behavior, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology. Her new book, The Autocratic Middle Class examines how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. She is the recipient of a Juan Linz Best Dissertation Prize and a Best Article Award honorable mention, both by the American Political Science Association’s Democracy & Autocracy Section. Her work appears in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research. She holds a PhD from Princeton.

Online, via Zoom:  REGISTER

Bryn Rosenfeld Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University
Seminars

French Culture Workshop with Minayo Nasiali

Please join us for a workshop discussion of Dr. Minayo Nasiali's draft book chapter, "A Working Alias: African Sailors and Fungible Identities across France and Great Britain’s Maritime Empires (1920-1939).

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Register for a Zoom link

Lectures

Eurovision and Intervision: The Politics of Europe's Song Contests

-

RSVP for this event

The annual Eurovision Song Contest is one of the world’s longest-running and most popular television shows, having been first staged in 1956. The European Broadcasting Union, the Eurovision Song Contest’s organiser, has always maintained that the contest is a non-political event that promotes cooperation among the European Broadcasting Union’s members, national public service broadcasting organisations from Europe and the Mediterranean rim. Yet, as entries in it represent states, the Eurovision Song Contest has always reflected political relations in Europe and has been appropriated by governments in their cultural diplomacy. For example, as a Western European event during the Cold War, the Eurovision Song Contest inspired the formation of and was challenged by an Eastern European equivalent, the Intervision Song Contest. In his talk, Dr. Dean Vuletic, the world’s leading academic expert on the history of the Eurovision and Intervision song contests, will address why these two song contests have been so politically significant for Europe. He will also discuss how this year’s Eurovision Song Contest reflects contemporary politics in Europe, especially with regards to East Europe.

Dean Vuletic is a historian of contemporary Europe based in the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. After receiving his doctoral degree in history from Columbia University, he designed the world’s first-ever university course on the Eurovision Song Contest, which he began teaching at New York University. He is the author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), the only scholarly monograph on the history of the contest, which he produced under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship. As a Lise Meitner Fellow, he has also led a research project on the history of the Intervision Song Contest. Dean is a leading media commentator and public speaker on the Eurovision Song Contest, and more information about his work can be found on his website www.deanvuletic.com.

 

David D. Laitin awarded 2021 Johan Skytte Prize

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Laitin has made “culture,” often the junk drawer of political science studies, studiable and concrete by identifying various cultural components of a nation’s inner life; language is one aspect of culture, religion another, art and literature a third, how private family life is organized a fourth. Central to his thinking is that these cultural components do not have to easily reinforce each other or pull in the same direction. These “spheres” can co-exist without coinciding.

Read the full press release, translated into English: Culture is the product of…
Hero Image
David D. Laitin
All News button
1
Subtitle

The Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, known by many as the “Nobel Prize in Political Science,” is being awarded for the 27th consecutive year. This year’s recipient is David D. Laitin, for his “original and objective explanation of how politics shapes cultural strategies in heterogeneous societies.”

What (If Anything) is Wrong with Positive Liberty?

Paragraphs

Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society
Isaiah Berlin’s criticisms of positive liberty are often read as mere artefacts of his Cold War context. But are they good criticisms? This article evaluates Berlin’s three main worries about positive liberty—the inner-citadel worry, the moralization worry, and the tyranny worry. I find that while they may be reasonable worries to have about any concept of liberty, they are not compelling criticisms of positive liberty in particular.

Read More

Books
December 2018

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times

Author(s)
Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times
Journal Articles
August 2018

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds

Author(s)
Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Authors
Alison McQueen
Subscribe to Europe