Stanford University

I still believe in progress

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"The year 2017 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of one of Francis Fukuyama’s most famous works, The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracy may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. Can Fukuyama’s theory still tell us something important about the world?" Read here CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama in conversation with Jaroslaw Kuisz and Łukasz Pawlowski. 

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Jerry Kaplan

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Adjunct Lecturer, Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Computer Science
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Jerry Kaplan is widely known as an Artificial Intelligence expert, serial entrepreneur, technical innovator, educator, bestselling author, and futurist. He invented several ground-breaking technologies including handheld tablet computers, online auctions, and electronic keyboard musical instruments.

A renowned Silicon Valley veteran, Jerry Kaplan founded several storied technology companies over his 35-year career, two of which became public companies. Kaplan may be best known for his key role in defining the tablet computer industry as the founding CEO of GO Corporation in 1987. Prior to GO, Kaplan co-founded Teknowledge, Inc., one of the first Artificial Intelligence companies to commercialize Expert Systems, which went public in 1986. In 1994, Kaplan co-founded Onsale, Inc., the world's first Internet auction website, which went public in 1997. In 2004, he pioneered the emerging market for social games by starting Winster.com, where he served as CEO for eight years.

Jerry Kaplan is an Adjunct Lecturer in Computer Science and the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research and teaching focusses on the social and economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence. He is an inventor on more than a dozen patents, and has published over twenty refereed papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. Kaplan holds a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Chicago.

Kaplan is the author of four books, including the best-selling classic "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" (Houghton-Mifflin).  Selected by Business Week as one of the top ten business books of 1995, Startup was optioned to Sony Pictures.  "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (Yale University Press) was honored by The Economist as one of the top ten science and technology books of 2015. His books "Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford University Press, 2016) and “Generative Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press, 2024) were both Amazon new release #1 best sellers in Artificial Intelligence.

He is a frequent public speaker and commentary contributor to major newspapers and magazines. His opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, among other publications. He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside. He received the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Northern California; served on the Governor's Electronic Commerce Advisory Council Member under Pete Wilson, Governor of California (1999); and received an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from California International Business University, San Diego, California (2004). 

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Artificial intelligence expert joins CDDRL’s ranks

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CDDRL is pleased to announce that Jerry Kaplan, who teaches social and economic impact of artificial intelligence in the Stanford computer science department, has been appointed to the position of adjunct professor at CDDRL. He will be working with Francis Fukuyama and Larry Diamond on issues related to the Internet, social media and democracy.
 

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Kaplan is widely known as an artificial intelligence expert, serial entrepreneur, technical innovator and bestselling author. He is currently a fellow at the Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University and a visiting lecturer in the computer science department, where he teaches social and economic impact of artificial intelligence.
 
Kaplan founded several technology companies over his 35-year career, two of which became public companies. He is the author of the best-selling classic “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” (Houghton-Mifflin, 1995); “Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (Yale University Press, 2015); and “Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford Press, 2016). Kaplan has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Business Week. He holds a BA in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Chicago and a PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Read his full bio here.
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Towards fine resolution global maps of crop yields: Testing multiple methods and satellites in three countries

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One of the greatest challenges in monitoring food security is to provide reliable crop yield information that is temporally consistent and spatially scalable. An ideal yield dataset would not only extend globally and across multiple years, but would also have enough spatial granularity to characterize productivity at the field and subfield level. Rapid increases in satellite data acquisition and platforms such as Google Earth Engine that can efficiently access and process vast archives of new and historical data offer an opportunity to map yields globally, but require efficient and robust algorithms to combine various data streams into yield estimates. We recently introduced a Scalable satellite-based Crop Yield Mapper (SCYM) that combines crop models simulations with imagery and weather data to generate 30 m resolution yield estimates without the need for ground calibration. In this study, we tested new large-scale implementations of SCYM, focusing on three regions with varying crops, field sizes and landscape heterogeneity: maize in the U.S. corn belt (390,000 km2), maize in Southern Zambia (86,000 km2), and wheat in northern India (450,000 km2). As a benchmark, we also tested a simpler empirical approach (PEAKVI) that relates yield to the peak value of a time series of spatially aggregated vegetation indices, similar to methods used in current operational monitoring. Both SCYM and PEAKVI were applied to data from all Landsat's sensors and MODIS for more than a decade in each region, and evaluated against ground-based estimates at the finest available administrative level (e.g., counties in the U.S.). We found consistently high correlations (R2 ≥ 0.5) between the spatial pattern of ground- and satellite-based estimates in both U.S. maize and India wheat, with small differences between methods and source of satellite data. In the U.S., SCYM outperformed PEAKVI in tracking temporal yield variations, likely owing to its explicit consideration of weather. In India, both methods failed to track temporal yield changes, with various possible explanations discussed. In Zambia, the PEAKVI approach applied to MODIS tracked yield variations much better (R2 > 0.5) than any other yield estimate, likely because the frequent cloud cover in this region confounds the other approaches. Overall, this study demonstrates successful approaches to yield estimation in each region, and illustrates the importance of distinguishing between accuracy for spatial and temporal variation. The 30 m resolution of Landsat-based SCYM does not appear to offer large benefits for tracking aggregate yields, but enables finer scale analyses than possible with the other approaches.

 

 

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Remote Sensing of Environment
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George Azzari
David Lobell
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Eileen Donahoe

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 721-5345 (650) 724-2996
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Eileen Donahoe is the co-founder and an affiliated scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI) at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. (Previously, she served as GDPI’s executive director.) GDPI is a global multi-stakeholder collaboration hub for the development of policies that reinforce human rights and democratic values in a digitized society. Current research priorities include: international trends in AI governance, technical methods for aligning AI with democratic norms and standards, evolution of digital authoritarian policies and practices, and emerging blockchain and AI-enabled tools to support democracy.

Eileen served in the Biden administration as US Special Envoy for Digital Freedom at the Department of State. She also served in the Obama administration as the first US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva during a period of significant institutional reform and innovation. After the Obama administration, she joined Human Rights Watch as Director of Global Affairs, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity, and internet governance. Earlier in her career, she was a technology litigator at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

Eileen serves as Vice Chair of the National Endowment for Democracy Board of Directors; on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Board of Directors; and on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees. She is a member of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), the World Economic Forum AI Governance Alliance, and the Resilient Governance and Regulation working group. Previously, she served on the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, the University of Essex Advisory Board on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology, the NDI Designing for Democracy Advisory Board, and the Freedom Online Coalition Advisory Network. Degrees: BA, Dartmouth; J.D., Stanford Law School; MA East Asian Studies, Stanford; M.T.S., Harvard; and Ph.D., Ethics & Social Theory, GTU Cooperative Program with UC Berkeley. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
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The Problems of Social Order and Violence in Latin America

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This talk was given during the Stanford's "Disruption: Challenges of a New Era" conference organized by Fundacion RAP,  in March 2017. Beatriz Magaloni, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, presents results of her work on social order and violence in Latin America, with a focus on her research in Brazil and Mexico.

 

Production: Roger Winkelman, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford. 

 

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An Education Strategy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Japan: Introducing the Stanford e-Japan Program

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In discussions of how Japan can harness Silicon Valley, and how Japan can accelerate its efforts to foster greater innovation and entrepreneurship, the endpoint is often “Japan’s education system needs to change.” However, the people discussing innovation, entrepreneurship, and harnessing Silicon Valley are rarely positioned to be able to take the next step and actively facilitate change. The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) has begun offering an interactive online learning program called Stanford e-Japan to high schools in Japan and plans to expand into the college level.  Students not only learn content provided by Stanford scholars, but are also exposed to critical thinking, creative but structured intellectual inquiry, and formulating informed opinions about topics of great relevance to everyday life – all in English. SPICE and the Stanford Silicon Valley – New Japan Project are delighted to collaborate on building new relationships and content to directly begin influencing educational change in Japan. In this SV-NJ Public Forum series, SPICE director Gary Mukai and SV-NJ project leader Kenji Kushida will provide an overview of educational skills needed for the Japanese young people of today and tomorrow, and introduce the Stanford e-Japan program.

 

Dr. Gary Mukai is the director of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) at Stanford University. Prior to joining SPICE in 1988, he was a teacher in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, and in California public schools. Gary’s academic interests include curriculum and instruction, educational equity, and teacher professional development. He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University. His curricular writings for U.S. schools include extensive work on Japan and the Japanese-American experience. In 2003, under his leadership, SPICE established the Reischauer Scholars Program, a distance-learning course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations for high school students in the United States, and in 2015, SPICE launched Stanford e-Japan, a distance-learning course on the United States and U.S.–Japan relations for high school students in Japan. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for the promotion of mutual understanding between Japan and the United States, especially in the field of education. In 2015, he was selected as the recipient of the Stanford Alumni Award by the Asian American Activities Center Advisory Board. He has been a long-time interviewer of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program and member of the JET Alumni Association of Northern California board. 

Kenji E. Kushida is a Japan Program Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and an affiliated researcher at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Kushida’s research interests are in the fields of comparative politics, political economy, and information technology. He has four streams of academic research and publication: political economy issues surrounding information technology such as Cloud Computing; institutional and governance structures of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster; political strategies of foreign multinational corporations in Japan; and Japan’s political economic transformation since the 1990s. Kushida has written two general audience books in Japanese, entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (Chuko Shinsho, 2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (Fusosha, 2008). Kushida holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. His received his MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.

Agenda

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP Required

 
For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/

 

Gary Mukai, Director of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE)
Kenji Kushida, Research Scholar, Shorenstein APARC Japan Program
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Womenomics, the Workplace, and Women Final Report

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The Japan Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), with the generous support of the United States-Japan Foundation and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, held a conference in November 2016 titled “Womenomics, the Workplace, and Women.” The report, which is an outcome of the conference, offers an analysis of the state of women’s leadership and work-life balance in Japan and the United States, and specific actions that Japanese government stakeholders, corporations, start-ups, and educational institutions can take to address gender inequality in Japan.

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Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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