This project aims to develop and test remote-sensing based approaches to gathering two typesof aid-relevant data: data on agricultural productivity and data on household assets, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. The work will combine new high-resolution satellite imagery with household survey data to develop algorithms to measure crop yields and key household assets remotely (i.e. from space), with the household survey data providing the “ground truth” with which to train the algorithms.
Masa ISHII is founder and a Managing Director of AZCA, Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in US-Japan corporate development for high technology companies. To date, AZCA has helped numerous companies in Japan and US in developing their new business across the Pacific Ocean. Masa is also a Managing Director of AZCA Venture Partners, a venture capital firm whose most recent fund specializes in the domain where IT/Electronics and Life science converge. Formerly, Masa worked at McKinsey & Company, Inc. and at IBM. Masa is a frequent speaker and writer on issues involving international business development in the high technology industry.He is a visiting professor at Waseda University Business School and at Graduate School of Engineering, Shizuoka University. Masa holds a Bachelor of Engineering in mathematical engineering and instrumentation physics from the University of Tokyo and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University.
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION:
It was in early 1970s that Japanese companies first started interacting with Silicon Valley. As Silicon Valley grew, many Japanese companies started trying to work with high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley with the purpose of innovating and developing new businesses. More recently, start-up companies and SMEs from Japan have started taking root in Silicon Valley by fully taking advantage of its high technology infrastructure. In doing so, however, many Japanese companies failed to achieve their strategic goals. These hard-learned lessons over time are bound to be forgotten as the new generation of Japanese companies attempt to enter the Silicon Valley’s ecosystem unless they are recorded and the memory is institutionalized. Having lived and worked between Japan and Silicon Valley over the past 30 years, the speaker will share an insider's view of large firms, start-ups and entrepreneurs since the 1970s and his direct experience and reminiscence in dealing with companies in Japan and Silicon Valley, so that the long-built up experience of firms entering this region for the last 40 years can prove to be of benefit to others in the future.
Abstract: Somebody once said, “What a damn fool can do for a dollar, an engineer can do for a nickel.” Thinking about cost as an engineering constraint brings new life to ideas. This is what makes the difference between an idea influencing a hundred people or a billion. With our planet literally teeming with problems (ecological, health and social), it’s time to take cost constraints into serious consideration. As physicists, we like to make stuff. We use these skills (and field work) to design solutions for extremely resource constrained settings, specially in the field of global health. I will discuss our current work from field diagnostics to high-throughput vector ecology and hands on science education and talk about it’s implication in a global context. I will also discuss outcomes, and lessons from a global experiment - Foldscope (a 50 cent origami microscope); where we shipped 50,000 origami microscopes around the world (130+) countries enabling curious users to discover and explore the microscopic world surrounding them.
About the Speaker: Manu Prakash is an assistant professor in bioengineering. He leads a curiosity driven research group, focused on technological interventions in extreme resource-poor settings, tackling global public health problems. A physicist and a prolific inventor, his inventions include a 50 cent “print-and-fold” paper microscope, a $5 chemistry lab, a computer that works by moving water droplets in a magnetic fields, and Oscan, a 3-D printed smartphone add-on that helps diagnose oral carcinomas responsible for 40% of cancer-related deaths in India. Professor Prakash has been distinguished as a Frederick E. Terman Fellow (2011-2013), a Pew Scholar (2013-2017), a top innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review (2014) and in the Brilliant 10 by Popular Science (2014). Born in Meerut, India, Prakash earned a BTech in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur before moving to the United States. He did his master’s and PhD at MIT before founding the Prakash Lab at Stanford.
Manu Prakash
Assistant Professor of Bioengineering
Stanford University
Abstract: Technological and social forces are allowing the growth of science outside a professionalized context. The Internet, mobile devices, and public availability of big data are technological facilitators of “citizen science”, in part through enabling data sharing, analysis, and communication. These technological changes now allow the entire scientific process, from funding and development of a research agenda, to conduct, analysis and dissemination and application of findings, to take place without the involvement of any science professionals or research-related institutions. However, most ethical and regulatory frameworks for biomedical science arose from concepts of obligations of professionals and (largely not-for-profit) institutions. We will discuss current examples of “citizen science” in biology and clinical research, and the ethical and policy implications.
About the Speaker: Mildred Cho is a Professor in the Division of Medical Genetics of the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University, Associate Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, and Director of the Center for Integration of Research on Genetics and Ethics. She received her B.S. in Biology in 1984 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in 1992 from the Stanford University Department of Pharmacology. Her post-doctoral training was in Health Policy as a Pew Fellow at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco and at the Palo Alto VA Center for Health Care Evaluation. She is a member of international and national advisory boards, including for Genome Canada, the March of Dimes, and the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine. Her current research projects examine ethical and social issues in research on the human genome and microbiome, synthetic biology and genome editing, and the ethics at the intersection of clinical practice and research.
Mildred Cho
Professor in the Division of Medical Genetics of the Department of Pediatrics and Associate Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
Stanford University
Abstract: Faster evolving technologies, new peer adversaries, and the increased role of non-government entities changes how we think about decisions to develop and adopt new technology. Uncertainties about technology “shelf life,” adversary intentions, and dual uses of technology complicate these decisions. This seminar will discuss the use of mathematical models and optimization methods to provide insight on technology policy issues. These issues include: balancing risk and affordability during technology research and development; timing technology adoption; and understanding adversary responses to new technologies. Examples will be discussed from offensive cyber operations and synthetic biology. We will conclude by discussing implications for how policy analysts and policy makers think about technology and security.
About the Speaker: Philip Keller is a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow at Stanford. He is completing his PhD in Management Science & Engineering. He studies technology policy problems posed by new technologies. His research is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods from engineering risk and decision analysis, game theory, and operations research. His professional experience includes conducting studies and analysis for the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security at RAND and the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute. Previous study topics include unmanned aircraft operations; nuclear terrorism; offensive cyber operations; and military force structure. Philip holds a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Defense and Strategic Studies.
Abstract: Biotechnology is in a transition from artisanal tools and methods to computer-controlled, high-throughput systems that allow research and development at industrial scale. This digitization is also radically reducing technical and economic barriers, empowering a new generation of young designers to do bioengineering on par with major companies but at a fraction of the cost, and prompting a re-think of the entire industry, including business models, intellectual property, ethics and biosecurity. This shift has the potential to disrupt R&D on a global scale. This lecture provides an overview of the issues and opportunities.
About the Speaker: Autodesk Distinguished Researcher Andrew Hessel is spearheading the development of tools and processes that facilitate the computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacture of living creatures and systems. As a 2015-2016 AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador, he also encourages others to explore invention and innovation in biological engineering. Andrew is active in the iGEM and DIYbio (do-it-yourself) communities and frequently works with students and young entrepreneurs to guide their career and business development efforts. He has given hundreds of invited talks on synthetic biology to groups that include hollywood movie producers, the United Nations, and the FBI.
Andrew Hessel
Distinguished Researcher
Autodesk Inc. (Bio/Nano Programmable Matter group)
Large-scale monitoring of crop growth and yield has important value for forecasting food production and prices and ensuring regional food security. A newly emerging satellite retrieval, solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) of chlorophyll, provides for the first time a direct measurement related to plant photosynthetic activity (i.e. electron transport rate). Here, we provide a framework to link SIF retrievals and crop yield, accounting for stoichiometry, photosynthetic pathways, and respiration losses. We apply this framework to estimate United States crop productivity for 2007–2012, where we use the spaceborne SIF retrievals from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 satellite, benchmarked with county-level crop yield statistics, and compare it with various traditional crop monitoring approaches. We find that a SIF-based approach accounting for photosynthetic pathways (i.e. C3 and C4 crops) provides the best measure of crop productivity among these approaches, despite the fact that SIF sensors are not yet optimized for terrestrial applications. We further show that SIF provides the ability to infer the impacts of environmental stresses on autotrophic respiration and carbon-use-efficiency, with a substantial sensitivity of both to high temperatures. These results indicate new opportunities for improved mechanistic understanding of crop yield responses to climate variability and change.
Kenji Kushida will provide an overview of canonical works of Silicon Valley, including work of Martin Kenney and his classic co-edited volume "Understanding Silicon Valley" and other more recent work drawn from the Stanford Silicon Valley - New Japan project’s "Top Ten Reading List of Silicon Valley." He will also share insights from a recent report co-authored with Richard Dasher, Nobuyuki Harada, Takeo Hoshi, and Tetsuji Okazaki entitled "Institutional Foundations for Growth" which partially draws from research on Silicon Valley.
Kanetaka Maki will present his new research from a paper entitled "Milestones to University-Based Startup Success: What Is the Impact of Academic Inventor Involvement?” Based on the data analysis of 533 University of California startups, he will explain the impact of inventor involvement in the growth and success of university-based startups.
Technological advances have brought us to a potential tipping point in the delivery of financial services that will affect the individual, firm, the industry and the country. How important will this development be for potential growth in developed and developing countries? Will the changes occur without official intervention, or will they need the state’s guiding hand to ensure that they provide their benefits with minimal risk? What measures are needed from policy makers and regulatory authorities to clear the path for faster growth?
This seminar, co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will look at how a group of companies, an industry and a country have effectively capitalized on conducive regulatory environment the opportunities offered by the technological advances and related disruptions. The talk will focus on the strategy of M-Pesa/Alibaba, Chinese Financial Sector and Singapore. The combination of Silicon Valley Technology and Smart Nation/City initiative may overcome some challenges of low productivity and low growth in many parts of the world especially in Asia and ASEAN.
David LEE Kuo Chuen is a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) for the fall of 2015. He is currently the Director of Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics. He holds the appointment of Practice Professor of Quantitative Finance, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, in Singapore Management University. He is also the founder of Ferrell Asset Management Group. His research interests encompass digital and Internet finance, digital banking, Asia finance, impact investing, financial inclusion and asset allocation. During his time as a Fulbright Scholar at Shorenstein APARC, his research will focus on harnessing Silicon Valley technology for connectivity and financial inclusion in ASEAN and Singapore. David is also an Independent Director of two SGX-listed companies and sits on the Investment Committee and Council of two charitable organizations. He is the Vice President of the Economic Society of Singapore. He was the Founding Vice Chairman of the Alternative Investment Management Association (Singapore Chapter), a member of the SGX Security Committee, and MAS Financial Research Council. He was also the Group Managing Director of OUE Limited and Auric Pacific Limited, as well as the Non-Executive Chairman of MAP Technology Limited. David speaks frequently in international conferences with occasional appearances in Bloomberg, Reuters and Channel NewsAsia. He has published in Financial Analyst Journal, Journal of Investing, Journal of Wealth Management, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Applied Financial Economics, and several books and chapters on Household Economics and Hedge Funds. His two books on Asia Finance focus on Banking, Sovereign Wealth Funds, REITs, Financial Trading & Markets, and Fund Performance. His latest book is on Digital Currency. He graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science with a BSc (Econs), MSc (Mathematical Economics and Econometrics) and a PhD in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics.
Smart Nation, Silicon Valley Technology and Asia Growth Strategy
A Stanford-led team has discovered how to estimate crop yields with more accuracy than ever before with satellites that measure a special form of light emitted by plants. This breakthrough will help scientists study how crops respond to climate change.
As Earth's population grows toward a projected 9 billion by 2050 and climate change puts growing pressure on the world's agriculture, researchers are turning to technology to help safeguard the global food supply.
A research team, led by Kaiyu Guan, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy, & Environmental Sciences, has developed a method to estimate crop yields using satellites that can measure solar-induced fluorescence, a light emitted by growing plants. The team published its results in the journal Global Change Biology.
Scientists have used satellites to collect agricultural data since 1972, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) pioneered the practice of using the color – or "greenness" – of reflected sunlight to map plant cover over the entire globe.
"This was an amazing breakthrough that fundamentally changed the way we view our planet," said Joe Berry, professor of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a co-author of the study. "However, these vegetation maps are not ideal predictors of crop productivity. What we need to know is growth rate rather than greenness.
The growth rate can tell researchers what size yield to expect from crops by the end of the growing season. The higher the growth rate of a soybean plant or stalk of corn, for instance, the greater the harvest from a mature plant.
"What we need to measure is flux – the carbon dioxide that is exchanged between plants and the atmosphere – to understand photosynthesis and plant growth," Guan said. "How do you use color to infer flux? That's a big gap."
Solar-induced fluorescence
Recently, researchers at NASA and several European institutes discovered how to measure this flux, called solar-induced fluorescence, from satellites that were originally designed for measuring ozone and other gases in the atmosphere.
A plant uses most of the energy it absorbs from the sun to grow via photosynthesis, and dissipates unused energy as heat. It also passively releases between 1 and 2 percent of the original solar energy absorbed by the plant back into the atmosphere as fluorescent light. Guan's team worked out how to distinguish the tiny flow of specific fluorescence from the abundance of reflected sunlight that also arrives at the satellite.
"I think of it like crumbs falling to the ground as people are eating. It's a very small trail," said co-author David Lobell, associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy, & Environmental Science. "This glow that plants have seems to be very proportional to how fast they're growing. So the more they're growing, the more photosynthesis they're doing, and the brighter they're fluorescing." Lobell is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment.
The research team saw an opportunity to use this new data to close the knowledge gap about crop growth, beginning with a major corn- and soybean-producing region of the U.S. Midwest.
"With the fluorescence breakthrough, we can start to directly measure photosynthesis instead of color," Guan said.
The fact that fluorescence can now be detected from space allows researchers to measure plant growth across much larger areas and over long periods of time, giving a much clearer picture of how yields fluctuate under changing weather conditions.
"One of the really cool things about fluorescence is that it opens up a whole new set of questions that we can ask about vegetation, and often times it's these new measurements that drive the science forward," Lobell said.
Next steps
The research team has already identified a number of potential uses of this approach by agricultural scientists, farmers, crop insurance providers and government agencies concerned with agricultural productivity.
If there is a day when the plant is really stressed, the fluorescence will drop significantly, Lobell said. Capturing these short-term responses to environmental changes will help scientists understand what factors plants are responding to on the daily time scale.
"That helps us, for example, figure out what we need to worry about in terms of stresses that crops are responding to," Lobell said. "What should we really be focusing on in terms of the next generation of cropping systems? What should they be able to withstand that the current crops can't withstand?"
At this early stage, fluorescence measurements are relatively low-resolution (a single measurement covers about 50 square kilometers) and because it is only collected once per day, cloudy skies can interfere with the fluorescence signal. For now, researchers have to supplement the data with other information and with on-the-ground observations to refine the measurements.
"Now that we have demonstrated the concept, we hope to soon be orbiting some new satellites specifically designed to make fluorescence measurements with better spatial and temporal resolution," Berry said.
The team plans to continue its research on U.S. crop yields while expanding measurements to other parts of the world.
"In the future, we hope to directly use this technology to monitor global food production, for example in China or Brazil, or even in your backyard," Guan said.
David Lobell is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. The study was also co-authored by Youngguan Zhang of the International Institute for Earth System Sciences at Nanjing University and the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ); Joanna Joiner of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Laboratory for Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics; Luis Guanter of GFZ; and Grayson Badgley of Stanford's Department of Earth System Science and Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
CONTACTS:
p> Kaiyu Guan, Stanford School of Earth, Energy, & Environmental Sciences: kaiyug@stanford.edu
Laura Seaman, Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment: lseaman@stanford.edu, (650) 723-4920
