Stanford University

Science and Technology

Big Data for Social Science: What is it?

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Abstract: TBA

 

About the Panelists: Dr. Justin Grimmer is an Associate Professor in Stanford University's Department of Political Science.  His primary research interests include Congress, representation, bureaucracy and political methodology.  

Dr. Rob Forrest is a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the System Research and Analysis Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC from 2011 to 2014 and is now a CISAC Affiliate. 

Erin Baggott is a Zukerman Predoctoral Fellow at CISAC and is completing her PhD in international relations at the Harvard University Department of Government.  She studies Chinese foreign policy with techniques from computational social science and machine learning.  

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Justin Grimmer Associate Professor of Political Science Panelist Stanford University

Robert Forrest

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Affiliate
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Rob Forrest is currently a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories where his research interests include nuclear power, cybersecurity, and nonproliferation. As a member of the systems research group, he specializes in data driven methods and analysis to inform policy  for national security.

As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.

Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.

Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA. 

 

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Robert Forrest Senior Member of Technical Staff in the System Research and Analysis Department Panelist Sandia National Laboratories
Erin Baggott Zukerman Predoctoral Fellow Panelist CISAC
Panel Discussions

Actinide Chemistry and the Battlefields of the Cold War

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Abstract: The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for much of the second half of the 20th Century. While the superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, a nuclear arms race became the centerpiece of a doctrine of mutually assured destruction, and prompted a mass production of plutonium, and the designing, building, and testing of large numbers of nuclear weapons. In more than 50 years of operation, the Cold War battlefields created over 100 metric tons of plutonium, produced tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, oversaw more than 1000 detonations, and left behind a legacy of contaminated facilities, soils, and ground water.  

The extent of long-term adverse health effects will depend on the mobility of plutonium and other actinides in the environment and on our ability to develop cost-effective scientific methods of removing or isolating actinides from the environment. Studying the complex chemistry of plutonium and the actinides in the environment is one of the most important technological challenges, and one of the greatest scientific challenges in actinide science today.

I will summarize our current understanding of actinide chemistry in the environment, and how that understanding was used in the decontamination and decommissioning of the Rocky Flats Site, where plutonium triggers for U.S. nuclear weapons were manufactured. At Rocky Flats, synchrotron radiation measurements made at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory were developed into a science-­based decision-­making tool that saved billions of dollars by focusing Site-­directed efforts in the correct  areas, and aided the most extensive cleanup in the history of Superfund legislation to finish one year ahead of schedule, ultimately resulting in billions of dollars in taxpayer savings.

 

About the Speaker: David L. Clark received a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1986 from Indiana University. His thesis work received the American Chemical Society’s Nobel Laureate Signature Award for the best chemistry Ph.D. thesis in the United States. Clark was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. He became a Technical Staff Member in the Isotope and Nuclear Chemistry Division in 1989. Since then he has held various leadership positions at the Laboratory, including program management for nuclear weapons and Office of Science programs, and Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science between 1997-2009. He has served the DOE as a technical advisor for environmental stewardship including the Rocky Flats cleanup and closure (1995-2005), closure of High Level Waste tanks at the Savannah River Site (2011), and as a technical advisor to the DOE High Level Waste Corporate Board (2009-2011). He is currently the Program Director for the National Security Education Center at Los Alamos, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Laboratory Fellow, and Leader of the Plutonium Science and Research Strategy for Los Alamos. His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to actinide science, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, and in the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials. He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of plutonium, and has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters. 

Actinide Chemistry and The Battlefields of the Cold War
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Encina Hall (2nd floor)

David L. Clark Laboratory Fellow and Program Director, National Security Education Center, Speaker Los Alamos National Laboratory
Seminars

Geopolitical Consequences of the Upcoming Flood of Asteroid Discoveries

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Due to the overwhelming response we received for this event and to our space constraints,

registration is now closed. We regret that we are unable to accommodate any more visitors.

Abstract: The explosion of an asteroid over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 with energy 30X larger than the Hiroshima bomb was a wake-up call that asteroids of this size hit the Earth every few decades. Several large telescopes are in the works which will over the next 10 years drastically increase our ability to discover and track asteroids.  A large number of these asteroids will be found to be on orbits with a high probability (great than a few percent) of hitting the Earth with energy larger than several hundred kilotons, and a few of these will actually hit the Earth. I will discuss the consequences of us actually knowing many years in advance the date and place of an asteroid impact, and how current technology makes it relatively easy to deflect an asteroid in such cases. A number of questions will be discussed such as: Who pays for gathering and analyzing the data? Who controls the data? Who is responsible for deflecting asteroids? What are the consequences (political, social, economic) on a particular area which is known to be threatened during the time period before the asteroid is deflected? The scenario of human beings deflecting an asteroid from hitting the Earth is going to happen, and is something policy makers need to be prepared for.

About the Speaker: Dr. Lu is the CEO and co-founder of the Sentinel Mission, a project of the B612 Foundation. Dr. Lu, a physicist with a PhD from Stanford, was selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 1994. He flew two Space Shuttle missions, was the first American to launch as Flight Engineer on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and spent 206 days in space aboard the International Space Station in 2003. He is the recipient of NASA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal, and worked on Google’s Advanced Project Team.

 

Ed Lu Astronaut (Fmr.); CEO and co-founder of the Sentinel Mission Speaker Sentinel Mission; B612 Foundation
Seminars

Privacy and Security: Can We Achieve Both with Cryptography?

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Abstract: In many real-world settings, the need for security is often at odds with the desire to protect user privacy. In this talk we will describe some recent cryptographic mechanisms that can be used to resolve this tension. In doing so we will present developments in cryptography of the past few years as well as areas for future work. The talk will be self-contained and intended for a broad audience.
 
About the Speaker: Dr. Boneh is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University where he heads the applied cryptography group. Dr. Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to computer security. His work includes cryptosystems with novel properties, security for mobile devices, web security, and cryptanalysis.  He is the author of over a hundred publications in the field and is a recipient of the Godel prize, the Packard Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Award, the RSA award in mathematics and five best paper awards.  In 2011 Dr. Boneh received the Ishii award for industry education innovation.

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Dan Boneh

Not in residence

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Rajeev Motwani Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering
Co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab
Co-director of the Stanford Cyber Initiative
Affiliate Faculty at CISAC
dabo.jpg MA, PhD

Professor Boneh heads the applied cryptography group and co-direct the computer security lab. Professor Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to computer security. His work includes cryptosystems with novel properties, web security, security for mobile devices, and cryptanalysis. He is the author of over a hundred publications in the field and is a Packard and Alfred P. Sloan fellow. He is a recipient of the 2014 ACM prize and the 2013 Godel prize. In 2011 Dr. Boneh received the Ishii award for industry education innovation. Professor Boneh received his Ph.D from Princeton University and joined Stanford in 1997.

Dan Boneh Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering; Co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

New Tools for Genome Editing and the Future of the Earth

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Abstract: CRISPR-Cas9 and other new tools are making genome editing faster, cheaper, and more accurate. When coupled with cheaper sequencing and our more slowly increasing understanding of the effects of DNA sequencing, this breakthrough technology may bring within our reach the power to transform, fundamentally, all of life.  Most of the attention so far has focused on human germ line genome editing, but the implications stretch much farther. This talk will explore some of the issues for the use of this technology, in humans (germ line or somatic cell) and in other life-forms. It will also note the limits of our current understanding and regulatory framework.

About the Speaker: Hank Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics at Stanford University.  He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from advances in the biosciences, particularly from genetics, neuroscience, and human stem cell research.  He directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society; chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research; and serves on the Neuroscience Forum of the Institute of Medicine, the Advisory Council for the National Institute for General Medical Sciences of NIH, the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law of the National Academy of Sciences, and the NIH Multi-Council Working Group on the BRAIN Initiative. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.

Professor Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and from Yale Law School in 1977.  He served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court.  After working during the Carter Administration in the Departments of Defense and Energy, he entered private practice in Los Angeles in 1981 as a litigator with the law firm of Tuttle & Taylor, Inc.  He began teaching at Stanford in 1985.  

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Hank Greely Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law Speaker Stanford Law School
Seminars

George Azzari

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Affiliated scholar
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George Azzari joined FSE as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in February 2015. He worked with David Lobell on designing, implementing, and applying new satellite-based monitoring techniques to study several aspects of food security. His current focuses include estimates of crop yields, crop classification, and detection of management practices in Africa, Asia, and the United States.  He is currently the Chief Technology Office at Atlas AI.

George's research uses a variety of satellite sensors from the private and public sector -including Landsat (NASA/USGS), Sentinel 1 and 2 (ESA), MODIS (NASA),  RapidEye (Planet), Planet Scope (Planet), and Skysat (Terrabella)- combined with crop modeling and machine learning techniques.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, where he worked with Mike Goulden on monitoring post-fire succession of southern California ecosystems from remote sensing data. He examined the impact of topographic illumination effects on long time series of optical satellite data.

Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea

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Global Talent seeks to examine the utility of skilled foreigners beyond their human capital value by focusing on their social capital potential, especially their role as transnational bridges between host and home countries. Gi-Wook Shin (Stanford University) and Joon Nak Choi (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) build on an emerging stream of research that conceptualizes global labor mobility as a positive-sum game in which countries and businesses benefit from building ties across geographic space, rather than the zero-sum game implied by the "global war for talent" and "brain drain" metaphors.

"Advanced economies like Korea face a growing mismatch between low birth rates and increasing demand for skilled labor. Shin and Choi use original, comprehensive data and a global outlook to provide careful, accessible and persuasive analysis. Their prescriptions for Korea and other economies challenged by high-level labor shortages will amply reward readers of this landmark study."  —Mark Granovetter, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

The book empirically demonstrates its thesis by examination of the case of Korea: a state archetypical of those that have been embracing economic globalization while facing a demographic crisis—and one where the dominant narrative on the recruitment of skilled foreigners is largely negative. It reveals the unique benefits that foreign students and professionals can provide to Korea, by enhancing Korean firms' competitiveness in the global marketplace and by generating new jobs for Korean citizens rather than taking them away. As this research and its key findings are relevant to other advanced societies that seek to utilize skilled foreigners for economic development, the arguments made in this book offer insights that extend well beyond the Korean experience.

Media coverage related to the research project:  

Dong-A Ilbo, January 27, 2016

Interiew with Arirang TV, March 10, 2016 (Upfront Ep101 - "Significance of attacting global talent," interview with Arirang)

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Gi-Wook Shin

Bulk Collection of Signal Intelligence: Technical Alternatives

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Abstract: The first Snowden disclosure was that Verizon was providing daily updates of telephony metadata to the NSA. This caused great consternation, and resulted in two government studies, one by the President's NSA Review Committee and one by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.  Both concluded the collection should be ended. The President asked Office of the Director of National Intelligence to produce a report "assessing the feasibility of creating software that would allow the intelligence community more easily to conduct targeted information acquisition rather than bulk collection."  This talk reports on that work, which considered the issue from the angle of technical alternatives, and concluded that there is no technical replacement for bulk data collection, but that software can enhance targeted collection and automate control of data usage. This talk will discuss that report, conducted by the National Research Council, explaining what the report says — and what it doesn't say.

About the Speaker: Susan Landau is Professor of Cybersecurity Policy in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Landau has been a senior staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at Wesleyan University. She has held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, and Yale, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Landau is the author of Surveillance or Security?  The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT Press, 2011), and co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, 1998, rev. ed. 2007). She has written numerous scientific and policy research papers, and has also published in other venues, including Science, Scientific American, and the Washington Post. Landau has testified in Congress on cybersecurity and on electronic surveillance. Landau currently serves on the Computer Science Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.  A 2012 Guggenheim fellow, Landau was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, and also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery.  She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Susan Landau Professor of Cybersecurity Policy in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies Speaker Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Seminars

Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance

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Cloud computing is a revolution in computing architecture, transforming not only the “where” (location) of computing, but also the “how” (the manner in which software is produced and the tools available for the automation of business processes). Cloud computing emerged as we transitioned from an era in which underlying computing resources were both scarce and expensive to an era in which the same resources were cheap and abundant. There are many ways to implement cloud architectures, and most people are familiar with public cloud services such as Gmail or Facebook. However, much of the impact of cloud computing on the economy will be driven by how large enterprises implement cloud architectures. Cloud is also poised to disrupt the Information Technology (IT) industry, broadly conceived, with a new wave of commoditization. Offerings optimized for high performance in an era of computing resource scarcity are giving way to loosely coupled, elastically managed architectures making use of cheap, abundant computing resources today.

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Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade
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Kenji E. Kushida

The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries: A Political Economy Explanation of the Rise of Apple, Google, and Industry Disruptors

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The global Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) industry has experienced a rapid, radical reorganization of industry leaders and business models—most recently in mobile. New players Apple and Google abruptly redefined the industry, bringing a wave of commoditization to carriers and equipment manufacturers. Technologies, corporate strategies, and industry structures are usually the first places to look when explaining these industry disruptions, but this paper argues that it was actually a set of political bargains during initial phases of telecommunications liberalization, which differed across countries, that set the trajectories of development in motion. This paper shows how different sets of winners and losers of domestic and regional commoditization battles emerged in various ICT industries around the world. Carriers won in Japan, equipment manufacturers in Europe, and eventually, computer services industry actors rather than communications firms emerged as winners in the United States. These differences in industry winner outcomes was shaped by the relative political strength of incumbent communications monopolies and their will to remain industry leaders, given the political system and political dynamics they faced during initial liberalization. The U.S. computer services industry, which developed independently of its telecommunications sector due to antitrust and government policy, eventually commoditized all others, both domestically and abroad. This paper contends that a political economy approach, tracing how politics and regulatory processes shaped industry structures, allows for a better understanding of the underlying path dependent processes that shape rapidly changing global technological and industry outcomes, with implications beyond ICT.

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Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade
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Kenji E. Kushida
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