Aberto Díaz-Cayeros
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Not in residence
James O. Ellis Jr. retired as president and chief executive officer of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 18, 2012. He became an affiliate of CISAC in Fall 2013. For 2013-2014, he is the Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow and member of the Arctic Security Initiative at the Hoover Institution.
INPO, sponsored by the commercial nuclear industry, is an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the highest levels of safety and reliability--to promote excellence--in the operation of nuclear electric-generating plants.
In 2004, Admiral Ellis completed a distinguished thirty-nine-year navy career as commander of the United States Strategic Command during a time of challenge and change. In this role, he was responsible for the global command and control of United States strategic and space forces, reporting directly to the secretary of defense.
A 1969 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Admiral Ellis was designated a naval aviator in 1971. His service as a navy fighter pilot included tours with two fighter squadrons and assignment as commanding officer of an F/A-18 strike/fighter squadron. In 1991, he assumed command of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. After selection to rear admiral, in 1996 he served as a carrier battle group commander leading contingency response operations in the Taiwan Straits.
His shore assignments included numerous senior military staff tours including commander in chief, US Naval Forces, Europe, and commander in chief, Allied Forces, Southern Europe, during a time of historic NATO expansion. He led United States and NATO forces in combat and humanitarian operations during the 1999 Kosovo crisis.
Ellis holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and, in 2005, was inducted into the school’s Engineering Hall of Fame. He completed United States Navy Nuclear Power Training and was qualified in the operation and maintenance of naval nuclear propulsion plants. He is a graduate of the Navy Test Pilot School and the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun). In 2013, Ellis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
In 2009 he completed three years of service as a presidential appointee on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and, in 2006, was a member of the Military Advisory Panel to the Iraq Study Group.
CISAC Honors Student Mailyn Fidler has been awarded a Marshall Scholarship to continue her studies in international technology policy. She investigates security implications of the global trade in "zero-day" software exploits. Fidler has also worked as a consultant for Google Glass, autonomous vehicles and Internet access through atmospheric balloons, and was the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Stanford Journal of Public Health.
Marshall Scholarships are named for former U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Army General George Marshall, and are given to intellectually distinguished Americans to study in Britain.
About the Topic: The Internet in 2014 is a marvelous communication utility. It provides cheap and fast transfer of information to and from most places on or near the surface of Earth. It also regularly betrays that information to curious onlookers, commercial entities, criminals, and governments. We will explore the origins of the Internet, the workings of its core protocols, exploits which take advantage of those protocols, and feeble attempts to make those protocols secure. In sum, we will describe the devolution of the Internet from a peaceful commons to the jungle it is today.
About the Speaker: Tom Berson is a CISAC affiliate and the founder of Anagram Laboratories. He is a cryptographer who views cryptography broadly as the science and ethics of trust and betrayal. He has spent his career working both the defensive and the offensive sides of the information security battle and is attracted most strongly to security issues raised at the confluence of technology, business, and world events.
Tom is a student of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and its applicability to modern information conflict. He was the first person to be named a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. His citation reads, “For visionary and essential service and for numerous valuable contributions to the technical, social, and commercial development of cryptology and security.” He was an editor of the Journal of Cryptology for fourteen years. He is a Past-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.
Tom earned a B.S. in physics from the State University of New York in 1967 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of London in 1977. He was a Visiting Fellow in Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Tom has been a member of several National Research Council committees: including the Committee on Computer Security in the Department of Energy, the Committee to Review DoD C4I Plans and Programs, and the Committee on Offensive Information Warfare.
CISAC Conference Room
More information TBA.
CISAC Conference Room
More information TBA.
CISAC Conference Room
Abstract:
Nipah virus lives in large fruit bats in South and Southeast Asia. When people become infected with Nipah virus over half of them die. Nipah virus can also be transmitted from person to person. This talk will describe how this bat virus occasionally infects human populations and causes outbreaks through person-to-person transmission. It will explore the risk of a global pandemic of Nipah virus and consider appropriate policy responses.
Speaker bio:
Stephen Luby is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine; Deputy Director for Research at the Center for Global Health Innovation; Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Dr. Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. Dr. Luby earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan for 5 years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death. Immediately prior to his current appointment, Dr. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. Dr. Luby was seconded from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and was the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.
Dr. Luby's research has focused on clarifying the burden of several communicable diseases in low income countries and developing and evaluating practical strategies to mitigate their impact. He is currently exploring circumstances where economic and political forces encourage environmental degradation that exerts substantial disease burden in low income countries, with a view to developing and evaluating interventions.
CISAC Central Conference Room
Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2013): USAID and the UN's World Food Program have proposed strategies for allocating ready-to-use (therapeutic and supplementary) foods to children in developing countries. Analysis is needed to investigate whether there are better alternatives. We use a longitudinal data set of 5657 children from Bwamanda to construct a statistical model that tracks each child's height and weight throughout the first five years of life. We embed this model into an optimization framework that chooses which individual children should receive food based on a child's sex, age, height and weight, to minimize the mean number of disability-adjusted life years per child subject to a budget constraint. Our proposed policy compares favorably to those proposed by the aid groups. Time permitting, we will also discuss a recent analysis of a nutrition program in Guatemala that quantifies the age dependence in the impact of supplementary food, and develops a food allocation policy that exploits this age dependence and reduces child stunting.
India: Motivated by India's nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess 12 similarity scores (for 10 fingerprints and two irises) between a resident's biometric images at enrollment and his biometric images during his first verification. At subsequent verifications, we allow individualized strategies based on these 12 scores: we acquire a subset of the 12 images, get new scores for this subset that quantify the similarity to the corresponding enrollment images, and use the likelihood ratio to decide whether a resident is genuine or an imposter. Compared to the policy currently used in India, our proposed policy provides a five-log (i.e., 100,000-fold) reduction in the false reject rate while only increasing the mean delay from 31 to 38 seconds.
A full speaker bio is available on CISAC's website.
CISAC Conference Room
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Lawrence Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. After getting a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1988, he spent 14 years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the DEC Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science. His research interests include mathematical models in operations management, medicine and biology.
Since 2001, he has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on an emergency response to a smallpox attack, an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and an analysis of a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?", and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.
For his homeland security research, Wein has received several awards from the International Federation of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), including the Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the INFORMS President’s Award for contributions to society, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best research publication, and the George E. Kimball Medal. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
Over the last several years the landscape for money movement has changed dramatically. Non-state-backed digital currencies such as Bitcoin have introduced new paradigms for money movement in which transfers are public but the identities of the individuals behind the transfers are masked. Traditional currencies are being moved in novel ways as well. In the developing world, unbanked populations are engaging in an increasingly sophisticated array of financial transactions using mobile phone-based mobile money services.
These changes present both opportunities and challenges. Mobile money, for example, has become a vital tool for financial inclusion for tens of millions of people in the developing world. Yet, all mechanisms for moving (and storing) money—new and old—involve risks and the potential for misuse. This seminar, which will be structured as a highly interactive facilitated discussion, aims to explore ways to realize the benefits of technologically facilitated money movement, while also providing frameworks minimizing the risk of misuse.
Speaker bio:
John Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a CISAC Affiliate. His work addresses the intersection of digital technology with public policy and the law.
CISAC Conference Room
John Villasenor is on the faculty at UCLA, where he is a professor of electrical engineering, public policy, law, and management as well as the director of the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Villasenor’s work considers the broader impacts of key technology trends, including the growth of artificial intelligence, advances in digital communications, and the increasing complexity of today’s networks and systems. He writes frequently on these topics and on their implications with respect to cybersecurity, privacy, law, and business.
He has published in the Atlantic, Billboard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, the Washington Post, and in many academic journals. He has also provided congressional testimony on multiple occasions on topics including drones, privacy, and intellectual property law.
Before joining the faculty at UCLA, Villasenor was with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed methods of imaging the earth from space. He holds a BS from the University of Virginia and an MS and PhD from Stanford University.