An Unlikely Alliance: Hackers & Human Rights Activists
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Since Iran's Green Revolution, technology has demonstrated its power to mobilize millions of people demanding political and social change in countries where authoritarian regimes remained untouchable for decades. The same technology and open networks have also been used by oppressive governments to surveil populations and thwart these social movements. In facing these tensions, activists and hackers share a common mission of challenging the status quo to improve existing systems - whether governments or networks. How do the two communities work together to defend civil liberties online and on the ground?
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Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval).
Earthquake Alert: Warning before shaking using smartphones
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Abstract: Today, 100 people get an alert before earthquakes in California. Recent legislation says everyone should get a warning. In the future, your phone will detect earthquakes. In the era of big data and the Internet of Things, how can seismology harness new technologies both for the purpose of science, and to reduce the impact of future disasters around the world? In this seminar, we will discuss the current status of real-time earthquake information using existing seismic and emerging geodetic networks. We will also explore on what might be possible in the near future as the quality and number of sensors in consumer electronics increase by orders of magnitude.
About the Speaker: Richard Allen is the Director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, a Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. He is an expert in earthquake alerting systems, developing methodologies to detect earthquakes and issue warnings prior to shaking. His group uses seismic and GPS sensing networks, and is experimenting with the use of smartphones. Testing of a warning system for the US west coast is currently under way. Allen’s group also uses geophysical sensing networks to image the internal 3D structure of the Earth and constrain the driving forces responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes and other deformation of the Earth’s surface. His research has been featured in Science, Nature, Scientific American, the New York Times and dozens of other media outlets around the world. He has a BA from Cambridge University, a PhD from Princeton University, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech.
Richard Allen
Professor, Dept. Earth & Planetary Science
Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, UC Berkeley
Seminars
Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology
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Over the last four decades, the United States saw an explosion of digital technologies that penetrated every corner of the country, yet during the same time span, the American rate of poverty did not decrease and inequality skyrocketed. In other words, a golden age of innovation did not lead to better lives for poor people living in the world's most technologically advanced country. This simple fact, which flies in the face of Silicon Valley triumphalism, should give pause to foreign aid and international development efforts whose primary goal is to increase technology and its use.
Bio
Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorest communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and machine learning research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in Physics. http://kentarotoyama.org
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval.)
Seminars
Bringing Connectivity through Community-Owned Cellular Networks
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Cellular networks are one of the most impactful technologies of the last century, with over 3.5 billion active users in just under 25 years of operation. However, over a billion people, primarily in rural areas, still live without this basic service. This is primarily because large-scale incumbent carriers cannot profitably serve these rural areas. One potential solution is "Community Cellular Networks": Small-scale, locally owned and operated cellular networks. These operate more efficiently by using local actors who know their communities. In this talk I will detail the community cellular model, its limitations, challenges, and the future through the lens of Endaga, the company we founded to commercialize the technology.
Bio
Kurtis Heimerl is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working under Eric Brewer in EECS and Tapan Parikh in the iSchool and will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington in 2016. He is also a co-founder and the prior CEO of Endaga. His work focuses primarily bringing telecommunications access throughout the world by empowering actors within marginalized communities to solve their own communications problems.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval.)
Advancing Human Rights through Tech and Data
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Human rights groups have only two assets: people and information. Learn about Benetech's decade of putting information technology tools into the hands of human rights activists, with the goal of making these two assets more effective in advancing the global cause of human rights.
Bio
Jim Fruchterman is the founder and CEO of Benetech, a Silicon Valley nonprofit technology company that develops software applications to address unmet needs of users in the social sector. He is the recipient of numerous awards recognizing his work as a pioneering social entrepreneur, including the MacArthur Fellowship, Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Migel Medal - the highest honor in the blindness field - from the American Foundation for the Blind. Since its founding in 1989, Benetech has touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Its tools and services have transformed the ways in which people with disabilities access printed information, at-risk human rights defenders safely document abuse, and environmental practitioners succeed in their efforts to protect species and ecosystems. Through his work with Benetech and as a trailblazer in the field of social entrepreneurship, Jim continues to advance his vision of a world in which the benefits of technology reach all of humanity, not just the wealthiest and most able five percent.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval.)
Seminars
Crowdsourced Democracy: Algorithms, Platforms, and Mechanisms
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While social media pervades many aspects of our lives, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for large scale decision making: crowds of hundreds, perhaps millions, of individuals collaborating together to come to consensus on difficult societal issues. The objective of this research is to develop an algorithmic and empirical understanding of large scale decision making, and experiment with real-life deployments of our algorithms. In this talk, he will first present his platform for voting in participatory budgeting elections, which has been used in over a dozen different elections. He will then describe the related algorithmic problem of knapsack voting, where voters have to allocate a fixed amount of funds among multiple projects. He will conclude by analyzing opinion formation processes in terms of their effect on polarization, and relate this to the design of recommendation systems for friends and contents.
Bio
Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms. Current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship, a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award, and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award. He was a coauthor on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, and an Edelman Laureate in 2014. Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014.
Wallenberg Hall, Building 160
Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater, Room 124
Twitter and the Rebranding of Narendra Modi
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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has almost 15 million followers on Twitter and over almost 30 million “likes” on Facebook, making him among the most followed politicians on social media. With a mix of ‘feel good’ messages, shout-outs to other celebrities, well-timed ritualized responses, as well as a careful strategy of ‘followbacks’ for a small selection of his most active followers, Modi grew his following dramatically since 2013. This talk looks at ways in which Twitter is used as part of a larger brand management exercise through which Modi has emphasized different issues at various phases of his political evolution.
Joyojeet examines four specific phases, during each of which, the focus of his social media message evolved based on electoral or post-election needs. While Twitter helped Modi circumvent the mainstream media and directly reach a significant constituency of listeners, he also examines how social media was central to Modi's image shaping as a technology-savvy leader who represents pan-Indian aspirations of modernity, away from Modi’s own past image in the popular media as a divisive communal politician.
Bio
Joyojeet Pal is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information where his work focuses on user experience and accessibility in low and middle-income countries. His recent research looks at the use of social media in political communication in India, specifically on the role of political branding online in India. He is one of the technical collaborators on the Unfinished Sentences project examining oral histories of the El Salvador civil war, and leads the Colombia Digital Culture project at the University of Michigan. He researched and produced the award-winning documentary, "For the Love of a Man" based on the fan following of South Indian film star Rajnikanth.
Note: Those of you attending this talk may be interested in a related event, "Why India Matters", a talk by Richard Verma, 25th US Ambassador to India.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval).