About the talk

Kicking off SPRIE's seminar series on the emerging environment for entrepreneurship in Japan, this presentation will focus on the changing pattern of venture capital (VC) investments there. Michael Korver will address issues related to venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation in Japan in the context of the experiences of Global Venture Capital and its partners during the last twelve years.

Recently, Japan has seen a rapid evolution of financing for new firms, including rapid changes to its VC industry. Mr. Korver's firm is in the vanguard of that evolution. He will discuss aspects of Japanese VC companies from their earliest inception to the latest trends--from bank subsidiaries to independent funds--and he will share his observations about entrepreneurial startups in Japan.

About the speaker

Michael Korver is a co-founding partner of Global Venture Capital (GVC). He was born and raised in Tokyo and first developed his insider's perspective on Asian business from his experience as an analyst at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo from 1983 until 1986, and as an international transactions lawyer with Richards & O'Neil in New York and Tokyo from 1987 until 1993.

Since 1993 Korver has worked as an international business consultant, corporate lawyer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Tokyo. He has founded or co-founded several companies and has served on the boards of a number of them. From 1999 until 2002 he was in charge of legal and business affairs at The News Corporation Limited Japan, the Japanese operations of the international media conglomerate. Korver currently serves as professor in the MBA program at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of Hitotsubashi University where he teaches courses in entrepreneurship and venture capital.

Korver received the BA, the MA in Economics and the JD all from the University of California at Berkeley. He is licensed to practice law in the States of New York and California.

This is a CDDRL's Special Event within our Democracy in Taiwan Program. It is also co-sponsored by the Public Diplomacy/Emerging Publics Project of the Center for the Pacific Rim at University of San Francisco. In this seminar, Dr. Richard Madsen will talk about his new book that explores the religious renaissance that has reformed, revitalized, and renewed the practices of Buddhism and Daoism in Taiwan and how this religious renaissance embraces democracy modernity.  

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Richard Madsen received an MA in Asian studies and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard.

"Madsen is a genial and well-informed guide, both to social-political change in Taiwan and to the ins and outs of religious movements. His engaging writing skillfully interweaves profound insights and themes into the descriptive analytical narrative. Democracy's Dharma presents new material based on recent research while offering a fresh spin on thinking about Asian religions."–Thomas Gold, editor of Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi

Nuclear energy production today and in the near future will still be dominated by light-water reactors and therefore there will be a continued need for uranium enrichment. There is currently a focused attention on gas centrifuge enrichment. Gas centrifuge technology is much cheaper and efficient, but also poses a greater security concern, than the former gas diffusion technology.

In order to address the increased security concerns, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is planning and implementing strengthened safeguards procedures involving an increased reliance on continuous and remote monitoring technologies, and environmental sampling. The IAEA is also promoting multilateral enrichment centers as an additional avenue to enhance international security. Much of the current enrichment industry today already involves international partnerships such as between the US and European companies, or the tripartite agreement between Russia, China and the IAEA.

In order for safeguards and multilateral approaches to be viable and effective, they need to be accepted by industry, operators, states and the regulatory agencies. This talk will address how strengthened safeguards could be implemented while accommodating potentially conflicting interests such as: the protection of proprietary information, transparency in monitoring, applicability in multilateral arrangements, cost-effectiveness, and the ultimate goal of ensuring that enrichment activities remain peaceful.

Elena Rodriguez-Vieitez is a postdoctoral science fellow at CISAC, Stanford. Her research concerns proliferation risks associated with the global expansion of nuclear power. She received her PhD in nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation focused on nuclear physics experimental work conducted at cyclotron facilities at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Michigan State University, where she analyzed nuclear structure and fragmentation reaction data of neutron-rich unstable nuclei. As a nuclear engineering graduate student, she collaborated on a Department of Energy research project on radioactive waste transmutation in molten-salt reactors, where she modeled actinide transmutation efficiency and evaluated proliferation and environmental risks. As a graduate student, Rodriguez-Vieitez was also a research associate on public policy and nuclear threats at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Prior to her PhD studies, she was an intern at the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Radioactive Waste Management in Washington, DC.

Abstract
We will present our observations from a visit to India’s nuclear facilities and several think tanks during March 2008. We will comment on India’s nuclear research programs, nuclear energy development, and the implications for the proposed U.S.-India nuclear deal and for scientific collaboration between our countries. We visited the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research (IGCAR) in Kalpakkam, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay, had detailed discussions with the top leadership of the India Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), and also visited several institutes in Bangalore and Chennai to discuss nuclear energy and nuclear nonproliferation.

Chaim Braun is a vice president of Altos Management Partners, Inc., and a CISAC science fellow and affiliate. He is a member of the Near-Term Deployment and the Economic Cross-Cut Working Groups of the Department of Energy (DOE) Generation IV Roadmap study. He conducted several nuclear economics-related studies for the DOE Nuclear Energy Office, the Energy Information Administration, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Non-Proliferation Trust International, and others. Braun has worked as a member of Bechtel Power Corporation's Nuclear Management Group, and led studies on power plant performance and economics used to support maintenance services. Braun has worked on a study of safeguarding the Agreed Framework in North Korea, he was the co-leader of a NATO Study of Terrorist Threats to Nuclear Power Plants, led CISAC's Summer Study on Terrorist Threats to Research Reactors, and most recently co-authored an article with former CISAC Co-Director Chris Chyba on nuclear proliferation rings.

Siegfried Hecker is a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, a senior fellow at FSI, and co-director of CISAC. He is also an emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hecker's research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapon policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. Over the past 15 years, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. His current interests include the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan, North Korea, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran. Hecker works closely with the Russian Academy of Sciences and is actively involved with the U.S. National Academies, serving on the National Academy of Engineering Council and its International Programs Committee, as chair of the Committee on Counterterrorism Challenges for Russia and the United States, and as a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control Nonproliferation Panel.

Geoffrey Forden has been at MIT since 2000 where his research includes the analysis of Russian and Chinese space systems as well as trying to understand how proliferators acquire the know-how and industrial infrastructure to produce weapons of mass destruction. In 2002-2003, Dr. Forden spent a year on leave from MIT serving as the first Chief of Multidiscipline Analysis Section for UNMOVIC, the UN agency responsible for verifying and monitoring the dismantlement of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Prior to coming to MIT, he was a strategic weapons analyst in the National Security Division of the Congressional Budget Office after having spent a year at CISAC as a Science Fellow, a time he still looks back upon as a very happy and productive experience. Dr. Forden holds a PhD in physics.

This talk describes a novel methodology to understand global energy systems and their evolution. We are incorporating state-of-the-art open tools in information science and technology (Google, Google Earth, Wikis, Content Management Systems, etc.) to create a global real time observatory for energy infrastructure, generation, and consumption. The observatory will establish and update geographical and temporally referenced records and analyses of the historical, current, and evolving global energy systems, the energy end-use of individuals, and their associated environmental impacts. Changes over time in energy production, use, and infrastructure will be identified and correlated to drivers, such as demographics, economic policies, incentives, taxes, and costs of energy production by various technologies. As time permits Dr. Gupta will show, using Google Earth, existing data on power generation infrastructure in three countries (South Africa, India and the USA) and highlight examples of unanticipated crisis (South Africa), environment (USA) and exponential growth (India). Finally Dr. Gupta will comment on how/why trust and transparency created by democratization of information that such a system would provide could motivate cooperation, provide a framework for compliance and monitoring of global treaties, and precipitate action towards carbon-neutral systems.

Rajan Gupta is the leader of the Elementary Particles and Field Theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Laboratory fellow.  He came to the USA in 1975 after obtaining his Masters in Physics from Delhi University, India, and earned his PhD in Theoretical Physics from The California Institute of Technology in 1982. The main thrust of his research is to understand the fundamental theories of elementary particle interactions, in particular the interactions of quarks and gluons and the properties hadrons composed of them. In addition, he uses modeling and simulations to study Biological and Statistical Mechanics systems, and to push the envelope of High Performance Computing. Starting in 1998 his interests broadened into the areas of health, education, development and energy security. He is currently carrying out an integrated systems analysis of global energy systems. In 2000 Dr. Gupta started the forum “International Security in the new Millennium” at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its goals are to understand global issues dealing with societal and security challenges.