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Abstract: Clean energy provides a number of benefits at scales from household to village to city and region. An unrealized and under-appreciated opportunity is to transition conflict regions from external fuel supply chains to local, clean and unpolluting energy. The benefits of this transition include local energy security to shared benefits from sustaining local generation capacity, which we term 'peace through grids'.  

Speaker bio: Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL; http://rael.berkeley.edu), and was Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from 2007 - 2015.

He was appointed by then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in April 2010 as the first energy fellow of the Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) initiative. He began service as the Science Envoy for U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2016, but resigned over President Trump’s policies in August 2017. He has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities, including time at the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Energy, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy

Dr. Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell (BA 1984) and Harvard (MA 1986; PhD 1988), and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Kammen helped found over 10 companies, including Enphase that went public in 2012, Renewable Funding (Renew Financial) a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) implementing company that went public in 2014. Kammen played a central role in developing the successful bid for the $500 million energy biosciences institute funded by BP.

During 2010-2011 Kammen served as the World Bank Group’s first Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. While there, Kammen worked on the Kenya-Ethiopia “green corridor” transmission project, Morocco’s green transformation, the 10-year energy strategy for the World Bank, and on investing in household energy and gender equity. He was appointed to this newly created position in October 2010, in which he provided strategic leadership on policy, technical, and operational fronts. The aim is to enhance the operational impact of the Bank’s renewable energy and energy efficiency activities while expanding the institution’s role as an enabler of global dialogue on moving energy development to a cleaner and more sustainable pathway. Kammen’s work at the World Bank included funding electrified personal and municipal vehicles in China, and the $1.24 billion transmission project linking renewable energy assets in Kenya and Ethiopia.

He has authored or co-authored 12 books, written more than 300 peer-reviewed journal publications, and has testified more than 40 times to U.S. state and federal congressional briefings, and has provided various governments with more than 50 technical reports. For details see http://rael.berkeley.edu/publications. Dr. Kammen also served for many years on the Technical Review Board of the Global Environment Facility. He is the Specialty Chief Editor for Understanding Earth and Its Resources for Frontiers for Young Minds.

Kammen is a frequent contributor to or commentator in international news media, including Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. Kammen has appeared on ‘60 Minutes’ (twice), NOVA, Frontline, and hosted the six-part Discovery Channel series Ecopolis. Dr. Kammen is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society. In the US, he has served on several National Academy of Sciences boards and panels.

Abstract: In this talk, I present three findings from an in-depth investigation of the US Drone War in Pakistan from 2004 to 2014. First, I use a panel estimation strategy to show a negative statistical association between the drone war period from 2008 onward and insurgent violence in Pakistan. Second, I use a process tracing approach, drawing on data collected through fieldwork in Pakistan including interviews with members of Al-Qaeda and Pakistan Taliban, to show the drone war period from 2008 to 2014 led to dramatic reduction in the targeted organizations’ operational capabilities, folding of and displacement from bases, managerial challenges like desertions, and political breakdown like splintering and feuds. Third, I use interview-based data to show that the popularly held notion of “drone blowback” – that drone strikes energize recruitment of targeted armed groups - doesn’t find empirical support. I explain these findings by introducing a new concept of Legibility and Speed-of-exploitation System, or L&S in short. L&S varies in the degree of legibility of the population where armed groups are based (legibility, in short) and the speed of exploitation of legibility gains (speed, in short). I argue that the period of the US Drone War which attained high levels of L&S (2008 to 2014) was very disruptive for the targeted groups. The theoretical position and empirical findings challenge the wisdom on importance of winning “hearts-and-minds” of civilians in counterterrorism/counterinsurgency. The findings also have important policy implications for how US policymakers are likely to approach the challenge of managing threats by Al-Qaeda and ISIS from weak states.

Speaker bio: Asfandyar Mir is a Social Science Predoctoral fellow at CISAC and a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on effectiveness of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. His research draws on quantitative and qualitative microdata collected through field work and archival sources. Some of his research is forthcoming in Security Studies. His commentary has been featured in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. 

GSVlabs is a startup and corporate innovation accelerator located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Redwood City. It houses more than 180 startups and supports corporate innovation programs for more than 25 corporations. During the past few years, GSVlabs has welcomed numerous startups from foreign countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, China, Korea, Germany, Austria just to name a few. In many cases, these foreign startup acceleration programs are funded by large corporations and governments that see long-term economic benefits of supporting such activities in Silicon Valley. In this public forum, Atsuko Jenks will discuss examples of such corporate and government funded accelerator programs and implications for the efforts by Japanese corporations and Japanese government organizations to accelerate corporate innovation and economic growth of Japan.

SPEAKER:

Atsuko Jenks, Managing Director, Japan, GSVlabs

BIO:

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AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED:

Abstract: Despite decades of research on organizational disasters, such events remain too common. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines agree that one of the most viable approaches to preventing such catastrophes is to observe near-misses and use them to identify and eliminate problems before they produce large failures. Unfortunately, these important warning signals are too often ignored because they are perceived and interpreted as successes rather than near-misses, near-failures, or simply failures.  Through a series of studies, we explore how organizational messages might nudge more recognition of a near-miss event as something other than a success.  The intent is not to make organizations more risk-averse, per se, but to make leaders with decision power more aware of the risks they assume and how the low probabilistic nature of high risk decisions facilitates our tendency to become more risk-tolerant over time.

Speaker Bio: Catherine Tinsley, Ph.D., is the Raffini Family Professor of Management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Faculty Director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute, Academic Director of Georgetown McDonough’s Executive Master’s in Leadership program, and a Senior Policy Scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.  Tinsley is an expert on principled leadership, workforce development, negotiations, and decision making.  She looks at how and why people make decisions, especially when managing risk, and empowering employees.  She applies decision analytic frameworks to understand leadership challenges, and expert and novice responses to natural disasters (such as hurricanes) and man-made disasters (terrorist attacks).

For the past three years, she participated in The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland where she spoke about the interplay between confidence and economic empowerment. Tinsley has collaborated with the White House and U.S. State Department on developing programs related to gender and workforce development, including partnering with the Council of Women World Leaders to convene the first ever world-wide meeting of the Ministers of Women’s Affairs.  

Tinsley has served on three committees for the National Academy of Sciences— The Committee to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security, The Committee on Unifying Social and Cultural Frameworks in the Military, and the Committee on The Context of Military Environments (where she served as vice-Chair).   She has received several awards for her research as well as grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and Army Research Office.  

Tinsley has published more than 50 articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and her research has been covered extensively in the popular media.

Abstract: Recent public attention and debate around “fake news” has highlighted the growing challenge of determining information veracity online. This is a complex and dynamic problem at the intersection of technology, human cognition, and human behavior—i.e. our strategies and heuristics for making sense of information may make us vulnerable, within online spaces, to absorbing and passing along misinformation. Increasingly, it appears that certain actors are intentionally exploiting these vulnerabilities, spreading intentional misinformation—or disinformation—for various purposes, including geopolitical goals. Drawing on research conducted on online rumors in the context of crisis response, this talk explores what alternative narratives (or “conspiracy theories”) of crisis events reveal about “fake news”, political propaganda, and disinformation online

Speaker Bio: Kate Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate's research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. One aspect of her research focuses on how online rumors spread—and how online rumors are corrected—during natural disasters and man-made crisis events. More recently, she has begun exploring the propagation of disinformation and political propaganda through online spaces. Kate earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Technology, Media and Society and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.