Abstract: 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 our 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, we will first present our platform for voting in participatory budgeting elections, which has been used in over a dozen different elections. We will then describe the related algorithmic problem of knapsack voting, where voters have to allocate a fixed amount of funds among multiple projects. We 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.

About the Speaker: 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 (2004-06), a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award (2002-07), and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award (2010). He was a co-author 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.

Abstract: The threat of biological attack on the people of the United States and the world, whether intentional, natural or accidental, is of growing concern, both in spite of and because of significant technological advances over the past four decades. As a global leader, the United States needs a comprehensive policy approach for managing future attacks, which incorporates technologic elements from rapid detection through appropriate response. American and international responses to recent infectious disease outbreaks such as anthrax (intentional, accidental), H5N1 influenza (natural) and ebola (natural) have managed to contain these events ‐ with the paradoxical effect on policy makers, both political and administrative, of relief (“missed that bullet”, “we must be doing this right”), rather than serving as wake‐up calls. A challenge in merging technological solutions into policy lies in the rapid advances across the multiple sciences. Translation of these ongoing technologic advances for policy leaders is an essential element in effective policy development. Incorporation of technologic solutions into biosecurity policy construction, combined with motivated leadership, has the potential for enhancing future national and global responses to unprecedented biological attacks.

About the Speaker: Patrick J. Scannon, M.D., Ph.D. is XOMA's Company Founder, Executive Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer and a member of its Board of Directors. Since 1980, Dr. Scannon has directed the Company's product identification, evaluation and clinical testing programs for novel therapeutic monoclonal antibodies and proteins against infectious, oncologic, metabolic and immunologic diseases. As Chief Scientific Officer, he leads evaluations for new therapeutic antibody identification and discovery programs. 

Dr. Scannon holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia. He completed his medical internship and residency in internal medicine at the Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. A board-certified internist, Dr. Scannon is also a member of the American College of Physicians. He is the inventor or co-inventor of several issued U.S. patents, and has published numerous scientific abstracts and papers.

Dr. Scannon has served as a member of the Research Committee for Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the National Biodefense Science Board (NBSB, a federal advisory board for the Department of Health and Human Services), the chair of the Chem/Bio Warfare Defense Panel for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and a member of the Defense Sciences Research Council (DSRC, a research board for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)). He has served as a Trustee of the University of California Berkeley Foundation and as a member of the University of California Berkeley Chancellor's Community Advisory Board. Dr. Scannon is currently on the Board of Directors of Pain Therapeutics, Inc.