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.
About the Topic: This presentation includes a review of significant trends in the development of nuclear energy in China, from the mid1980's until the present, and related future prospects. Among the subjects covered will be: nuclear technology development based on competition/cooperation between a giant state owned enterprise and an upstart commercial utility from the south; different development goals and technology development by the two corporations; the impact of Fukushima on nuclear energy developments in China; the current status of the Chinese nuclear energy system; future growth prospects considering a range of different challenges in the industry; and nuclear technology development prospects and intellectual property issues.
About the Speaker: Chaim Braun is a consulting professor at CISAC specializing in issues related to nuclear power economics and fuel supply, and nuclear nonproliferation. Braun pioneered the concept of proliferation rings dealing with the implications of the A.Q. Khan nuclear technology smuggling ring, the concept of the Energy Security Initiative (ESI), and the re-evaluation of nuclear fuel supply assurance measures, including nuclear fuel lease and take-back. Before joining CISAC, Braun 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. Prior to that, Braun worked at United Engineers and Constructors (UE&C), EPRI and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).
CISAC Conference Room
A large literature examines performance pay for managers in the private sector, but less is known about the use of performance pay for their public sector counterparts. Improving public service delivery may nonetheless depend heavily on aligning the incentives of public sector managers with social objectives. In this paper we study performance incentives for school administrators and how their responses to incentives vary with the amount of resources under their control. Our specific focus is the implementation of new, school-based programs to reduce childhood anemia in rural China. We randomly assigned 170 schools to three levels of performance pay for reductions in student anemia across which we orthogonally assign two levels of block grants. We emphasize three key findings. First, with a smaller block grant, large incentives were effective, but smaller incentives (10% of the size) were ineffective in reducing anemia. Second, absent explicit anemia-based incentives, increasing the size of block grants under the control of school administrators lead to sizeable reductions (but was nearly twice as costly as incentives alone). Third, we find that incentives crowd out the effect of additional resources (or vice-versa). Our evidence suggests that this crowding-out result is attributable, at least in part, to risk avoidance and the nature of existing ‘bureaucratic incentives’ facing school administrators.
CISAC Conference Room
Encina Commons Room 101,
615 Crothers Way,
Stanford, CA 94305-6006
As a health and development economist based at the Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Miller's overarching focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries.
His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes: First, what are the major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time? His projects addressing this question are retrospective observational studies that focus both on historical health improvement and the determinants of population health in developing countries today. Second, what are the behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement? Policy relevance and generalizability require knowing not only which factors have contributed most to population health gains, but also why. Third, how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively? The ultimate test of policy relevance is the ability to help formulate new strategies using these insights that are effective.
In hopes of increasing awareness that could minimize sexual health risks, the team will promote a mobile health counseling service, which will enable young people in Nairobi’s Mathare slums to receive private and reliable answers from health counselors through text messaging.
CISAC Conference Room
Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.
CISAC Conference Room
Encina Commons, Room 220
615 Crothers Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6006
Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Health Policy, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center on Longevity and Stanford Center for International Development. His research focuses on complex policy decisions surrounding the prevention and management of increasingly common, chronic diseases and the life course impact of exposure to their risk factors. In the context of both developing and developed countries including the US, India, China, and South Africa, he has examined chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C and on risk factors including smoking, physical activity, obesity, malnutrition, and other diseases themselves. He combines simulation modeling methods and cost-effectiveness analyses with econometric approaches and behavioral economic studies to address these issues. Dr. Goldhaber-Fiebert graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1997, with an A.B. in the History and Literature of America. After working as a software engineer and consultant, he conducted a year-long public health research program in Costa Rica with his wife in 2001. Winner of the Lee B. Lusted Prize for Outstanding Student Research from the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2006 and in 2008, he completed his PhD in Health Policy concentrating in Decision Science at Harvard University in 2008. He was elected as a Trustee of the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2011.
Past and current research topics:
About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had for the legal world order.
About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society, military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014 under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War. Her talk is based on this latest research.
CISAC Conference Room