SPEAKERS
Eze Vidra - Head of Campus London and Google for Entrepreneurs European Outreach, Google

Samantha Evans - Vice Consul, Software, UK Trade & Investment

ABOUT THE SEMINAR

Innovation Hub: London
Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London and Google for Entrepreneurs European Outreach, Google
Samantha Evans - Vice Consul, Software, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI)

Wednesday, October 30, 12:00-1:00 pm 
Venue: McClelland Building, Room M109 - Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

London's Tech City, or Silicon Roundabout, is the fastest growing tech cluster in Europe with over 1300 startups, and has managed to attract industry leaders such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Intel, and more to establish a presence there. 

Learn more about what is going on in this hub of innovation in a one-hour seminar with Eze Vidra, the head of Campus London, Google's first physical startup hub worldwide providing entrepreneurs with work and event space, mentorship, and educational programs. Joining him will be Vice Consul Samantha Evans of UKTI, who will offer a government/policy perspective on Tech City.

This talk is part of a seminar series hosted by the Silicon Valley Project at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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Eze Vidra is the Head of Campus London and Google for Entrepreneurs Europe. In March 2012, Eze launched Campus London, Google's first physical startup hub worldwide providing entrepreneurs with work and event space, mentorship and educational programs as well as access to a vibrant startup community.

Before Campus, Eze spearheaded Google's commerce strategic partnerships in EMEA, launching Google Shopping in Spain and Local Shopping in the UK among other projects. In the years before joining Google, Eze held product management leadership roles at Shopping.com in Israel, Gerson Lehrman Group in New York, Ask.com in Silicon Valley and AOL Europe in London, where was the Principal Product Manager for Search in EMEA. In 2003, Eze co-founded a startup in Israel, developing text-input technology for mobiles.

In 2005, Eze founded VC Cafe, a highly regarded venture capital blog shining a spotlight on Israeli startups. In 2012, he founded Techbikers, a non-for-profit cycling community responsible for starting a school and 20 libraries for children in the developing world. Eze serves as advisory board member of BBC Worldwide Labs and is a trustee of StartupWeekend Europe. He holds a BA in Business and Entrepreneurship from IDC in Israel (Cum Laude) and an MBA from London Business School. A native Argentinean raised in Israel, Eze is fluent in Spanish, Hebrew and English and lives in London with his family.

Eze Vidra's bio on the Campus London website: http://www.googleventures.com/team/eze-vidra
Eze Vidra on twitter: www.twitter.com/ediggs

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Samantha Evans is the Vice Consul for Software at UK Trade & Investment. Her role is to advise Enterprise software companies and fast growing start-ups on the opportunities in the UK and European Market as well as providing practical support to accelerate their success in the UK. UKTI is a UK Government organization based in 90 cities across the world – with a overall aim of economic development for the UK – both through import and export.

Sam moved to San Francisco for her current role in January 2013. She previously worked for MIDAS – Manchester’s Investment Agency and a Technology Accelerator in Manchester.

About the Topic: Recent revelations indicate the extent to which the government has used data-mining as a tool for surveillance, and the lengths to which it used official secrecy to conceal the scope and nature of its activities, all in the name of national security. What if data-mining could also be a tool for citizens to ensure government accountability? This talk will describe new research using computational methods to explore large corpora of declassified documents. It includes efforts to detect unstudied events, identify topics deemed particularly sensitive, and measure how official secrecy shapes the official record. This work is still exploratory in nature, and the challenges to be overcome are political and ethical, and not just technical. But it is already clear that computational methods will be essential if the government is to adopt a more enlightened, risk-management approach to official secrecy.

About the Speaker: Matthew Connelly’s work seeks to offer new, more productive ways to think about the history – and future – of world politics. He works with computer scientists and statisticians to try to uncover the scope and nature of official secrecy, and venture predictions about what a fuller accounting might reveal about major global threats. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History; The International Journal of Middle East Studies and The American Historical Review, and published commentary for The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997.

One of the most important developments in the modern global economy is financial globalization. This has raised threats to the stability of political regimes in two ways: (1) by enhancing the possibility of a financial crisis that could cause political turmoil; and (2) by easing access to foreign sources of financing for opposition political groups. I argue that state capitalism – defined as state-owned publicly listed corporations -- has risen disproportionately among single party regimes as a way to address these dual threats. Single party regimes have both the motivation and a greater institutional capacity for addressing these threats in comparison to other regimes. Tests are conducted on 607 firms in 1996 and 856 firms in 2008 across seven East Asian economies, and are supplemented with case studies of Malaysia and South Korea.  The evidence suggests that financial globalization is contributing to the rise of the state as a counter reaction.

Richard W. Carney is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations located in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. His research and teaching are in the areas of international and comparative political economy with a focus on corporate governance and finance in East Asia. He has published articles in many academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Business and Politics. He is also the author of the book Contested Capitalism: The Political Origins of Financial Institutions, and editor of the book Lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (2003-04), and has held visiting positions at INSEAD. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (UCSD 2003). Before joining the ANU in 2011, he was an Assistant Professor in Singapore.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: James Cameron, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, completed his PhD in July 2013 at the University of Cambridge. James is very interested in the contribution history can make to informing today’s debates on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Russian relations. After completing his master’s in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, he was a business consultant specializing in the former Soviet Union. 

His dissertation, “The Development of United States Anti-Ballistic Missile Policy, 1961-1972”, used the transformation of the American anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon as a prism through which to examine changing patterns of presidential nuclear leadership during this period. Employing both new American and Russian sources, the thesis shows how successive occupants of the Oval Office and their most trusted advisers managed the tension between their publicly articulated nuclear strategies and their inner convictions regarding the utility of nuclear weapons during this pivotal decade of the Cold War.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Richard Nixon did not believe in mutual assured destruction. Yet he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which enshrined MAD as a central fact of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear balance. Conversely his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, publicly defended American nuclear superiority and pushed ahead with ABM, despite their private skepticism regarding the utility of both and desire to moderate the arms race. Employing newly available evidence from declassified telephone recordings and documents, this paper attempts to account for this contradiction. It does so by placing the perpetual presidential struggle to reconcile private convictions with public demands at the center of the emergence of assured destruction and the limitation of ABM as elements of U.S.-Soviet détente through strategic arms control.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Rachel Gillum is a PhD student in Political Science at Stanford University, and joined CISAC as a predoctoral fellow in September of 2013. She is also a fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS) and is affiliated with Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Rachel’s research focuses on the Muslim-American community and examines the determinants of a variety of political beliefs and behaviors towards the American government, from full integration and identification with the United States, to support for violent extremism.

Rachel previously served as a graduate associate researcher at the RAND Corporation’s International Policy Center, where she conducted in-depth analysis on terrorist recruitment strategies and presented policy suggestions to U.S. government clients. From 2010-2012, she served as the chief editor and head research assistant under Prof. Martha Crenshaw on the Mapping Militants Project, where she oversaw and helped devise the design of an online tool for the analysis of terrorist networks. Rachel has also worked as a consultant for the Gallup Organization and a research assistant at the Department of Defense’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: How do Muslim-Americans form beliefs about the treatment they expect to receive from US law enforcement? The results of an original, nationally-representative survey of Muslim-Americans suggest two key findings. First, expectations of fairness on the part of Muslim immigrants are shaped, in part, by the level of institutional corruption in their country of origin. Immigrants coming from less corrupt countries hold more optimistic views about expected treatment by US law enforcement. Second, Muslim immigrants who have been naturalized are less trusting in the government than newcomers, and Muslims who were born and raised in the United States are least likely to believe that law enforcement will deal with Muslims fairly. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of control variables. Ethnographic evidence drawn from interviews with Muslims-Americans suggests that Muslims update their expectations through interactions and familiarity with American institutions. US-born Muslims expect violations of their rights by the government and are politically concerned about such issues. Foreign-born Muslims, while aware of the controversies regarding US government surveillance and profiling of Muslim communities, tend to be less focused on issues related to citizen rights and more focused on the day-to-day concerns common to immigrants everywhere.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Niccolò Petrelli is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on reassessing the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. Incorporating insights from the contiguous fields of study of "civil wars" and "peacekeeping operations" and employing critical historical analysis of case studies, the research aims to analyze the features, limits and influence of the theory of Counterinsurgency. Before joining CISAC in 2013, Niccolò was a military research fellow at the Military Center for Strategic Studies (Ce.Mi.S.S.) within the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CASD) in Rome, Italy, and a research assistant at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya. Niccolò received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Roma Tre in 2013. In his dissertation, he examined the impact of strategic culture on the Israeli approach to counterinsurgency.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: In "Counterinsurgency: A Conceptual Reassessment," Niccolò Petrelli will address unresolved issues in the study of counterinsurgency (COIN). The talk will focus on three main questions: How did COIN theory emerge and which are its intellectual sources? To what extent has COIN practice been informed by theory? Is the population-centric COIN paradigm prevalent in scholarly studies and in the contemporary professional discourse historically accurate? In order to answer these questions, the talk will first outline a critical historical analysis of the development of COIN theory, tracing its intellectual roots and fundamental assumptions. Subsequently, it will reassess practice through the qualitative comparative analysis of several case studies of COIN campaigns.

Abstract
I will discuss an ambitious project by the Program on Liberation Technology to fight corruption with mobile phones. The project is being designed with partners in four states of India on issues such as education, health and social protection for some of the most vulnerable communities in India.  The project has started at a time when technology for transparency and accountability projects have come under increasing scrutiny. For example, a series of papers have questioned if transparency has an impact in improving accountability, and thus have raised questions on the very premise of such projects.  Similarly, the Open Data movement succeeded in getting data in the public sphere but most datasets are languishing with no takers.  He will discuss what these studies mean for the project, and some insights from it on designing technologies for transparency and accountability.

Abstract:  

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Speaker bios:

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Prof. Feldman is the author of numerous publications. These include five books: Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); The Future of U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation (Washington D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996); Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997 – with Abdullah Toukan (Jordan); and, Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons from the Middle East (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003 – with Hussein Agha, Ahmad Khalidi, and Zeev Schiff).

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Khalil Shikaki is a professor of political science and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. Since 2005 he has been a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1985, and taught at several Palestinian and American universities. Between 1996-99, Prof. Shikaki served as the dean of scientific research at al Najah University in Nablus. Since 1993 he has conducted more than 200 polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and, since 2000, dozens of joint polls among Palestinians and Israelis.

He is the co-author of the annual report of the Arab Democracy Index. His recent publications include “The future of Israel-Palestine: a one-state reality in the making,” NOREF Report, May 2012; "Coping with the Arab Spring; Palestinian Domestic and Regional Ramifications," Middle East Brief, no. 58, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, December 2011; Public Opinion in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Public Imperative During the Second Intifada, with Yaacov Shamir, Indiana University Press, 2010.

This seminar is part of the "European Governance" program series.

After decades of ambiguity towards European integration, the United States is pushing for Europe to become a genuine actor in security and foreign policy. As Vice President Biden put it at the 2013 Munich Security Conference, “a strong and capable Europe is profoundly in America’s interest, and I might add, presumptuously, the world’s interest.”

In principle, Europeans have accepted that closer defense cooperation is essential in order to maintain, and hopefully expand, existing military capabilities, and in order to reinforce mutual trust and contribute to a convergence in common goals and strategic cultures. But the sad reality is that decision-makers have not yet been willing to take the necessary decisions and disagree about what that means. In matters of European security and defense, the gap between rhetoric and policy is wider than in every other area of the European agenda, despite ever-shrinking defense budgets, declining capabilities, and the US “pivot.”

The European Council in December of 2013, focusing on defense and security issues for the first time in many years, will have to deliver ambitious projects - and member states will have to deliver when it comes to their implementation. The European Security Strategy from 2003 is in dire need of an update. And the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, who will assume office in 2014, will have the difficult task of developing a genuine "one voice approach", a common European foreign and security policy.

A number of fundamental issues will need to be addressed: European security policy priorities, the EU level of ambition and, even larger, the purpose and influence of the EU in a world in which we will increasingly struggle to make ourselves heard. Are EU countries ready and willing to truly join forces and pool resources?

The talk will address current efforts to enhance European security and defense policy, the political feasibility of further steps, Germany’s responsibility to push the agenda forward, and what these efforts in European defense and security policy mean for the United States.

Wolfgang Ischinger was the Federal Republic of Germany's Ambassador to London from 2006-2008. Prior to this assignment, he was the German Ambassador to the United States of America from 2001 to 2006. In 2007, he also represented the European Union in the Troika negotiations on the future of Kosovo.

Wolfgang Ischinger studied law at the universities of Bonn and Geneva and obtained his law degree in 1972.  He did graduate and postgraduate work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and at Harvard Law School, Cambridge/USA (M. A., Fletcher School, 1973).

Ambassador Ischinger has published widely on foreign policy, security, and arms control policy as well as on European and transatlantic issues. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and of the Governing Board of SIPRI, Stockholm. He is Co-Chair of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative (Carnegie Endowment) and a member of the Global Zero Commission. He also serves on the Boards of the Atlantic Council of the U. S., of the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), of the American Academy, Berlin and of SWP, Berlin. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Tübingen.