Speaker bio:

Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI. He is also an emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. Hecker currently is on sabbatical working on a book project and will return to Stanford in the summer of 2013 to resume his research and teaching.

Hecker's research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapons policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. Over the past 18 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.

Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

About the Topic: As the U.S. considers potential paths towards nuclear arms reductions, key considerations are asymmetry (the state of the US nuclear stockpile/deterrent and variations in international nuclear capabilities) and risk (degree of transparency/trust and ability to verify commitments). As stockpile numbers go down, each weapon takes on increased importance and stability of deterrence will be essential. Technically we can achieve reduced risk levels in our stockpile and the ability to verify compliance, if we plan and prepare. Increased transparency and dialogue could enable better understanding of the risks and help direct future negotiations in an environment of increased confidence. 

About the Speaker: Bruce Goodwin is the Associate Director at Large for National Security Policy and Research and the Director of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). In this role, he is the principal military and civilian policy liaison at LLNL. From 2001 until 2013, he was the Lab’s Principal Associate Director for the nuclear weapons program. In that role he was responsible for leading the stockpile stewardship program, for developing strategies, for establishing priorities, and for the design and maintenance of LLNL’s nuclear explosives. He is one of the world’s leading theoretical experts in plutonium and implosion dynamics, and has won the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Awardfor his work.

A tremendous amount of radioactive products were discharged as a result of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, which resulted in radioactive contamination of the plant and surrounding areas. While geographical distribution of radioactive iodine, tellurium, and cesium in the surface soils was smoothly (but not always systematically) widespread all over the region, health risk information by the government, media, and other organizations is most likely to be given in terms of administrative boundaries (cf. prefectures, municipalities, etc.) and/or distance from the radiation source.

This paper estimates the effect of such health risk information rather than the actual health risks of radiation on land and other prices in different locations. We find that the prefecture and municipality border effects – but not the distance effect from the nuclear power plant – are significantly related to a reduction in land and other prices after the accident. This shows that people responded to health risk information based on administrative boundaries rather than the actual health risk of radiation after the disaster. Although health risk information based on prefecture and municipality boundaries has an obvious advantage of distilling large and complex risk information into a simple one, the government, media, and other organizations need to recognize and carefully examine the potential of misclassifying non-contaminated areas into contaminated prefectures. Doing so will avoid unintentional consequences to the region’s economy.

Hiroaki Matsuura is currently Departmental Lecturer in the Economy of Japan in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow of St. Antony’s College. His main interests are health economics and demography, with a special interest in the relation between laws and population health. Hiroaki received his B.A. in Economics from Keio University, M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, M.S. in Project Management from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Sc.D. in Global Health and Population (Economics track) from Harvard University’s School of Public Health. In the past, he was affiliated with Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences, Human Rights in Development, and Takemi Program in International Health at Harvard University. He also worked as a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His doctoral dissertation research explores a right to health or to health care in national constitutions of 157 countries and state constitutions of the 50 U.S. states and estimates the impact of introducing (or removing) a right to health or to health care into national and state constitutions on health system and population health outcomes. His most recent article, “The Right to Health in Japan: Challenges of a Super Aging Society and Implication from Its 2011 Public Health Emergency” (with Eriko Sase) will be appeared on “Advancing the Human Right to Health”, edited by José M. Zuniga, Stephen P. Marks, and Lawrence O. Gostin, Oxford University Press, 2013. 

About the Topic: Analysis of environmental samples collected for nuclear forensics purposes typically involves determination of isotopic composition, which can sometimes (but not always) reveal information about nuclear events or processes that resulted in the anthropogenic radioactivity. This information is referred to as the “isotopic signature”.  Sequential extractions have been used for many years to determine chemical forms of contaminants for environmental regulatory purposes and clean-up decisions, and they can reveal “chemical signatures” about the events or processes that resulted in contamination.  Coupling sequential extractions with isotopic determinations in nuclear forensics analyses provides an opportunity to link isotopic and chemical signatures, which can improve confidence in identifying the relevant nuclear event or process. This approach shows promise, particularly when coupled with nuclear fuel cycle process knowledge.  Examples involving contaminated nuclear sites in the US and Russia will be discussed.

About the Speaker: Sue B. Clark is the regents distinguished professor of chemistry with tenure at Washington State University. She also holds an appointment to the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, appointed in 2011 by President Barack Obama. Her current research areas include the environmental chemistry of plutonium and other actinides, chemistry of radioactive waste systems, and actinide separations. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in these areas. 

Her research support includes grants and contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration. Prof. Clark is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and is the 2012 recipient of the ACS’s Olin-Garvan Medal. Prof. Clark is an editor for the journal Radiochimica Acta. Professor Clark holds a BS degree in Chemistry from Lander College (Greenwood, SC) and MS and PhD degrees in Chemistry from Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL). 

About the Topic: Air, sea, land, and space are the traditional domains of military operations. Now, as the Information Age unfolds, cyberspace has become the fifth domain. The relative newness of cyberspace and the interdependencies between it and the preexisting domains pose many challenges, both in terms of the wise integration of cyber into ongoing operations and the creation of personnel with the right combination of technical and non-technical knowledge to apply activities on computers and networks in ways consistent with high-level policy. Cyber operations include both the defense of networks and computers, but also actions to achieve specific effects on adversaries.  These effects may extend to the physical world, or may be circumscribed entirely to cyber systems. Through examples and observations, this unclassified talk will illustrate the complexity of our quest to use cyber space.

About the Speaker: Dr. Cynthia Irvine is the chair of the Cyber Academic Group and director of the Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research (CISR) at the Naval Postgraduate School where she is a professor of computer science. Her research centers on the design and construction of secure high assurance systems and multilevel security, and now cyber systems and operations. She is an author on over 160 papers and reports and has supervised the research of over 140 Masters and PhD students. Dr. Irvine is a recipient of the Naval Information Assurance Award and the William Hugh Murray Founder’s Award from the Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a lifetime member of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Golden Core Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). From 2005 through 2009, she served as Vice- Chair and subsequently as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.

Abstract
This talk reports on a study about the impact of crowdsourcing on a law-making process in Finland. In the studied process, the reform of off-road traffic law was opened for public participation in Finland. The citizens were first asked to share their experiences and problems with off-road traffic and the regulating law on an online platform. Then the participants were asked to share solutions for those problems. Crowdsourcing resulted into 500 ideas, over 4,000 comments and 24,000 votes, which were analyzed and evaluated both with citizens and experts and using an algorithmic consensus tool. The talk discusses deliberative aspects in crowdsourcing and the usefulness of blended expertise, i.e. the mixture of the crowd's and experts' knowledge, in law-making.

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, doing reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.

1953 saw both the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement and a Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea. The uneasy and incomplete peace, coupled with a formalized U.S.-ROK security alliance relationship, ushered in a new era on the Korean Peninsula. 2013 marks the 60th anniversary of these pivotal events.

Ambassador Stephens will draw from her experience in Korean affairs over the past four decades, including her tenure as U.S. ambassador to the ROK 2008-2011, to discuss the evolution of the bilateral alliance, its challenges and achievements, and major issues now and going forward. This lunchtime seminar is scheduled to occur immediately upon Ambassador Stephens' return from a visit to Seoul where she will have participated in a first-ever gathering of former American ambassadors to Korea and former Korean ambassadors to the U.S. aimed specifically at reflecting on the U.S.-ROK alliance at 60.  Her comments will also be informed by these discussions.

Ambassador Stephens recently completed thirty-five years as a career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. She was Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 2012, and U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, 2008 to 2011.

Ambassador Stephens has served in numerous posts in Washington, Asia, and Europe. From 2005 to 2007 she was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP). While Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR) from 2003 to 2005, she focused on post-conflict and stabilization issues in the Balkans. She was Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration.

Ambassador Stephens’ overseas postings included service in China, Korea, Yogoslavia, Northern Ireland, Portugal, and Trinidad & Tobago.

Ambassador Stephens received the 2009 Presidential Meritorious Service Award. Other awards and recognition include the Korean government’s Sejong Cultural Prize (2013), and in 2011 the Pacific Century Institute’s Building Bridges Award, the Outstanding Achievement Award from the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea, and the Kwanghwa Medal of Diplomatic Merit from the Korean government. Her book, Reflections of an American Ambassador to Korea, based on her Korean-language blog, was published in 2010.

Ambassador Stephens graduated from Prescott College, and holds a master's degree from Harvard University, along with honorary doctoral degrees from Chungnam National University and the University of Maryland. Ambassador Stephens studied at the University of Hong Kong. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea in the 1970s.