Frank Wolak discusses restructuring of the electricity industry in the U.S. using examples from California and explains the problems involved in energy market design.

Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, members of the biosecurity community and US government officials have expressed a growing sense of alarm at the threat of a biological attack.  The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism recently predicted that a terrorist attack involving WMD is likely to take place by 2013 and identified biological terrorism as the most likely contingency.  To counter this threat, increasing emphasis has been placed on the role of microbial forensics in deterring an attack. New infrastructure has been established by the US government to develop capabilities to identify the source of a pathogen used in an attack and identify the perpetrators. However, many open questions remain about the potential efficacy of this approach both from a technological capabilities standpoint and from a deterrence perspective.

Existing technologies can be borrowed from molecular biology to identify elements in a pathogen's DNA, which could help investigators trace it back to a specific source strain. However, these tools are limited, and new methods should be developed to increase confidence in microbial forensics analyses. Moreover, a comprehensive genome database of pathogen strains is necessary for an effective investigation in the event of an attack. Who will cover the costs of sequencing pathogen genome strains to generate such a database? Will there be obstacles to gaining cooperation from academic and government facilities within the United States and internationally?  In the best-case scenario, advances in microbial forensics could enable us to identify the source of a biological attack; would these capabilities effectively deter non-state actors? These questions must be addressed to determine the extent to which microbial forensics programs can meet their stated goals.

Jaime Yassif is a doctoral candidate in the Biophysics Group at UC Berkeley. She is conducting her thesis research in the Liphardt lab, where she studies the dynamics of RNA-binding proteins using a single-molecule technique called plasmon rulers.

Prior to her graduate work, Ms. Yassif worked for several years in science and security policy and arms control.  She began as a research assistant at the Federation of American Scientists, where she contributed to the writing of Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony on radiological weapons and authored a piece on radiological decontamination in Defense News. She then worked as a program officer at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, where she provided support for the organization's four key program areas-Russia/New Independent States, Biological, Regional and Communications-and managed the organization of an international workshop on Global Best Practices in Nuclear Materials Management. This was followed by a fellowship to study the Chinese nuclear posture at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Ms. Yassif holds an MA in Science and Security from the War Studies Department at King's College London, where she wrote her thesis on verification of the Biological Weapons Convention.  She received her bachelor's degree in Biology from Swarthmore College. Ms. Yassif is former president of the student-run Science, Technology and Engineering Policy group at UC Berkeley and a member of Women in International Security.

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute, and professor of political science (by courtesy). Her current research focuses on why the United States is the target of terrorism, the effectiveness of counter terrorism policies, and mapping terrorist organizations. Professor Crenshaw served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chaired the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006. Her edited book, The Consequences of Counterterrorism in Democracies, is being published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Nonproliferation efforts have traditionally focused on controlling supply of proliferation-relevant technology, expertise, and material. As barriers to diffusion of all three have been lowered, there is increased acknowledgement of the need to reduce demand for such weapons, and, in cases where efforts to prevent proliferation have failed, the need to develop effective international responses. However, with few exceptions, approaches to nonproliferation have not changed qualitatively in the last 40 years. This research explores the concept of resilience as understood for other complex interactive systems, extracts key features, and applies them to nonproliferation. In addition, it examines unintended consequences of traditional nonproliferation strategies and feedbacks among them.  Based on insights gained from this exercise, a new analytical framework for nonproliferation will be proposed.

Arian L. Pregenzer is a 2009-2010 CISAC visiting scholar and a Senior Scientist in the Global Security Program at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is responsible for initiating new programs in arms control and nonproliferation and for developing strategies for international engagement for multiple laboratory programs. In addition, she provides leadership for Sandia's efforts to integrate across nuclear weapons, arms control, and nonproliferation missions to effectively meet nuclear security challenges.

Most recently, Dr. Pregenzer has focused on near-term steps that can enhance nuclear security while advancing the goals of NPT Article VI. She is particularly interested in how international technical cooperation on topics such as verification methods for nuclear arms control, nuclear weapons security and accountability, and nuclear fuel cycle management can establish the technical basis for moving toward a world without nuclear weapons.

Dr. Pregenzer has bachelors' degrees in physics, mathematics, and philosophy from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from the University of California at San Diego. Prior to her career in international security, she worked at Sandia to develop lithium ion sources for particle-beam-driven inertial confinement fusion.

When discussing Korea's "Chinese Decade," roughly defined as the dozen or so years prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, most of the attention is focused on the heavy-handed activities of Yuan Shikai in Seoul.  Less well known is that part of this Chinese effort to bind Korea more closely to China involved the absorption of Korea's newly-formed Maritime Customs Service.  Several scholars have looked at this period and the actions of some of the key players such as Sir Robert Hart, Li Hongzhang, Henry F. Merrill, and Paul Georg von Mollendorff.  Using the recently-discovered correspondence of the first commissioner of customs in Pusan, this talk will discuss some heretofore unknown aspects of this attempted takeover by China.

Wayne Patterson received his undergraduate degree in history from Swarthmore College, and his graduate degrees in history and international relations from the University of Pennsylvania.  He has authored or edited eleven books on modern Korea, including The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 (1994) and The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903-1973 (2000).  He has taught Korean history at a number of institutions in the United States, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of South Carolina, the University of Kansas, and the University of Pennsylvania.  He has also taught Korean history abroad, including Ewha University, Korea University, Yonsei University, as Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, and most recently, at the University of the Philippines, as Korea Foundation Visiting Professor.  His home institution is St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, where he is professor of history.  He is currently teaching Korean history as a visiting professor at the University of California - Berkeley.

While information technologies have transformed our way of life in rich countries, in developing regions there remain many barriers to adopting new technologies, including high costs, unreliable power and network infrastructures, and lack of real or perceived benefits.  Consequently, technology ownership and usage in resource-poor environments is often limited to a small number of near-and-dear devices, which may include a television, video player, or mobile phone.  Devices that are unfamiliar are unlikely to be used.

In this talk, I will describe three projects that seek to adapt or apply familiar technologies to advance new goals in socio-economic development:

1. A new platform for citizen journalism that enables tribal communities to record and share audio newscasts over a mobile phone,
   
2. A new platform for interactive educational content using ordinary TVs and DVD players, and
   
3. A new system for monitoring and improving healthcare delivery by using off-the-shelf biometric technologies. 
   

While all projects are in their early stages, they have each been deployed in India; I will relate our experiences gained and highlight recurring themes at the intersection of technology and development.

Bill Thies is a researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he is a member of the Technologies for Emerging Markets Group.  His research focuses on creating appropriate information and communication technologies to promote socio-economic development, as well as the description and automation of biology protocols on platforms such as microfluidic chips.  Bill was trained as a computer scientist and received all of his degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing his Ph.D. in 2009.  His graduate research focused on programming languages and compilers for parallel computing.

Abstract
In the same world where there are 1.4 billion Internet users, a very different 1.4 billion people live below the World Bank's poverty line. As if in sudden recognition of this gap, the past decade has seen incredible interest in applying information and communication technologies for global development, an endeavor often abbreviated "ICT4D." How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? Can you keep five rural schoolchildren from fighting over one PC? What value is technology to a farmer earning $1 a day?

Interventionist ICT4D projects seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated a lot of hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I will present 10 myths of ICT4D which continue to persist, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. My hope is to temper the brash claims of technology with realism about its true potential.

Summary of the Seminar
Kentaro identified a number of myths that surround the field of ICT4D and argued that these can confuse our thinking about the proper role for technology in addressing development problems.

Myth 1: Technology x will save the world: The history of writing on technology shows that each new advance tends to be greeted with unbridled enthusiasm about its potential impact. Where once people were convinced television could solve all social and political problems, today we are putting that burden onto mobile phones.

Myth 2: Poor people have no alternatives:  We can often assume that technology is the only way that poor people will be access certain goods. In reality, there are usually non-technological routes to information and services that are free and therefore preferable.

Myth 3: ‘Needs' are more pressing than desires: A high proportion of the income of the very poor goes on what Western observers might view as ‘luxury' items: (music, photos, festivals & weddings) rather than ‘basics' such as healthcare.

Myth 4: ‘Needs' translate into business models: Building a business model around the needs of poor communities is possible, but there are significant barriers. Poor populations are harder to reach, and they may not want to pay for the services you provide, even if their value seems obvious to you.

Myth 5: If you build it, they will come: Spending is not always rational. An eye hospital in India offers extremely high quality cataract operations for free and covers all related costs. 10% of those offered the service will still refuse to have the operation.

Myth 6: ICT undoes the problem of the rich getting richer: In contexts where literacy and social capital are unevenly distributed, technology tends to amplify inequalities rather than reduce them. An email account cannot make you more connected unless you have some existing social network to build on.

Myth 7: Hardware and software are one-time costs: Kentaro estimates that the average One Laptop per Child will in fact cost $250 per child per year to cover breakage, connectivity, power, maintenance and training.

Myth 8: Automated is always cheaper and better: Where labor is cheap and populations are illiterate, automated systems are not necessarily preferable. Greater accuracy may be another reason to favor voice and human mediated systems.

Myth 9: Information is the real bottle-neck:  Those in the ICT4D world are prone to overestimate the significance of information gaps. Even if you connect a farmer to an agricultural expert via a PC, there are a host of other barriers to be overcome before he can actually increase his yields, including: literacy, poor transport links, and a lack of volume buyers for seeds, pesticides etc.

Kentaro contends that when technology makes a difference in development, it is always as much to do with the input of committed and competent individuals and organizations. Despite this, the focus when reporting ICT4D projects quickly slips into extolling the virtues of the technology itself, not the human component. This says much about the seductive quality of technology. Myths about its potential persist because we have a strong desire to see the triumph of clever ideas and ingenuity, and to believe that one time catalytic investments can have such an impact. The reality is always more complex.

Kentaro Toyama is a visiting scholar at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Until 2009, he was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. He co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to provide a global platform for rigorous academic research in this field.

Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.

Fahamu is committed to using ICTs to support the development and growth of a powerful social justice movement that is committed to self determination in Africa. But given poor access to the internet in most of Africa, such ambitions have not been easy to realise. I will be discussing Fahamu's experiences in Africa of using ICTs in distance learning, the development of Pambazuka News, podcasts, film documentaries, mobile phone initiatives, and the book publishing program ‘Pambazuka Press', and will touch upon some of our ambitions in the future, especially in the the development of an interactive community on the Pambazuka 2.0 platform that is currently being developed.

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan with more than 30 years experience in international development, health and human rights, is founding Executive Director of Fahamu - Networks for Social Justice, a pan African organisation with bases in Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and the UK. Fahamu aims to support the building of progressive pan-African social movements by stimulating debate, discussion and analysis, building through training a culture of respect for human rights and human dignity, supporting social justice advocacy and publishing and disseminating information using both new and conventional media. 

Manji has previously worked as Africa Programme Director for Amnesty International; Chief Executive of the Aga Khan Foundation (UK); and Regional Representative for Health Sciences in Eastern and Southern Africa for the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

He is a member of the editorial board of "Development in Practice", a member of the steering group on the campaign for the ratification of the protocol on the rights of women in Africa (Solidarity for African Women's Rights), and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, Goldsmiths College, University of London.  
 
As founder and editor in chief of the prize-winning pan African social justice newsletter and website Pambazuka News, he oversees the production by a pan-African community of more than 1800 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators, with a readership estimated at over 500,000, and a website with more than 55,000 articles and news items on social justice in Africa.

Also he is commissioning editor of Pambazuka Press / Fahamu Books, a pan African publisher of books on freedom and justice in Africa.

Currently a Visiting Fellow in International Human Rights at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, Manji holds a PhD and MSc from the University of London, and a BDS from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Abstract
The historic focus of development has rightfully been on macroeconomics and good governance, but technology has an increasingly large role to play.  In this talk, I review several novel technologies that we have deployed in India and Africa, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of this new subfield of EECS research.  Working with the Aravind Eye Hospital, we currently supporting doctor/patient videoconferencing in 30 rural villages; more than 25,000 people have had their blindness cured due to these exams.

Dr. Brewer focuses on all aspects of Internet-based systems, including technology, strategy, and government.  As a researcher, he has led projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, sensor networks, and security. His current focus is (high) technology for developing regions, with projects in India, Ghana, and Uganda among others, and including communications, health care, education, and e-government.

In 1996, he co-founded Inktomi Corporation with a Berkeley grad student based on their research prototype, and helped lead it onto the NASDAQ 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003.

In 2000, he founded the Federal Search Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization focused on improving consumer access to government information. Working with President Clinton, Dr. Brewer helped to create USA.gov, the official portal of the Federal government, which launched in September 2000.

He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering for leading the development of scalable servers (early cloud computing), and also received the ACM Mark Weiser award for 2009.  He received an MS and Ph.D. in EECS from the MIT, and a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley. He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the "most influential person on the architecture of the Internet", by InfoWorld as one of their top ten innovators, by Technology Review as one of the top 100 most influential people for the 21st century (the "TR100"), and by Forbes as one of their 12 "e-mavericks", for which he appeared on the cover.

Summary of the Seminar
Eric Brewer is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley where he leads the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group.

Dr. Brewer spoke about the role for technology in effective development strategies at the base of the pyramid.

The history of development to date has been characterized by large agencies funding big projects with strings attached, usually in the form of debt or demands for political allegiance. These kinds of projects are hampered by their scale and the requirement to work with corrupt governments. They typically include little role for new technology as projects move slowly and lack the expertise to facilitate this.

Outside the sphere of traditional development, technology is having a major impact on economic prosperity. The mobile phone revolution, driven by bottom up demand, provides enormous advantages to any worker operating in a large radius. A taxi driver given a mobile phone, for example, will increase his revenue by 60% on average. Other bottom-up businesses have seen major success. The Village Phone scheme, which runs as a franchise model with capital coming from microfinance, now covers the majority of Bangladeshi villages. A village phone lady will make on average two times the income she would have done from farming.

However, the mobile phone remains a largely urban phenomenon since cellular networks require a certain density of users before they can economically justify the installation of a base station. The availability of an internet connection is crucial for the viability of businesses and services in rural areas.  WiFi-based Long Distance networks (WiLDNet) are emerging as a potential low-cost alternative to traditional connectivity solutions for rural regions. Unlike mesh networks, which use omni-directional antennas to cater to short ranges, WiLD networks are comprised of point-to-point wireless links that use directional antennas with line of sight over long distances.

Eric's Berkeley research team has partnered with Aravind Eye Hospital in Theni in the southern India state of Tamil Nadu to use this technology to address the problem of blindness in the region, 70% of which is treatable. The long-distance wireless network they have installed is allowing eye specialists to interview and examine patients in five remote clinics via high-quality video conferencing. 25,000 patients have recovered sight using this system and it is set to expand to 50 centers covering 2.5 million people.

Eric's team has also worked on software that addresses local educational needs in developing regions. In poorly resourced schools, students will often be sharing a mouse and computer screen with a group of others. Metamouse gives each student their own mouse to use; when answering questions all users must agree on a location before progressing. This encourages collaboration between students and has had impressive results in boys in particular, with a 50% improvement in scoring compared to each user having their own PC.

Gang He and Richard Morse examine one of the biggest controversies in the global carbon market - the additionality of Chinese wind power in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).   Addressing and moving beyond the binary question of whether such projects do or do not represent "real" CO2 reductions, they use insights drawn from detailed analysis of the entire Chinese wind CDM portfolio to argue that the current legal and economic structure of additionality is unworkable in the Chinese power sector when one takes into account how regulation and policy in those markets actually function. 

Therefore under the current CDM additionality regime, additionality cannot be credibly verified for Chinese wind - a problem that extends to multiple types of energy projects in numerous developing countries.  In short, the controversy over Chinese wind illustrates the need for large-scale reforms of how the world validates carbon credits in developing world power sectors.  In a post-Kyoto world that envisions a greatly expanded role for international carbon offsets, ensuring the integrity of carbon markets through smarter policy engagement with countries like China is more important than ever.

Who should decide how users can use the Internet? users or network providers? Should network providers be allowed to block certain applications or content on their networks? Should they be allowed to offer different classes of service to applications or content, and, if yes, whom should they be allowed to charge for this service? And should the answer to these questions differ depending on whether a network provider engages in these practices to manage bandwidth on its network?

Triggered by changes in Internet technology, these questions over network neutrality have moved to the center of the regulatory and legislative debates surrounding the Internet worldwide. They are at the core of the Open Internet Proceeding, launched by the Federal Communications Commission in October 2009 to explore what rules are needed to secure the Internet's openness. The talk will give an overview of the draft rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission and explain how the alternative options under consideration would affect the environment for political speech in the United States.

Barbara van Schewick's research focuses on the economic, regulatory, and strategic implications of communication networks. In particular, she explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to these changes. This work has made her a leading expert on the issue of network neutrality.Her book "Internet Architecture and Innovation" will be published by MIT Press this spring.

Professor van Schewick is the Faculty Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society and an assistant professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford's Department of Electrical Engineering.

Prior to joining the Stanford Law faculty, van Schewick was a senior researcher at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and a nonresidential fellow of the Center for Internet and Society. Van Schewick has advised the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research on innovation and technology policy and worked with the German Federal Network Agency on spectrum policy. From August 2000 to November 2001, she was the first residential fellow at the Center for Internet and Society.

Summary of the Seminar
Barbara van Schewick, Assistant Professor at the Stanford Law School, introduced the current debate about net neutrality and explored the implications for diversity and freedom of expression online.

Network providers were at one time ‘application blind' - they were unable to see what was contained in the data packets that allow information to be transmitted online. Now that this is no longer the case, a debate has emerged about the role for regulation in controlling the ability of network providers to block or interfere with applications. What was drawn up as a voluntary policy statement is now being considered and revised by the FCC's Open Internet Proceeding.

Blocking of applications is problematic on several counts. First, there may be incentives for network providers to block applications that threaten their own profitability (for example, Skype). This leads to a situation where the success of applications is no longer decided on user criteria and the overall value created for society diminishes. Second, the great promise of the internet is that it removes traditional gatekeepers (such as mass media outlets) to speech. This is undermined if network providers have the ability to control what content users see. This is particularly problematic since users cannot easily switch to another provider as they could if a particular store did not carry a product they wanted. The cost of switching makes this impractical and in places without a choice of providers, this is not an option.

In drawing up regulation against blocking the FCC is debating a number of related issues:

Discrimination: Even if blocking is prohibited, discriminating between levels of service can still allow network providers to slow down an application to the extent that it becomes un-useable. This is actually a more effective tool than blocking since it is much harder to detect. Users may attribute slow speeds to poor design and potentially useful applications will fail to get traction.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Charges for different levels of service: Even if we agree network providers should not discriminate between the services they provide in an arbitrary way, could they offer improved service for payment? Opponents argue that this policy would be bad for competition since new developers would be unable to pay for the levels of service that established players could afford. And it would threaten the ability of poorly resourced minority voices - e.g. small NGOs and publications - to get heard.

Exceptions to discrimination: Network providers argue that there needs to be some discrimination to allow them to undertake reasonable network management. But it is difficult to determine what counts as reasonable management. One concern is that peer to peer networks - which allow those without many resources to exchange material cheaply - might be targeted in particular, since they can create a lot of congestion. This might also threaten the ability of new applications with high bandwidths to get funding, since the risk of being slowed down by the networks would be perceived to be too high by investors.

Many of the major benefits of the internet - the ease of publishing and coordinating, for example - are only possible through applications. Hence the outcome of this debate will have serious implications for the future social and political impact of the internet.