Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development. Prior to launching the center, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, Birdsall was Executive Vice-President of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, Birdsall spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as Director of the Policy Research Department.

Ms. Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs. She has also written more than 75 articles for books and scholarly journals published in English and Spanish. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals.

Marc Trachtenberg, a historian by training, now teaches political science at UCLA. He's the author of a number of works on twentieth century international politics, including most notably A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963. He just finished a book due to come out this spring called The Craft of History: A Guide to Method.

The talk will be based on his new book Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics.

Professor Fish received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993. His research and teaching interests include post-Soviet politics, democratization and regime change, and general comparative politics. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics. He is the author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1995) and a coauthor of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001). He has also published articles in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Comparative Political Studies, Current History, Diplomatic History, East European Constitutional Review, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, The Journal of Communist Studies, Journal of Democracy, Peace and Change, Post-Soviet Affairs, Slavic Review, World Politics and numerous edited volumes.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have increasingly located research and development (R&D) in developing countries like China and India since the 1990s. On the one hand, governments in developing countries are eager to attract R&D to their local economies; on the other hand, developed countries are concerned about losing their competitive advantages due to R&D offshoring. At the same time, intellectual property (IP) protection is a growing concern considering the weak IP institutions that developing countries typically have.

Presenting both survey findings in Beijing and several case studies on individual MNC R&D labs, Dr. Quan examines MNC R&D labs' activities in China and puts forward a 'hierarchical modular R&D structure' as means of IP protection in weak IPR regime countries.

Quan has extensive research experience in the areas of technology & innovation management, international business, strategy, entrepreneurship, and regional economic development. Besides her recent publications on the Chinese software industry and on Chinese and Indian immigrant professionals in Silicon Valley (with Saxenian), she also has a number of publications in Chinese academic core journals such as "China Industrial Economy." Quan holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, an M. Econ. degree and a B.S. degree both from Beijing University, China.

Before sexology and medical science prevailed in Japan as the accepted forms of "knowledge" of human sexuality, by the 1910s and '20s, other discourses competed with sexology's binaries of "normal sex" and "pathological sex," and so on. Leslie Winston will discuss the paradigm of intersexuality in the work of Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933) and Tokuda Shûsei (1872-1943) as a counter-discourse to the dominant narratives on sexuality. The body of the hermaphrodite confirmed that the roles the state insisted women should assume, in fact had no basis in "nature." As sexologists and scientists were making efforts to eliminate hermaphroditism, Shikin and Shûsei were invigorating it as an alternate discourse.

Leslie Winston is Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at Dickinson College. Her research focuses on subjectivity, particularly the female subject, in Japanese literature of the 1890s and early twentieth century. Her current interest lies in the discourse on intersexuality and its production of knowledge of the categories of "woman" and "man." She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.A. in English Literature from Stony Brook University, and an M.A. in Communication Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Open source software (OSS) is widely used as operating systems (Linux), web tools (Apache, JBoss), database platforms (MySQL) and a range of applications. Creating OSS is widely believed to be a relatively easy process compared with proprietary software. Its growing use and support from large firms such as IBM and HP have led many to believe that OSS will ultimately replace proprietary software. While this is hotly debated, there is little doubt that as its use increases, it will impact how software services will be delivered. In particular, low cost global delivery centers might benefit from ready access to OSS code. The panel will discuss these and other issues related to the globalization of software services caused by OSS.

Panelists:

Mike Balma is HP's Linux Business Strategist. Mike has helped drive HP's strategy for Linux and Open Source software across HP since 1999. Mike is a member of HP's Open Source Review Board that reviews HP open source projects. He was involved in the Linux port to Itanium. He also helped create an exchange for open source software development. And he helps drive HP's Linux strategy in the public sector including the security related technologies and certifications.

Mitchell Kertzman is a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He has over 30 years of experience as a CEO of public and private software companies. Most recently, Mitchell was chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, a provider of platform software for the delivery of digital services by cable television companies.

Rajesh Setty chairman of CIGNEX Technologies, Inc., a company that he co-founded in late 2000. Setty has managed technology projects and practices over the last 14 years in several parts of the world (India, Singapore, Malayisa, Hong Kong, France and the United States.)