Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on February 24th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Tom Schnaubelt.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Winter Seminar Series continues through March; see our Winter Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

What does it mean to become a citizen in an age of polarization, platforms, and declining trust in institutions? This 60-minute seminar explores how civic identity is formed, why American civic education is struggling to keep pace with social and technological change, and what that means for democracy. Drawing on research and hands-on experience in civic education, the session examines how colleges, communities, and digital environments shape civic habits, beliefs, and participation—often in unintended ways. The seminar will describe a variety of innovative approaches to civic learning and asks how technology can move from fragmenting civic life to playing a role in revitalizing democratic knowledge, skills, and behaviors.

About the Speaker:

Prior to assuming the role of Executive Director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution in 2023, Tom served as a Lecturer and Senior Advisor on Civic Education at the Deliberative Democracy Lab, within the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Tom came to Stanford in 2009 and has served as the Associate Vice Provost for Education, the Executive Director of the Haas Center for Public Service, and a Resident Fellow in Branner Hall, where he and his wife oversaw the development and implementation of a living-learning community focused on public service and civic engagement. In 2015, Tom coordinated the launch of Cardinal Service, a university wide effort to elevate and expand public service as a distinctive feature of the Stanford experience, and he has launched and led several national initiatives focused on democratic engagement and social change education.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2009, Tom served as the Dean for Community Engagement and Civic Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and was the founding Executive Director of Wisconsin Campus Compact. Tom began his career as the first service-learning coordinator at the University of Southern Mississippi. During his eight years in Mississippi, Tom coordinated statewide academic-community partnerships, including several large AmeriCorps programs focused on educational equity and environmental sustainability, and launched the Mississippi Center for Community and Civic Engagement.

Tom’s personal vision is to connect people with themselves, each other, and the earth in ways that contribute to the common good and build a more perfect union. His work in higher education focuses on democratic engagement, and place-based and experiential learning that fosters civic identity and the capacity to engage constructively across differences. He has extensive experience creating university-community partnerships and his experiences span geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries. Tom received a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from the University of Mississippi, a Master of Arts in Education from the University of Michigan, and Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on February 10th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for a seminar with Guilherme Lichand.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Winter Seminar Series continues through March; see our Winter Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

A rapidly expanding literature documents the detrimental effects of excessive cell phone use, particularly on mental health outcomes and attention. While nearly all studies focus on adult populations, many experts have used them to support phone bans in schools – partially in the hope that these might help reverse declining trends in standardized test scores dating from even before the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper provides first-hand evidence that phone restrictions in schools indeed causally boost K–12 learning outcomes. Leveraging the introduction of a policy that banned non-pedagogical uses of cell phones within schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we contrast schools that already had strict rules on phone use even before the policy (the control group) to all other schools (the treatment group), before and after the ban. We find that, 1.5 year after roll-out, (1) the prevalence of high-usage schools converged across groups; and (2) standardized test scores significantly increased in treatment schools, relative to control: in the former, students learned 0.06 s.d. more – enough to fully eliminate the baseline gap in test scores across groups.

About the Speaker:

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on January 27th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for AI, Automation, and Augmentation, a seminar with Rob Reich.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Winter Seminar Series continues through March; see our Winter Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Will artificial intelligence replace human workers, or will it empower them? Tech leaders and economists have long warned that AI is fundamentally a "labor-replacing tool" destined to automate away millions of jobs. But this outcome is not inevitable—it reflects specific design choices, not technological fate.
This presentation challenges the prevailing automation narrative by recovering a neglected vision from the history of computing. Drawing on labor economics and the history of computing, this paper examines the distinction between automation (machines doing tasks for us) and augmentation (machines doing tasks with us). It argues that both the design choices of AI developers, the policy decisions of governments, and the adoption patterns of users will determine the effects of AI on labor and society.

About the Speaker:

Rob Reich is the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology at Stanford University. His main appointment is in Political Science where he works at the intersection of political theory, social science, and computer science. He is senior fellow at the Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. His current interests are in AI governance. He was on public service leave in 2024-25 as Senior Advisor to the United States AI Safety Institute. His most recent books are System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein 2021) and Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (edited with Lucy Bernholz and Hélène Landemore). He has testified before Congress and written widely for the public, including for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review and at the Spencer Foundation. He helped to create the global movement #GivingTuesday and serves as the founding chair of its board.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on January 13th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for AI and Education, a seminar with Peter Norvig.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Winter Seminar Series continues through March; see our Winter Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Traditional lectures serve many students at once but are passive. Individual tutoring does better, but only for one student at a time. This talk explores how Generative AI can democratize the apprenticeship model, transforming education from broadcast to active, inquiry-based learning. With some changes to our approach, we can see AI not as a cheating tool, but as a pedagogical partner that fosters creativity, critical thinking, and personalization.
 

About the Speaker:

Peter Norvig is a Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and a researcher at Google. He was previously a director of research at Google and the director of NASA Ames Computational Sciences Division. He is the co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the world's leading textbook on AI. His current focus is on developing tools and methods to improve education through technology.

Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on January 13th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for How Tech Has Enabled Survey Research and Undermined It, a seminar with Jon A. Krosnick.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Winter Seminar Series continues through March; see our Winter Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Survey research is a centerpiece of life in America and throughout the world. Billions of dollars are spent by commercial companies, governments, academics, NGOs, and others to track people's life experiences (e.g., the unemployment rate comes from surveys) and opinions (e.g., presidential approval, preferences for government policies, satisfaction with products and services). For decades, scientific survey data collection was strikingly accurate, though expensive. With the arrival of the Internet, the cost of scientific survey data collection declined, but unscrupulous companies took advantage of non-scientific methods to minimize costs, maximize profits, and lie to customers and the public about the accuracy of the resulting data. Fortunately for those companies, researchers purchasing cut-rate data have been complicit in misrepresenting data quality, a prevarication that served the short-term interests of the researchers but caused hugely embarrassing and public failures, such as the prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Reviewing this history offers an opportunity to see how tech can help researchers and dramatically undermine those same researchers, science generally, and the nation.

About the Speaker:

Winner of the lifetime career achievement award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the Nevitt Sanford Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, Jon Krosnick is Frederick O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Political Science, Environmental Social Science, and Psychology at Stanford University, Director of Stanford’s Political Psychology Research Group, and Research Psychologist at the U.S. Census Bureau. He has expertise in questionnaire design and survey research methodology, voting behavior and elections, and American public opinion. He has taught courses for professionals on survey methods for decades around the world and has served as a methodology consultant to government agencies, commercial firms, and academic scholars. He is a world-recognized expert on the psychology of attitudes, especially in the area of politics and has been co-principal investigator of the American National Election Study, the nation's preeminent academic research project exploring voter decision-making. For 25 years, he has been conducting national surveys of American public opinion on climate change.