Eden Undone: Global Consequences of Earths' Changing Landscapes
Carnegie Institution
Department of Plant Biology
260 Panama Street
Stanford, CA 94305
Carnegie Institution
Department of Plant Biology
260 Panama Street
Stanford, CA 94305
In today's global economy, access to resources around the world has never been easier. The high tech industry has always been in the forefront of globalization in lowering costs, acquiring talent as well as serving markets. For instance, Asian countries have long been known for their vast manufacturing bases for western high tech industry.
In recent years, thanks to Y2K, India has become the leader in software outsourcing. China, given its expanding economy as well as its open market direction, has rapidly become the emerging location for multi-national semiconductor companies to outsource their product development amidst China's own burgeoning integrated circuit (IC) industry. Mr. Lee has first-hand experience in building and managing an IC product development center in Shanghai, China. He will discuss the challenges of operating a R&D organization in an environment of different languages and cultures. He will also share his vision of the future of the IC industry in China.
Mr. Lee is Group Vice President and general manager of Timing Solutions Products at Integrated Device Technology, Inc.(IDT), a public semiconductor company of $650 million annual sales, focusing on valued-added solutions for communication, consumer and computing markets. He has been with IDT for the last 22 years and has served various management roles. In 2001, he architected the acquisition of Newave Semiconductor Corporation in China and established the Shanghai Product Development Center for IDT. Before joining IDT in 1984, Mr. Lee spent 5 years at Intel Corporation as a technologist for the early development of flash memory technology. Mr. Lee earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1975 and M.S. degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1979.
Philippines Conference Room
Post-9/11, the U.S. government instituted the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) Program, which compares two index fingerprints from every foreign visitor entering the U.S. against a watchlist of fingerprints from several million criminals and suspected terrorists. In the first part of this talk, we develop a new probabilistic model for fingerprint matching that allows for population heterogeneity in fingerprint image quality, calibrate this model using data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and embed the model into a Stackelberg game, in which the U.S. government chooses an optimal biometric strategy to maximize the detection probability subject to a constraint on the mean biometric processing time per legal visitor, and then the terrorist chooses his fingerprint image quality to minimize his detection probability. We predict that switching from a two-finger system to a ten-finger system would increase the detection probability in this game from 0.526 to 0.949. This work was the basis of Congressional testimony last fall, and the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that they are switching from a two-finger system to a ten-finger system. In the second part of this talk, we use new data from Cogent (the biometrics vendor for the U.S. Visit Program) to derive a two-stage, two-finger biometric strategy that works as well as a one-stage, ten-finger strategy. The second stage of this two-stage strategy employs texture matching rather than the traditional minutiae matching.
Manas Baveja is a doctoral candidate in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University and a CISAC science fellow. His doctoral research is focused on quantitative modeling of homeland security projects.
Lawrence Wein is the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Lawrence Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. After getting a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1988, he spent 14 years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the DEC Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science. His research interests include mathematical models in operations management, medicine and biology.
Since 2001, he has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on an emergency response to a smallpox attack, an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and an analysis of a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?", and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.
For his homeland security research, Wein has received several awards from the International Federation of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), including the Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the INFORMS President’s Award for contributions to society, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best research publication, and the George E. Kimball Medal. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
Lynn Eden is associate director for research/senior research scholar at CISAC. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. Her book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Michael May is professor emeritus (research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for Intenrational Studies. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988.
Charles Perrow is professor emeritus of sociology at Yale University. His current interests are in managing highly interactive, tightly-coupled-systems (including hospitals, nuclear plants, chemical plants, power grids, aviation, the space program, and intelligent transportation systems). These interests grew out of his work on "normal accidents," with its emphasis upon organizational design and systems theory. An organizational theorist, he is the author of a number of award winning books in the field of sociology.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Not in residence
Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.
In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.
Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.
The Philippines suffers from an ominous systemic deficit: the incapacity of democratic institutions to respond to pent-up social demands. A scant four years after a second "peoople power revolution" in 2001 brought down President Joseph Estrada on charges of involvement in illegal gambling, the country again finds itself in crisis. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo struggles to retain power as she faces allegations that close relatives are also involved in gambling syndicates and still more damaging accusations of complicity in fixing the May 2004 elections. Unlike in 1986 and 2001, when changes in leadership nurtured new hopes, the crisis of 2005 reveals a system desperately struggling for legitimacy. Prof. Hutchcroft will argue for well-considered institutional reform designed to break the cycle of recurrent crisis and tackle the country's perilous democratic deficit.
Paul D. Hutchcroft has written widely on Philippine politics and political economy, including Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (1998). His current writing includes a book on state formation and territorial politics in the Philippines from the early American colonial period through the enactment of the Local Government Code in the 1990s; and an edited volume on Philippine political reform stemming from a workshop he organized in Manila in July. He has been a visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore and is now the associate chair of UW-Madison's Political Science Department.
Daniel I. Okimoto Conference Room
During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union made launch-on-warning an important part of their nuclear strategies. To achieve the launch-on-warning capability both countries deployed networks of early-warning satellites and radars as well as command and control systems that allowed them to launch a retaliatory strike in response to a ballistic missile attack. These systems, which remain operational to this day, are believed to support the "hair-trigger alert" posture of strategic nuclear forces.
This presentation will consider the current status of the U.S. and Russian early-warning systems and the extent to which characteristics of these systems can contribute to the danger of an accidental ballistic missile launch. It will also analyze various proposals that aim at reducing the danger of accidental launch--de-alerting, reduction of strategic forces, repairing the Russian early-warning system, etc. It will be shown that most of these measures are inadequate and some may in fact increase the danger of an accident.
Pavel Podvig joined CISAC as a research associate in 2004. Before that he was a researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He worked as a visiting researcher with the Security Studies Program at MIT and with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and he taught physics in MIPT's General Physics Department for more than ten years. Podvig graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, with a degree in physics. In 2004 he received a PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
His research has focused on technical and political issues of missile defense, space security, U.S.-Russian relations, structure and capabilities of the Russian strategic forces, nuclear nonproliferation. He was the head of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces research project and the editor of a book of the same title, which is considered a definitive source of information on Russian strategic forces.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
How have curators responded to the 1995 controversy over the National Air and Space Museum's Enola Gay exhibit? Trends in curatorial practice since then offer opportunities for museum professionals who wish to question the costs of wars. Curators now believe that museum exhibits should be open-ended and also should reflect a multiplicity of views about a given subject. Their main strategy is to evoke a variety of memories among museum goers without trying to integrate them completely - collecting memories rather than collectivizing them. Far more challenging for museums is representing the larger social categories that shape peacetime lives as well. They have greatest difficulty with representing the experiences of foreigners. Yet, many Americans have never been comfortable with the official A-bomb narrative. If, as museum professionals now emphasize, visitors are bringing their own meaning to exhibits, display of the Enola Gay will forever provide an invitation to debate the moral and strategic legitimacy of the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.
Laura Hein specializes in the history of Japan in the 20th century and its international relations. She is author of Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth Century Japan (University of California Press, 2004), which explores various ways in which economic expertise intersected with politics through a study of the lives of a tight-knit group of Japanese intellectuals. She also has a strong interest in problems of remembrance and public memory, resulting in three co-edited books with Mark Selden: Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (1997), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (2000), and Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to American and Japanese Power (2003). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
Michel Oksenberg Conference Room
Zia Mian, a research assistant with the Program on Science and Global Security (PS&GS) at Princeton University and lecturer of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, has been with PS&GS since 1997. His interests include nuclear weapons and nuclear energy programs in South Asia, and finding alternative policies that can contribute to disarmament and sustainable development. With Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Mian co-produced Crossing the Lines, a documentary film about India, Pakistan, and the battle over Kashmir, which was shown at CISAC this past summer. He has edited and co-edited a number of books on South Asia, including Out of the Nuclear Shadow (co-edited with Smitu Kothari; Zed Press, London and Rainbow Press, New Delhi, 2001). Mian has also co-edited a volume with Iftikhar Ahmad and Dohra Ahmad, Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on Pakistan by Eqbal Ahmad (Oxford University Press, Karachi).
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
The USSR's anti-plague system had four main responsibilities: monitor natural foci of endemic dread diseases such as plague, tularemia, anthrax, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever; protect the nation from imported exotic diseases (e.g., cholera and smallpox); protect the nation from biological warfare; and perform tasks for the Soviet offensive biological weapons program. Although the anti-plague system appears to have had successes in public health, its work undoubtedly was compromised by excessive secrecy, which led to anti-plague scientists having to overcome substantial barriers before being able to communicate with colleagues in other Soviet public health agencies, publish the results of their work, and undertake travel to non-socialist countries. This system disintegrated after December 1991, but was resurrected as elements of the newly independent states' health systems.
Reporting on the findings of a recently concluded project carried out by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), I will discuss: (1) the threats that the anti-plague systems' human resources, pathogen culture collections, and equipment pose to international security; (2) the promises these systems hold, should they regain their former level of scientific/technical capability, for enhancing international public health; and (3) current activities by U.S. government agencies to lessen the security and safety threats of these systems and, simultaneously, increase their public health capabilities. As appropriate, I will illustrate the presentation with photos taken by CNS personnel in the course of having visited more than 40 anti-plague institutes and stations.
Dr. Raymond Zilinskas worked as a clinical microbiologist for 16 years, after graduating from California State University at Northridge with a BA in Biology, and from University of Stockholm with a Filosofie Kandidat in Organic Chemistry. He then commenced graduate studies at the University of Southern California. His dissertation addressed policy issues generated by recombinant DNA research, including the applicability of genetic engineering techniques for military and terrorist purposes. After earning a PhD, Dr. Zilinskas worked at the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (1981-1982), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (1982-1986), and University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) (1987-1998). In addition, he was an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of International Health, School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, until 1999.
In 1993, Dr. Zilinskas was appointed William Foster Fellow at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), where he worked on biological and toxin warfare issues. In 1994, ACDA seconded Dr. Zilinskas to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), where he worked as a biological analyst for seven months. He participated in two biological warfare-related inspections in Iraq (June and October 1994) encompassing 61 biological research and production facilities. He set up a database containing data about key dual-use biological equipment in Iraq and developed a protocol for UNSCOM's on-going monitoring and verification program in the biological field.
After the fellowship, Dr. Zilinskas returned to the UMBI and Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he continued to serve as a long-term consultant to ACDA (now part of the U.S. Department of State), for which he carried out studies on Cuban allegations of U.S. biological attacks against its people, animals, and plants and investigations carried out by the United Nations of chemical warfare in Southeast Asia and the Arabian Gulf region. Dr. Zilinskas also is a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense.
In September 1998, Dr. Zilinskas was appointed Senior Scientist at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), Monterey Institute of International Studies. On September 1, 2002, he was promoted to the Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the CNS. His research focuses on achieving effective biological arms control, assessing the proliferation potential of the former Soviet Union's biological warfare program, and meeting the threat of bioterrorism. Dr. Zilinskas' book Biological Warfare: Modern Offense and Defense, a definitive account on how modern biotechnology has qualitatively changed developments related to biological weapons and defense, was published in 1999. In 2005, the important reference work Encyclopedia of Bioterrorism Defense, which is co-edited by Richard Pilch and Dr. Zilinskas, was published by Wiley. He currently is writing a book on the former Soviet Union's biological warfare program, including its history, organization, accomplishments, and proliferation potential, which will be published in 2006.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, East 207, Encina Hall
Dr. Liu first offered his view on the current state of the software industry's development and in particular software outsourcing to China. Software prices and margins continue to drop. Coupled with this reality is Liu's view that "only 10-15% of software development is truly innovative and therefore suitable to be developed in Silicon Valley". As software development platforms and communication technologies, especially the Internet, become ubiquitous and affordable, distributed software development is becoming the rule.
China's challenges and advantages in software outsourcing
Compared to India, the leader in software outsourcing, China has its own distinct challenges. Chinese software companies have almost no U.S. customers for a number of reasons: language barriers, different working styles, customers' concern for software piracy, and the lack of experienced programmers and technical managers in China. Yet, China also has its advantages. Not only does it have a rapidly expanding domestic software market, but it also has a large pool of fresh engineering talent. "The key, therefore," asserted Dr. Liu, "lies in someone creating the right environment to train and build a local team to be able to develop and deliver world-class software products."
Augmentum's software development goals
This is what Augmentum has set out to accomplish. "...[W]e want to build a world-class, distributed development team for software product development... like the ODM model in the PC world..." declared Dr. Liu. Based on this vision, Augmentum's strategy hinges on its insistence to develop software for top US customers, such as Motorola, Business Objects, and PalmSource--and to rely primarily on local Chinese engineers. Explained Liu: "We want to make sure that the center of most of the people of that team is going to be in China, even though the locomotive, the teachers, is in the U.S., because that's where the leadership is in the software product development world."
Drawing on decades of experience developing top software teams at IBM and other companies, Dr. Liu detailed his company's efforts to attract the brightest local engineers and train them to be even better. He explained, "Culture and team is the true differentiation of Augmentum.... The real...challenge is to build the right culture with the right core team." The company insists on having no expatriates in their China operations but promoting close interaction between experienced mentors in the U.S. and the young teams in China, sometimes using some creative approaches for recruitment and training. For example, Augmentum puts all of its new hires under "a stress test" after hiring and proactively maintains an "upfront churn of at least 30%" in the first three-month period." Their end goal: "a world-class software development team that can bridge the East and the West but still has a cost structure comparable to local companies."
Liu's focus for the future
Despite experienced leadership, ties to leading U.S. companies, and strong young software teams, Augmentum faces real challenges. Liu acknowledged skeptics who question the ability to build a world-class team through working on the "crumbs of companies" of "projects they don't want to work on themselves." Nevertheless, he is confident in the trajectory of Augmentum's future growth, as the company is expecting to double its employees every year for the coming few years. In addition, Dr. Liu's vision includes a landscape beyond Augmentum. "I have a very simple focus. I want to train a lot of world-class software developers in China to serve the world. Many of them will not be working for Augmentum. It is fine...I want to bring my experience to there to make it happen. And the best vehicle to do that at this moment and time, the wave [that] I want to jump on is outsourcing, because it is growing the fastest."
Biography of Leonard Liu
Leonard Liu has spent 30 years in the systems industry, with a track record of developing innovative computing technologies into successful businesses. Most recently, he served as president of ASE Group, a leading provider of IC test and packaging services, having held roles as Chairman and CEO of Walker Interactive Systems, COO of Cadence Design Systems, and President of Acer Group. He was an early champion of outsourcing to India and China at Cadence and Walker. Dr. Liu began his career at IBM where he was responsible for the creation and implementation of SQL and the management of CICS, SNA and AIX, eventually overseeing the worldwide Database and Language lines-of-business. He received his undergraduate degree from Taiwan University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University.