Abstract
Social media and new technology are being harnessed for social benefit in contexts from healthcare, economic development, and sustainable energy to civic engagement and government transparency in California and worldwide. The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) takes an interdisciplinary approach to addressing these problems and promoting innovation for students, faculty and entrepreneurs. In this talk, I will give a short overview of CITRIS's programs and initiatives, before diving into specific projects in the areas I lead: the Data and Democracy Initiative and the Social Apps Lab.

Camille Crittenden joined the Data and Democracy Initiative as Director in May 2012 and was named Deputy Director of CITRIS in May 2013. Prior to this appointment, she served as Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law, where she was responsible for overall administration of the Center, including fundraising, communications, and outreach, and helped to develop its program in human rights, technology, and new media. She held previous positions as Assistant Dean for Development in the division of International and Area Studies at UC Berkeley and in development and public relations at University of California Press and San Francisco Opera. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University.

Abstract
Diarrheal disease is the second leading cause of death for children under five years of age, globally.  Barriers to improving outcomes include an inability to identify cases early, provide support, and understand transmission collectively at the household level.   In this talk, we will propose a project to use crowdsourcing to identify pre-emergency patients with diarrheal disease at the level of the household, improve outcomes by providing basic 24 hour access to oral rehydration solution via a social business model at the level of pharmacies, and establish a novel method for patient recruitment to increase statistical power while decreasing the cost of clinical research.  Our primary and initial use case will be twice annual cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh.  Partners include Stanford University, Medic Mobile, ideSHi, and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh.

Dr. Eric Nelson studied evolution at Cornell University (BA)  and conducted marine microbial ecology research in Papua New Guinea.  He then received a Masters Degree for studies on the symbiosis between light-producing bacteria and marine animals at the University of Hawaii.  Then he switched to microbial pathogenesis during my MD PhD training at Tufts University.  During this time, he received a Fogarty NIH fellowship to research cholera transmission at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh.  DR. Nelson co-authored an ebook called the Cholera Outbreak Training and Shigellosis (COTS) Program that has taken him to outbreaks in Zimbabwe and Haiti.  He also finished a Stanford pediatrics residency in 2013 and was awarded a Pediatric Global Health Postdoctoral Fellowship through the Stanford Society of Physician Scholars.  His core effort now is to explore ways to leverage mobile technology to overcome poverty-based barriers to improve health outcomes from diarrheal diseases.

Speaker Bio:

Nabil Mouline is a senior researcher in The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). Prior to this, he was a research professor at the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po).
He earned a Ph.D. in history from the Paris-Sorbonne University and a Ph.D. in political science from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po).

He is the author, among other works, of The Imaginary Caliphate of Ahmad al-Mansûr: Power and Diplomacy in Morocco in the 16th Century (PUF, Paris, 2009) and The Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (PUF, Paris, 2011). Cambridge University Press and Yale University Press will publish the English translation of these two books in 2014 respectively.

During his residency at Stanford, he will work on a book on the sociological history of Saudi Arabia.

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Abstract:

Subnational conflict is the most widespread, enduring, and deadly form of conflict in Asia. Over the past 20 years (1992-2012), there have been 26 subnational conflicts in South and Southeast Asia, affecting half of the countries in this region. Concerned about foreign interference, national governments limit external access to conflict areas by journalists, diplomats, and personnel from international development agencies and non-governmental organizations. As a result, many subnational conflict areas are poorly understood by outsiders and easily overshadowed by larger geopolitical issues, bilateral relations, and national development challenges. The interactions between conflict, politics, and aid in subnational conflict areas are a critical blind spot for aid programs. This study was conducted to help improve how development agencies address subnational conflicts.

Speaker Bios:

Ben Oppenheim is a Fellow (non-resident) at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. His research spans a diverse set of topics, including fragile states, transnational threats (including pandemic disease risks and terrorism), and the strategic coherence and effectiveness of international assistance in fragile and conflict-affected areas.

Oppenheim has consulted for organizations including the World Bank, the United Nations, the Asia Foundation, the Institute for the Future, and the Fritz Institute, on issues including organizational learning, strategy, program design, foresight, and facilitation. In 2009, he served as Advisor to the first global congress on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, supported by the World Bank and the UN.

In 2013, Oppenheim was a visiting fellow at the Uppsala University Forum on Democracy, Peace, and Justice. His research has been supported by a Simpson Fellowship, and a fellowship with the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He was also a research fellow with UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies, affiliated with the New Era Foreign Policy Project.

Nils Gilman is the Executive Director of Social Science Matrix. He holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Gilman’s first scholarly interest was in American and European intellectual history, with a particular focus on the institutional development of the social sciences, the lateral transfer and translation of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, and the impact of social scientific ideas on politics and policy.

Gilman is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), the co-editor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (Continuum Press, 2011), as well as the founding Co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. He also blogs and tweets.

Prior to joining Social Science Matrix in September 2013, Gilman was research director at Monitor 360, a San Francisco consultancy that addresses complex, cross-disciplinary global strategic challenges for governments, multinational businesses, and NGOs. He has also worked at a variety of enterprise software companies, including Salesforce.com, BEA Systems, and Plumtree Software. Gilman has taught and lectured at a wide variety of venues, from the Harvard University, Columbia University, and National Defense University, to PopTech, the European Futurists Conference, and the Long Now Foundation.

Bruce Jones is a senior fellow and the director of the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. He is also the director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

Jones served as the senior external advisor for the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report, Conflict, Security and Development, and in March 2010 was appointed by the United Nations secretary-general as a member of the senior advisory group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities. He is also consulting professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and professor (by courtesy) at New York University’s department of politics.

Jones holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and was Hamburg fellow in conflict prevention at Stanford University.

He is co-author with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Brookings Press, 2009); co-editor with Shepard Forman and Richard Gowan of Cooperating for Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures(Lynne Reinner, 2001).

Jones served as senior advisor in the office of the secretary-general during the U.N. reform effort leading up to the World Summit 2005, and in the same period was acting secretary of the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee. In 2004-2005, he was deputy research director of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. From 2000-2002 he was special assistant to and acting chief of staff at the office of the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process. 

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Abstract:

Scholars of state development have paid insufficient attention to the question of regionalism; too often modeling state-building as the extension of the authority of a 'center' over peripheral territories, and too often linking regionalism to cultural or ethnic heterogeneity. A purely spatial account of the challenges to central control shows that even in the absence of cultural fractionalization, the presence of economically powerful and politically salient regions undermines political development. Three analytically distinct mechanisms - divergent public good preferences, economic self-sufficiency, and institutional design - underlie this relationship. I explore these issues through a region-wide analysis of Latin America, and case studies of the United States, Ecuador, Colombia, and early modern Poland.

Speaker Bio:

Hillel David Soifer earned his PhD in the Government Department at Harvard, and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research has been centered in Latin America, with a focus on political development and state capacity, and has been published in journals including Latin American Research Review and Comparative Political Studies. He is currently completing a book on the long-term divergence in state capacity in Latin America which contrasts the cases of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.