Speaker Bio

Michael Callen

Assistant Professor, Public Policy

Harvard Kennedy School

Michael Callen is assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His recent work uses experiments to identify ways to address accountability and service delivery failures in the public sector. He has published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the British Journal of Political Science. He is an Affiliate of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Jameel-Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the Center for Economic Research Pakistan (CERP), Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC), and a Principal Investigator on the Building Capacity for the Use of Research Evidence (BCURE): Data and evidence for smart policy design project. His primary interests are political economy, development economics, and experimental economics.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Abstract

The global ubiquity of mobile phones presents an opportunity to explore the potential of this technology as a tool for implementing lasting behavioral change on a large scale employing techniques from behavioral economics.  This talk presents a 6 month long pilot project carried out by Juntos Finanzas in conjunction with a large Colombian bank to determine whether behavior change messaging delivered via responsive SMS can alter the savings behavior  of first-time banking customers in Colombia. We discuss the results of the intervention, the technological and design techniques used and show a strong correlation between receiving behavior change messaging and increased savings.  We explore the potential uses of these techniques in other areas such as public health and the pros and cons of SMS vs native mobile apps as a platform for delivering behavior change content.

Speaker Bio

Amer Dahmash is a software engineer at Juntos Finanzas in San Carlos, California.  His interests lie in the use of mobile computing to overcome problems in infrastructure in under-developed and low-income areas.  Prior to working with Juntos, Amer cofounded Regalii a venture-backed startup based in Washington Heights in Manhattan working on mobile remittances.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Enrique Piracés

Abstract

For decades, security experts, privacy advocates, and whistleblowers have warned us about the growing surveillance capacity of states, the risk of technology in the hands of organized crime, and the increasing role that corporations play in violating citizens’ rights to privacy and anonymity.  As we start to grasp the scope and scale of unchecked surveillance, it is important to underscore the need to understand its potential long-term consequences for human rights organizations and the development of free media. Human rights defenders and journalists work in environments where resources are scarce and adversaries have the upper hand. In the context of human rights documentation and journalistic work, the implications of technically advanced surveillance can be tremendous.

Speaker Bio

This presentation uses Russian social media as a lens for exploring the relationship between individuals, society and online communication technologies.  Alexanyan proposes a framework for comparative international analysis that leverages three interconnected elements – history, network structure and media ecology.  She examines Russia’s social media ecology and its relationship to Russia’s broader socio-political environment on the basis of this framework.  This includes a case study and social network analysis of Russian social network platforms, articulating the various factors that have influenced the specific evolution and network structure of social media in Russia, its role within the broader online and traditional media ecologies, and its implications for Russian society and politics in general.

Speaker Bio

Karina Alexanyan

Recent publications include a chapter on Citizen Journalism in Russia in "Citizen Journalism-Global Perspectives," a chapter on Russian Blogging in “International Blogging – Identity, Politics and Networked Publics,” and articles on  Russian Social Networks in the journal Digital Icons, and in the Russian Analytical Digest.  In 2008, with the support of Harvard’s Berkman Center and Columbia’s Harriman Institute, Karina organized the "RussiaOnline" Conference at Columbia University, bringing together scholars and practitioners from Russia, the U.S. and Europe.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Is communication technology conducive to collective violence? Recent studies have provided conflicting answers to the same question. While some see the introduction of cellular communication as a contributing factor to civil conflict in Africa (Pierskalla and Hollenbach APSR 2013), others ascribe an opposite effect to mobile communications in Iraq (Shapiro and Weidmann IO forthcoming). During the talk, I will further explore the logic behind "Why the revolution will not be tweeted", and argue that the answer lies in contagion processes of collective action at the periphery, not the hierarchical schemes of central coordination as was argued before. To provide evidence, I will draw on historical accounts of social revolutions, a GIS study of the Syrian Civil War, a convenience survey sample from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, as well as network experiments of collective risk-taking in a controlled setting.

Speaker Bio

Navid Hassanpour

Navid Hassanpour (Ph.D.s in Political Science from Yale'14, and Electrical Engineering from Stanford'06) studies political contestation, in its contentious and electoral forms. Following an inquiry into collective and relational dimensions of contentious politics, currently he is working on a project that examines the history, emergence, and the dynamics of representative democracy outside the Western World. This year he is a Niehaus postdoctoral fellow at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of public and International Affairs. His work has appeared in Political Communication as well as IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. His book project, Leading from the Periphery, is under consideration at Cambridge University Press' Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences Series.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Three years ago, world leaders from 8 countries came together to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP) - a multi-stakeholder initiative that brings together domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable and responsive to citizens. Since then, the partnership has rapidly grown from 8 to 65 countries. In this talk, Linda Frey speaks about OGP's new approach to multilateralism, and how the uniqueness of its model is helping to spur progress on concrete open government reforms in a diverse group of countries.  Frey will draw on the findings of OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism to speak to early successes, as well as implementation challenges and areas for further study.  

Speaker Bio

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Munyema Hasan

Program Officer
Open Government Partnership, Support Unit

Munyema joined the OGP Support Unit in January 2014 as Program Officer. She has spent the past four years working in the field of transparent and accountable governance, with organizations like the World Bank, International Budget Partnership, Stanford University and the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability. Munyema holds a M.Sc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt and the University of California, Berkeley.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Speaker Bio

Michael Bernstein

Michael Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction group and is a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. His research in human-computer interaction focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received Best Paper awards and nominations at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing (ACM UIST, ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, AAAI ISWSM). Michael has been recognized with the NSF CAREER award, as well as the George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from MIT, and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

Abstract

Substantial systematic differences exist in children’s home learning experiences. The few existing parenting programs that have shown promise often are not widely accessible, either due to the demands they place on parents’ time and effort or cost. In this study, we evaluate the effects of READY4K!, a text messaging program for parents of preschoolers designed to help them support their children’s literacy development. The program targets the behavioral barriers to good parenting by breaking down the complexity of parenting into small steps that are easy-to-achieve and providing continuous support for an entire school year. We find that READY4K! positively affected the extent to which parents engaged in home literacy activities with their children by 0.22 to 0.34 standard deviations, as well as parental involvement at school by 0.13 to 0.19 standard deviations. Increases in parental activity at home and school translated into student learning gains in some areas of early literacy, ranging from approximately 0.21 to 0.34 standard deviations. The widespread use, low cost, and ease of scalability of text messaging make texting an attractive approach to supporting parenting practices.

Speaker Bio

Susanna Loeb

Susanna Loeb

Barnett Family Professor of Education, Stanford University

Faculty Director, Center for Education Policy Analysis

Co-Director, Policy Analysis for California Education

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

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