Abstract
Increasingly, technology is being used to facilitate trafficking and other forms of child sexual exploitation. Thorn, a nonprofit organization founded by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, has been working to use technology to fight back against the criminals and perpetrators. By informing law enforcement efforts, partnering with nonprofits to help them make use of available data and tools, and working closely with major companies in the tech industry, we have helped rescue victims and make the internet a more hostile place for these activities. 

Claire Schmidt has been working on child sex trafficking prevention since 2010. Previously, she worked in strategy consulting at Roll Global, a private holding company that owns Fiji Water, POM Wonderful, and other CPG brands. Prior to this, she was a management consultant at The Parthenon Group, helping Fortune 500 companies increase profitability and working with private equity firms to conduct due diligence projects on potential acquisitions. Currently, Claire is the Director of Programs at Thorn. Claire holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford 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.

Abstract:

The Performance of Democracies is a research project that will start in May 2014. The project is funded by the European Research Council, the budget is 4.2 mil. Euro. The problems this project will address are the following. While more countries than ever are now considered to be democratic, there is only a very weak, or none, correlation between standard measures of human well-being and measures of democracy. A second problem is that a large number of democracies turn out to have severe difficulties managing their public finances in a sustainable way. The third problem is that democracy seems not to be a cure against pervasive corruption. Empirical research shows that these problems have severe consequences for citizens’ perception of the legitimacy of their political system. The project intends to use an institutional approach to answer the question why some democracies perform better than others.

Speaker Bio:

Bo Rothstein holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at University of Gothenburg in Sweden where he is head of the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute. The QoG Institute consists of about twenty researchers studying the importance of trustworthy, reliable, competent and non-corrupt government institutions.

Rothstein took is PhD at Lund University in 1986 and served as assistant and associate professor at Uppsala University 1986 to 1994. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, Cornell University, Harvard University, Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, the Australian National University and the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2006, he served as Visiting Professor at Harvard University.

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