Professor David Kinley holds the Chair in Human Rights Law at University of Sydney, and is the Law Faculty's Associate-Dean (International). He is also an Academic Panel member of Doughty Street Chambers in London, the UK's leading human rights practice. He has previously held positions at Cambridge University, The Australian National University, the University of New South Wales, Washington College of Law, American University, and was the founding Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University (2000-2005). He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 2004, based in Washington DC, and Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge in 2008. He is author and editor of eight books and more than 80 articles, book chapters, reports and papers.

He has worked for 15 years as a consultant and adviser on international and domestic human rights law in Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Thailand, Iraq, Nepal, Laos, China, and Myanmar/Burma, and for such organizations as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, AusAID, and the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, and a number of transnational corporations, and NGOs.  He has also previously worked for three years with the Australian Law Reform Commission and two years with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

His latest publications include the critically acclaimed Civilising Globalisation: Human Rights and the Global Economy (CUP, 2009), Corporations and Human Rights (Ashgate 2009), and The World Trade Organisation and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2009) Another edited collection entitled Principled Engagement: Promoting Human Rights in Pariah States will be published by UNU Publications in 2011.  He is currently working on another book investigating the interrelations between human rights and global finance.

David was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and brought up there during the 1960s and 70s.  He studied in England in the 1980s at Sheffield Hallam University and the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, and after obtaining his doctorate from the latter in 1990 he moved to Australia.  He now lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.

In medicine, transportation, commerce and entertainment, and countless other fields, technology has transformed our lives and provided immense value for millions.

Yet despite all of these revolutionary advances, it has yet to have a similar impact to radically improve the workings of public policy. This situation is especially unfortunate given the fiscal, economic, and social challenges facing our democracy and those around the world. If there's ever a time where politics could use some creative solutions, it's now.

This seminar will highlight some of the legal, political, and social barriers preventing disruptive innovation from taking hold in the public policy sphere, as well as ways to remove these barriers. Drawing on sources ranging from theoretical physics and constitutional law to popular culture, the seminar will provide unique and practical perspectives on how technology can help democracies around the world evolve.

The seminar will offer provocative insights, thought-provoking discussions, and practical tools to help our society can facilitate the evolution of better political, economic, and social institutions.

Matt Harrison graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Political Science and from the University of Southern California with a joint law degree and Master of Public Policy. Matt founded Prometheus in 2003 and serves as the Institute's President. As the driving force behind the creative and strategic vision of Prometheus, Matt identified and recruited a talented team of engineers, designers and contributors. He was the brainchild behind the DIY Democracy iPhone app, has authored over 200 articles, publications and other features for Prometheus, has been a guest on several talk radio shows and has been quoted in the Orange County Register and Chicago Tribune.

txteagle is Boston-based company that enables mobile phone subscribers in the developing world to earn airtime by completing simple work. We have now integrated our compensation platform within the billing systems of over 220 mobile operators - providing 2.1 billion mobile phone subscribers with the ability for moderate economic empowerment. While originally focused on text-based tasks from the outsourcing industry, we have recently come to appreciate our distributed workforce as much more than a source of cheaper labor for the data-entry industry. Instead of simply facilitating labor arbitrage, we are now focused on leveraging a particular population's unique insights and local knowledge. Today our workforce provides services that could never be outsourced - services that require on-the-ground knowledge and insight. The scope of these types of services is rapidly expanding - ranging from conducting a 50-country survey commissioned by the United Nations, to helping a massive consumer goods corporation grow their sanitary pad distribution and marketing channels into rural markets, to localizing software for a major search engine, to verifying local businesses for the World Bank, to responding to surveys for international market and investment research firms, to conducting compensated awareness and engagement campaigns for many large, international brands.

The underlying value of our workforce comes from their unique community, their culture, their neighborhood, their social network, and their knowledge of the place where they live. We are excited to be continually discovering new ways to demonstrate this unique value they can provide to the rest of the world.

Nathan Eagle is the CEO of txteagle Inc. He holds faculty appointments at the MIT Media Laboratory and Northeastern University, and is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves engineering computational tools, designed to explore how the petabytes of data generated about human movements, financial transactions, and communication patterns can be used for social good. He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford's School of Engineering; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live' by the MIT Technology Review. Recently, he was named one of the world's top mobile phone developers by Nokia and also elected to the TR35. His academic work has been featured in Science, Nature and PNAS, as well as in the mainstream press.

For the last decade, China has been at the forefront of pushing for regional economic integration, e.g. ASEAN-China FTA, Hong Kong-China CEPA, and China-Taiwan ECFA. Could this process culminate into a movement toward a European Union-style economic bloc? What are the implications of this development for US economic welfare? US unions have long viewed the cheap goods from China as harmful to US workers; and some US economists have recently blamed the cheap credit from China for the 2008 implosion of the US financial system. The present escalation of Chinese and US rhetoric on the exchange rate is worryingly akin to the mutual pawing on the ground before the great leap forward at each other. What is the sensible solution? There is no sign that the impasse over the Doha Round of trade negotiations would be resolved in the medium-term.  It is very surprising that China has adopted a near hands-off approach on this issue because it has been the biggest beneficiary of the open multilateral trading system. Has China's failure to help strengthen the WTO framework emboldened protectionism, much to its own detriment and the world's? In this seminar, Professor Woo will examine China's strategy of external economic engagement, including the recently signed ECFA between Beijing and Taipei. Woo argues that part (and only part) of the reason why China does not already have a coherent strategy could be that its present governance institutions create disincentives to move quickly to embrace such a strategy.  

Wing Thye Woo is Professor of Economics at U.C. Davis, Yangtze River Scholar at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He has advised the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations. Professor Woo has published extensively, and his current research focuses on the economic issues of East Asia, international financial architecture, comparative economic growth, state enterprise restructuring, fiscal management, and exchange rate economics.