Drell Lecture Recording: https://youtu.be/K8qLqJwi4Qc

Drell Lecture Transcript: NA

Speaker's Biography: Admiral Inman graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1950, and from the National War College in 1972.  He became an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1987.  He was appointed as a tenured professor holding the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy in August 2001.  He served as Interim Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs from 1 January to 31 December 2005 and again from January 2009 to March 2010.

Admiral Inman served in the U.S. Navy from November 1951 to July 1982, when he retired with the permanent rank of Admiral.  While on active duty he served as Director of the National Security Agency and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.  After retirement from the Navy, he was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas for four years and Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Westmark Systems, Inc., a privately owned electronics industry holding company for three years.  Admiral Inman also served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 1987 through 1990.

Admiral Inman’s primary business activity since 1990 has been investing in start-up technology companies, where he is a Managing Director of Gefinor Ventures and of Limestone Capital Advisors.  He serves as a Trustee of the American Assembly and the California Institute of Technology.  He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Abstract: Today, 100 people get an alert before earthquakes in California.  Recent legislation says everyone should get a warning.  In the future, your phone will detect earthquakes.  In the era of big data and the Internet of Things, how can seismology harness new technologies both for the purpose of science, and to reduce the impact of future disasters around the world?  In this seminar, we will discuss the current status of real-time earthquake information using existing seismic and emerging geodetic networks.  We will also explore on what might be possible in the near future as the quality and number of sensors in consumer electronics increase by orders of magnitude.

About the Speaker: Richard Allen is the Director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, a Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley.  He is an expert in earthquake alerting systems, developing methodologies to detect earthquakes and issue warnings prior to shaking.  His group uses seismic and GPS sensing networks, and is experimenting with the use of smartphones.  Testing of a warning system for the US west coast is currently under way.  Allen’s group also uses geophysical sensing networks to image the internal 3D structure of the Earth and constrain the driving forces responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes and other deformation of the Earth’s surface.  His research has been featured in Science, Nature, Scientific American, the New York Times and dozens of other media outlets around the world.  He has a BA from Cambridge University, a PhD from Princeton University, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech.

Abstract: A number of senior Intelligence Community (IC) officials describe compliance as one of the IC’s biggest problems, perhaps the biggest. The underlying legal and informational issues are bound to become more acute and complex.  How can AI help? The IC protects our nation by analyzing the relationships between people, places, and things - essentially "connecting the dots.”  Doing so while remaining compliant with policies such as Executive Order 12333[1] and Presidential Policy Directive 28[2] is a balancing act. The interpretation, implementation, and enforcement of policy vary across organizations and administrations.  This frequently leaves analysts struggling to determine what data they can and cannot look at. The Internet, mobile, and “Big Data” generally further complicate the problem. The sheer volume, velocity, and variety of data that is constantly being generated necessitate automation, and even AI, to manage.  However, the benefits of analytic automation over the data deluge will remain limited, until the IC finds a way to scale the processing of legal judgments at a comparable rate.

DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, MICHAEL MORELL HAD TO CANCEL HIS VISIT. THE TALK IS BEING REPLACED WITH A PANEL DISCUSSION ON TERRORISM.

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- This event is offered as a joint sponsorship with the Hoover Institution - 

About the Event: Michael Morell, Former Deputy Director and twice Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, will be interviewed by Amy Zegart, CISAC Co-director and Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Audience members will have an opportunity to ask questions after the interview. A book signing will follow. Copies of Michael Morell's book will be available for purchase in the Reuben Hills ("East") Conference Room, on the second floor of Encina Hall. 

About the Speaker: Michael Morell, the former Acting Director and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is one of our nation’s leading national security professionals, with extensive experience in intelligence and foreign policy.

During his 33-year career at CIA, he served as Deputy Director for over three years, a job in which he managed the Agency’s day-to-day operations, represented the Agency at the White House and Congress, and maintained the Agency’s relationships with intelligence services and foreign leaders around the world.  Michael also served twice as Acting Director, leading CIA when Leon Panetta was named Secretary of Defense and again after David Petraeus left government.

Michael’s senior assignments at CIA also included serving for two years as the Director of Intelligence, the Agency’s top analyst, and for two years as Executive Director, the CIA’s top administrator—managing human resources, the budget, security, and information technology for an agency the size of a Fortune 200 firm.

Michael retired from the CIA in September 2013.  Upon retiring, he joined the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a senior fellow.  He also became a member of the Board of Directors of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, one the of the largest tire manufacturers in the world, as well as a Senior Counselor at Beacon Global Strategies, a Washington, DC based national security consulting firm. Michael is also a commentator on national security issues for CBS News.

Abstract: While social media pervades many aspects of our lives, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for large scale decision making: crowds of hundreds, perhaps millions, of individuals collaborating together to come to consensus on difficult societal issues. The objective of our research is to develop an algorithmic and empirical understanding of large scale decision making, and experiment with real-life deployments of our algorithms. In this talk, we will first present our platform for voting in participatory budgeting elections, which has been used in over a dozen different elections. We will then describe the related algorithmic problem of knapsack voting, where voters have to allocate a fixed amount of funds among multiple projects. We will conclude by analyzing opinion formation processes in terms of their effect on polarization, and relate this to the design of recommendation systems for friends and contents.

About the Speaker: Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms; current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship (2004-06), a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award (2002-07), and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award (2010). He was a co-author on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, and an Edelman Laureate in 2014.

Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014.