Aila M. Matanock is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford.  Her current research is on bringing militant groups into elections in conflicted states and, more broadly, on effective governance for minimizing conflict.  She is currently compiling an observational dataset on militant groups worldwide, while also conducting survey experiments, primarily in Colombia.  Before coming to Stanford, she was employed by the RAND Corporation to conduct research on terrorism and proliferation.  She received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, and also worked with the Belfer Center's Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory during that time.

Matthias Englert is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and a PhD student at the department of physics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His research during his stay at CISAC focuses primarily on the technology of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, the implications of their use for the nonproliferation regime, and on technical and political measures to manage proliferation risks.

Englert has participated in projects investigating technical aspects of the concept of proliferation resistance with topics including the conversion of research reactors, uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges, reducing plutonium stockpiles with reactor-based options,  spallation neutron sources and fusion power plants. Additional research topics have included fissile material stockpiles, fuel-cycles and accelerator driven systems.

Although a substantial part of his professional work recently has been technical he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies. Research interests include the dispute about Article IV of the NPT, the future development of the NPT regime, possibilities for a nuclear weapons-free world, preventive arms control, and the history and development of proliferation relevant programs. By studying contemporary theory in philosophy through the interaction of science, technology and society, Englert has acquired analytical tools to reflect on approaches describing or addressing the problem of ambivalent technology.

Englert is a vice speaker of the working group Physics and Disarmament of the German Physical Society (DPG) and a board member of the  German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and Security (FONAS).

Abstract
I will begin this talk with a short discussion of the function of warning in the US national security community, and the analytic methodology used by US intelligence agencies (in 1941 and since) to address the problem of warning. I will then present a formal model for crisis warning consisting of a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) intended to assist an intelligence analyst in deciding when to issue an alert to a foreign policy principal decision maker such as the President. The lead time demanded by the principal is a key element in the model. I will spend the remainder of the talk illustrating this warning model in the context of the brewing crisis in the Pacific from July to December 1941, and present results from test runs of the model using historical raw intelligence data from that period. While a probabilistic approach to warning is not a new idea, this research addresses three outstanding issues left unresolved from past efforts to develop such an approach:

1. The need to process multiple dependent signals in a manner that is combinatorially feasible;
2. Incorporation of the time dimension in which intelligence data is received into the inference, and the effect of dynamics on a warning decision where a finite horizon is imposed;
3. Consideration of the fact that the analyst serves as an advisor to the principal decision maker but is not completely aware of the principal’s preference set.

Together with my thesis advisor, Prof Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, I am currently writing a paper that covers the presented material, and I hope to incorporate feedback from this presentation into the paper. Because the paper is currently a work in progress, I am not distributing it at this time.

David Blum attends Stanford University, where he is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Management Science & Engineering as well as a U.S. Department of Defense SMART Scholar. He is currently developing a probabilistic model of national security crises, with the goal of improving crisis early warning. His interests also include targeting in counter-terrorism, signatures of WMD proliferation, and models of decisions made by adversarial actors as games with incomplete information. He is a graduate intern in the Counter-Proliferation Operations-Intelligence Support program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Between 2004 and 2008 David worked at the U.S. Department of Defense as an operations research analyst. He deployed twice to Iraq, in 2007 and 2008, where,  as member of Multi-National Corps Iraq, he provided direct analytic support to conventional and special operations units. He received his Master's degree from MIT in political science, concentrating in security studies, and his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University in history and physics.

Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose will describe how the United States has failed in the aftermaths of every major 20th-century war-from WWI to Afghanistan-routinely ignoring the need to create a stable postwar environment. He will argue that Iraq and Afghanistan are only the most prominent examples of such bunging, not the exceptions to the rule. Rose will draw upon historic lessons of American military engagement and explain how to effectively end our wars.

Gideon Rose is  the editor of Foreign Affairs. He served as managing editor of the magazine from 2000 to 2010 . From 1995 to December 2000 he was Olin senior fellow and deputy director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), during which time he served as chairman of CFR's Roundtable on Terrorism and director of numerous CFR study groups. He has taught American foreign policy at Columbia and Princeton Universities. From 1994 to 1995 Rose served as associate director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. From 1986 to 1987, he was assistant editor at the foreign policy quarterly The National Interest, and from 1985 to 1986 held the same position at the domestic policy quarterly The Public Interest. Rose received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from Harvard University.