Abstract: Recent advances in synthetic biology are transforming our capacities to make things with biology. This bio-based manufacturing technology has the potential to be most disruptive around products for which existing material supply chains result in limited access. For example, broad access to medicines and the development of new medicines has been difficult to achieve, largely due to the coupling between material supply chains and these therapeutic compounds. We are developing a biotechnology platform that will allow us to replace current supply chains for already approved medicines with stable, secure, scalable, distributed, and economical microbial fermentation. Our initial target is the opioids, an essential class of medicines for pain management and palliative care, which are currently sourced through opium poppy cultivation. In addition, we will leverage this technology to access novel compound structural space that will open up tremendous opportunity for transforming the discovery and development of new drugs over a longer-time frame.

About the Speaker: Christina D. Smolke is an Associate Professor, Associate Chair of Education, and W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar in the Department of Bioengineering and, by courtesy, Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Christina’s research program develops foundational tools that drive transformative advances in our ability to engineering biology. For example, her group has led the development of a novel class of biological I/O devices, fundamentally changing how we interact with and program biology. Her group uses these tools to drive transformative advances in diverse areas such as cellular therapies and natural product biosynthesis and drug discovery. Christina is an inventor on over 15 patents and her research program has been honored with numerous awards, including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, WTN Award in Biotechnology, and TR35 Award.

Abstract: Any given computer or network runs code from an enormous number of sources, including the producer of the operating system, the hardware, built-in and user-installed applications, websites, and the user herself.  Computers may also run code injected by remote attackers of various sorts including autonomous viruses, individual hackers and state-backed organizations.  What happens when the authors of these various software components have different objectives for the behavior of that single computer or network?

This talk will propose a simple theory that predicts which of these contestants will tend to win in different kinds of computer security contests, including the robustness of encrypted communications; the control of cloud-based and distributed computing systems; and some hypothetical future applications to the security of AI systems.

About the Speaker: Peter Eckersley is Technology Projects Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He leads a team of technologists who do both coding and policy work to strengthen Internet security, privacy, and innovation.

His work at EFF has included several projects to improve the strength and deployment of cryptography on the Internet, including HTTPS Everywhere, the SSL Observatory, and Sovereign Keys; efforts to educate Internet users about privacy and security threats such as Surveillance Self-Defense International and Panopticlick; rallying computer scientists in opposition to Internet blacklist legislation; and efforts to make networks more neutral, open, and transparent, including the first controlled tests of packet forgery by Comcast and promoting secure forms of open wireless networks.

Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne. His doctoral research was on digital copyright and the alternatives, including the computer security dimensions of copyright policy.

Due to the overwhelming response we received for this event and to our space constraints,

registration is now closed. We regret that we are unable to accommodate any more visitors.

Abstract: The explosion of an asteroid over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 with energy 30X larger than the Hiroshima bomb was a wake-up call that asteroids of this size hit the Earth every few decades. Several large telescopes are in the works which will over the next 10 years drastically increase our ability to discover and track asteroids.  A large number of these asteroids will be found to be on orbits with a high probability (great than a few percent) of hitting the Earth with energy larger than several hundred kilotons, and a few of these will actually hit the Earth. I will discuss the consequences of us actually knowing many years in advance the date and place of an asteroid impact, and how current technology makes it relatively easy to deflect an asteroid in such cases. A number of questions will be discussed such as: Who pays for gathering and analyzing the data? Who controls the data? Who is responsible for deflecting asteroids? What are the consequences (political, social, economic) on a particular area which is known to be threatened during the time period before the asteroid is deflected? The scenario of human beings deflecting an asteroid from hitting the Earth is going to happen, and is something policy makers need to be prepared for.

About the Speaker: Dr. Lu is the CEO and co-founder of the Sentinel Mission, a project of the B612 Foundation. Dr. Lu, a physicist with a PhD from Stanford, was selected for the NASA astronaut corps in 1994. He flew two Space Shuttle missions, was the first American to launch as Flight Engineer on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and spent 206 days in space aboard the International Space Station in 2003. He is the recipient of NASA’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal, and worked on Google’s Advanced Project Team.

Abstract: The purpose of this book project is to explain what it is about terrorism that makes it inherently difficult for the American government to formulate an effective counterterrorism policy. Why is terrorism such an intractable problem?  What are the obstacles to developing a consistent and coherent counterterrorism strategy?  The barriers that we identify flow from the issue itself, not the particular political predispositions of individual policy makers or flawed organizational processes.  We also find that scholars and policy makers face similar difficulties – the study of terrorism is often confused and contentious, and the study of counterterrorism can be even more frustrating.  

The book is co-authored by Martha Crenshaw and  Gary LaFree, Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, as well as professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

About the Speaker: Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI and a professor of political science by courtesy at Stanford. She was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where she taught from 1974 to 2007. She has written extensively on the issue of political terrorism; her first article, "The Concept of Revolutionary Terrorism," was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1972. Her recent work includes “Trajectories of terrorism: Attack patterns of foreign groups that have targeted the United States, 1970–2004,” in Criminology & Public Policy, 8, 3 (August 2009) (with Gary LaFree and Sue-Ming Yang), “The Obama Administration and Counterterrorism,” in Obama in Office: the First Two Years, ed. James Thurber (Paradigm Publishers, 2011), and “Will Threats Deter Nuclear Terrorism?” in Deterring Terrorism: Theory and Practice, ed. Andreas Wenger and Alex Wilner (Stanford University Press, 2012). She is also the editor of The Consequences of Counterterrorism (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). In 2011 Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work.

She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. In 2005-2006 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2005 she has been a lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. In 2009 she was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation/Department of Defense Minerva Initiative for a project on "mapping terrorist organizations." She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Political Psychology, Security Studies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She is currently a member of the Committee on Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Global Nuclear Detection Architecture of the National Academies of Science.

Abstract: CRISPR-Cas9 and other new tools are making genome editing faster, cheaper, and more accurate. When coupled with cheaper sequencing and our more slowly increasing understanding of the effects of DNA sequencing, this breakthrough technology may bring within our reach the power to transform, fundamentally, all of life.  Most of the attention so far has focused on human germ line genome editing, but the implications stretch much farther. This talk will explore some of the issues for the use of this technology, in humans (germ line or somatic cell) and in other life-forms. It will also note the limits of our current understanding and regulatory framework.

About the Speaker: Hank Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics at Stanford University.  He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from advances in the biosciences, particularly from genetics, neuroscience, and human stem cell research.  He directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society; chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research; and serves on the Neuroscience Forum of the Institute of Medicine, the Advisory Council for the National Institute for General Medical Sciences of NIH, the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law of the National Academy of Sciences, and the NIH Multi-Council Working Group on the BRAIN Initiative. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.

Professor Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and from Yale Law School in 1977.  He served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court.  After working during the Carter Administration in the Departments of Defense and Energy, he entered private practice in Los Angeles in 1981 as a litigator with the law firm of Tuttle & Taylor, Inc.  He began teaching at Stanford in 1985.  

Abstract: When President Obama approved the "Olympic Games'' cyber attacks on Iran, he told aides that he was worried about what would happen when nations around the world began to use destructive cyber attacks as a new weapon of disruption and coercion. Now, we've begun to find out. David Sanger, the national security correspondent of The New York Times and author of Confront and Conceal, the book that revealed the cyber program against Iran, will explore how offensive cyber operations have developed in the Obama administration -- and why they have been so little debated.

About the Speaker: David E. Sanger is National Security Correspondent and senior writer for The New York Times. He is the author of two bestsellers on foreign affairs: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (2009) and Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (2012). He served as the Times’ Tokyo Bureau Chief, Washington Economic Correspondent, White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush Administrations and Chief Washington Correspondent.

Mr. Sanger has twice been a member of New York Times teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, first for the investigation into the causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986, and later for investigations into the struggles within the Clinton administration over technology exports to China. He teaches national security policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.