About the Event: The Russian system is different than our own, in ways that matter. Yet, longstanding assumptions and understandings about how policy is made are outdated and misleading, and overlook festering internal dynamics which increasingly influence Russian decisions and actions. Analysts and policymakers should take stock and re-calibrate accordingly.

Lunch to be provided for registered attendees.

About the Speaker: Steedman Hinckley served seven presidents analyzing and advising on Soviet/Russian affairs at the departments of state and defense, the US embassy in Moscow, the White House, and the intelligence community. He retired in 2023 as a member of CIA’s senior analytic service. He holds a B.A. in Russian and Soviet Studies from Wesleyan University and an M.Phil. in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event:  In the summer of 2022, India and the United States set upon a new course to redefine their relationship. It came to be known as The Initiative on Critical Emerging Technology (iCET). The iCET has challenged generally accepted norms on and around regulation, in both countries. It has leveraged innovation capital, and allowed different channels of connections to be born as a result of the larger sense of purpose that shapes the iCET: a determination to secure supply chains, deepen technology and economic ties, and to build a common and trusted ecosystem. How has the iCET fared thus far? Where has it failed? What are the different channels of cooperation that have been born as a result of the iCET?

About the Speaker: Rudra Chaudhuri is the director of Carnegie India. His research focuses on the diplomatic history of South Asia, contemporary security issues, and the important role of emerging technologies and digital public infrastructure in diplomacy, statecraft, and development. He and his team at Carnegie India chair and convene the Global Technology Summit, co-hosted with the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. He is the author of Forged in Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947, and multiple scholarly and policy articles. He served as a lecturer and a senior lecturer at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London from 2009 to 2022. In 2012 he established the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office’s (FCDO) Diplomatic Academy for South Asia at King’s College London, and served as its founding director from 2013 to 2022. He holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. In February 2024, he was nominated as a visiting senior research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

No RSVP required

Please join the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance on Tuesday, May 14th at 3 PM Pacific for a talk with Liina Kamm, a Global Digital Governance Fellow at Stanford University for spring 2024 and a senior researcher at Cybernetica, a deep-tech company in Estonia. At this event, co-sponsored by Stanford University Libraries, Liina will be presenting her research on the blueprints for deploying privacy-enhancing technologies in e-government. 

About the session:
Liina Kamm's public talk at Stanford, “Blueprints for Deploying Privacy Enhancing Technologies in E-Government,” hosted by Stanford's Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, will address how governments are increasingly becoming providers of data-driven services to both citizens and organizations. As the number of these services grows, governments will store greater amounts of personal and company data. Data minimization and data protection can be legal obligations, especially for governments that have passed data protection and privacy regulations. However, even without such regulations, it is a good information security practice for organizations to only process as much data as is necessary. This talk will give an overview of how we put together a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) concept and roadmap for e-government, including motivations, an adoption strategy, and blueprints for services that benefit from PETs.
 
Liina Kamm is a Global Digital Governance Fellow at Stanford University for spring 2024 and a senior researcher at Cybernetica, a deep-tech company in Estonia. Her research focuses on the uptake of privacy-enhancing technologies, enabling privacy-preserving statistical analysis for social sciences and genomics, and the security and privacy of AI systems. Her current work also includes leading and managing research projects and consulting industry and public sector organizations on the uptake of privacy-enhancing technologies and AI risk management. She is Cybernetica’s PI for the Horizon Europe project CHESS (Cyber-security Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) project PAI-MACHINE on machine-optimizing machine learning algorithms for secure multi-party computation. She also leads the research group on the security and privacy of AI in the Estonian Centre of Excellence for AI. Liina received her PhD in computer science (cryptography) from the University of Tartu (Estonia).

About the Event: In the digital age, mass atrocity crimes are increasingly promoted and organized online. Yet, little attention has been afforded to the question of whether offensive cyberspace operations and big data analytics might be used for human protection purposes. Specifically: How might cyber-operations and online influence campaigns help protect populations from genocides, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansings? In this talk, I introduce the concept of ‘cyber humanitarian interventions’ to disrupt potential perpetrators’ means and motivations for atrocities. I will also navigate the most pressing ethical objections to deploying cyber humanitarian interventions, and identify which moral agents, precisely, are responsible for their deployment. This includes states, coalitions, international organizations, individuals, civil society, and – of course – Big Tech.

About the Speaker: Rhiannon Neilsen is the Cyber Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on digital technologies in conflict (specifically cyber, social media, and AI), mass atrocities, disinformation, and the ethics of war. Previously, Rhiannon was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, a Research Consultant for the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Please join the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance on Thursday, April 25th at 10 AM Pacific for a talk with Kairi Talves, a visiting scholar from the Estonian Military Academy. At this event, co-sponsored by Stanford University Libraries, Kairi Talves will be presenting her research about the role of technology in strengthening national security and resilience in small countries

About the session:
Kairi Talves' public talk at Stanford, “The role of technology in the security and resilience of small states: the example of Estonia ”, hosted by Stanford's Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, will address the role technology plays in today's society, including its impact on the security and defense of countries. In the future, the level of technological innovation and the ability to adopt new technologies will increasingly affect the balance of power and the formation of alliances between the states. In this perspective, for the small countries that are not shaping major technological trends or defining future global threats, it is important to find strategic modes of action. The presentation will draw on the research of Estonia to discuss the role of technology in shaping the national security and resilience of a small state in the face of a superior adversary. It reflects on the opportunities and challenges related to the factors of Estonian technological and societal development after regaining its independence in the 1990s.
 
Kairi Talves, currently a Global Digital Governance Fellow at Stanford University, is a Scientific Adviser at the Estonian Ministry of Defence and a Visiting Researcher at the Estonian Military Academy. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Tartu. Her main research interests cover the different aspects of technology in society: societal development and change (e.g., technological developments) and their social impact, people’s attitudes and coping in the context of rapid societal changes, public acceptance of technology and technology in the military: risks, trust, acceptance, ethical aspects, challenges of human-machine interaction, cognitive warfare, innovation of military organizations, technology, and states’ power balance. She has published a number of research papers in international journals and chapters in edited volumes. Together with Prof. Dierk Spreen from the University of Bundeswehr Munich, she is the co-editor of the book “Technology in the Military Now: Sociological, Cultural, and Ethical Perspectives,” which is planned to be published in Springer in 2025.

About the Event: Catastrophic, civilization-threatening climate change is a genuine possibility within the coming century. This talk will consider evidence that a variety of climate tipping points and other planetary boundaries have already been crossed, and that climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases may be considerably higher than recent IPCC estimates. Further, modeling of cascading risks – such as how multiple tipping points might interact if thresholds are crossed – suggests that the full impact of anthropogenic environmental change remains unknown and likely underestimated.  Meanwhile, a widespread focus on high-level international and national governance obscures how denial, disinformation, and multi-layered, subnational governance processes are delaying and derailing changes needed to reach Paris Agreement goals. The talk will end with reflections on ways forward. 
 
About the Speakers: Paul N. Edwards is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Director of the Program on Science, Technology & Society, and Co-Director of the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative, as well as Professor of Information and History (Emeritus) at the University of Michigan. Edwards is the author of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) and The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996), and co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001), as well as other books and numerous articles. With Janet Vertesi, he co-edits the Infrastructures book series for MIT Press. Edwards recently served as a Lead Author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The emergence of generative language models, such as the one powering ChatGPT, has sparked widespread interest due to its potential implications for the future of work and society at large. The drive to automate decision-making is reaching high-stakes applications like military applications and mental health care, where non-zero error rates lead to individual failures with dire consequences and the potential to cause wide-scale harm. Thus, it is time to scrutinize and ask whether we should use language models in high-stakes decision-making scenarios. In this talk, I will dissect the question by studying how human decision-making differs from language models, if language models add their own dynamics to conflict situations, and whether they can recognize emergency/high-stakes user queries. 
 
About the Speaker: Max Lamparth is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Stanford Center for AI Safety, and the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative at Stanford University. He is advised by Prof. Steve Luby, Prof. Paul Edwards, and Prof. Clark Barrett.

With his research, he wants to make AI systems more secure and safe to use to avoid individual and wide-scale harm. Specifically, he is focusing on how to improve the robustness and alignment of language models, how to make their inner workings more interpretable, and how to reduce the potential for misuses.

Max received his Ph.D. in August 2023 from the Technical University of Munich and previously a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Every moment of every day, we see, engage, and construct with biology. From gene editing with CRISPR in a lab to making yogurt under kitchen counters, engineering with biology permeates all aspects of our lives. However, not everyone sees biology as around us, in us, and of us. The 21st century may be the century of biotechnology, but it is also the time when many do not feel empowered to engage. People have been disenfranchised from innovating with biology at a moment of crisis: climate change, pandemics, and global inequality afflict millions. But what if everyone could access the tools and knowledge to see, understand, and construct effective biological solutions to their own problems, in their own communities? What if biology was by and for everyone?

Biology for Everyone, a collaborative research project led by Dr. Callie Chappell and their interdisciplinary team, envisions (1) creating publicly accessible labs at the local level, such as in public libraries (LABraries) and (2) professional pathways (LABrarians) and curricula for a national community biology training program. This CISAC seminar will present results from a series of working groups convening a diverse group of scientists, educators, academics, activists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and artists to deliberate on a national strategy to advance biology for everyone (BIO4E).

About the Speaker: Dr. Callie Chappell is a Bio Security and Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Their research focuses on expanding participation, innovation, and imagination in American bioeconomy through community engagement. Previously, they were involved in leading BioJam, a collaboration between community organizations in Salinas, CA and Stanford University, to reimagine bioengineering through the lens of youth leadership, culture, and creativity. Dr. Chappell received their PhD from Stanford University in Biology, where they were a Fellow with the Center for Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG), a graduate ethics fellow with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics, BioFutures Fellow with the Department of Bioengineering, and National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellow. During their PhD, Dr. Chappell was also a Mirzayan Science and Technology Fellow with the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, Catherine S. McCarter Science Policy Fellow with the Ecological Society of America (ESA), and president of the Stanford Science Policy Group. In addition to their research and policy work, Dr. Chappell is also a professional artist and arts educator.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: All technology is dual use to some degree: it has both civilian and military applications. This foundational feature often makes it hard to limit military competition. In a recent International Organization article, Jane Vaynman and Tristan Volpe reveal why this is the case. They argue that the duality of technology matters because it shapes the tension between detection and disclosure at the heart of arms control: agreements must provide enough information to detect violations, but not so much that they disclose deeper security vulnerabilities. They characterize technology along two dual use dimensions: (1) the ease of distinguishing military from civilian uses; (2) the degree of integration within military enterprises and the civilian economy. As these attributes vary, so do prospects for cooperation. The study introduces a new data set to assess both variables and their impact on competition across all modern armament technologies.

Unfortunately, many modern technologies at the crux of US-China competition today—from space systems and cyber capabilities to AI foundation models—fall in what Vaynman and Volpe identify as a "dead zone" for arms control. They show how the dual use features of these capabilities sharpen the tension between detection and disclosure, thereby dooming the prospects for cooperation. For AI models, however, it may be more productive to consider how this general-purpose technology will shape the dual use attributes of existing weapon platforms, which stand a better chance of being governed. 

About the Speakers:

Jane Vaynman (Ph.D.) is assistant professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Vaynman’s work focuses on security cooperation between adversarial states, the design of arms control agreements, and the effects of technology on patterns of international cooperation and competition. From 2022-2024 she served a senior advisor in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability at the U.S. Department of State.  Her prior academic appointments include the Department of Political Science at Temple University and the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Dr. Vaynman received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University and B.A. from in international relations from Stanford University, with honors from CISAC. 

Tristan A. Volpe (Ph.D.) is an assistant professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (Oxford University Press, 2023). His work has been published in academic and general policy journals such as International Organization, Security Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, and The Washington Quarterly. Prior to NPS and Carnegie, Dr. Volpe was a predoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He currently lives on the Monterey Peninsula in California.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: This research proposal aims to apply lessons learned from the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime to the design and negotiation of a future global system for AI governance, with a particular focus on India's role and interests.

The emergence of the post 1945 global order was accelerated in part by the discovery and subsequent weaponization of nuclear energy, a disruptive technology at the time. There are  visible parallels with the development of Artificial Intelligence in the backdrop of the present geopolitical flux and redistribution of global power. The nuclear non-proliferation regime, established to govern the development, distribution and deployment of this technology, has been critiqued on account of structural and systemic inequities and its limited success in meeting its objectives. India’s unique position during the NPT negotiations is widely recognized as having paid dividends. 

The proposed research will use a combination of tools, including literature review, case studies and interviews with primary sources to examine the dynamics of international cooperation, compliance and deterrence that have shaped nuclear governance. By juxtaposing these with specific aspects of AI meriting global governance such as technology diffusion, ethical concerns, data security, data monetization etc, the research aims to identify transferable strategies, mechanisms, and norms that can inform the development of AI governance frameworks and evaluate the state of emerging structures and organizations in place to do so. Finally, it will attempt to identify a set of values and approaches India could prioritize in designing new or revamping existing structures for global governance of AI to secure both its own, as well as interests of the Global South.

 The research is timely and significant as it seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of how India could shape and influence international norms for responsible AI development and deployment, establish its leadership in the global AI landscape and ultimately contribute to its quest for technology sovereignty. 
 
About the Speaker: Mahima Sikand is currently a Visiting Scholar with the inaugural Critical and Emerging Technologies and the US-India Strategic Partnership Fellowship at the Center for Security and International Cooperation at Stanford University. At CISAC, Mahima is looking at the intersection of technology, national security and foreign policy as it relates to the evolution of Indian grand strategy, the India-US strategic partnership and shaping global governance frameworks for emerging technologies. Her research is focused on examining the the lessons India could draw from the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime to future negotiations on establishment of a global AI Governance regime.

Mahima is an Indian diplomat with eight years of experience, and has served in various capacities at the Indian Embassy in Moscow and the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi. Mahima’s expertise lies in foreign policy, strategy formulation, diplomacy, multilateral negotiations, communications and community engagement.  She holds a Masters in International Relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Bachelors in Neurobiology and Physiology from the University of Maryland, College Park. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.