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.

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.

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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. 

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About the Speaker: Dr. Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), studying how to flag dual purpose physics research so we can prevent its weaponization. Before coming to CISAC, Bárbara got her physics Ph.D. at Columbia University working on astronomical instrumentation under a NASA FINESST fellowship. Born and raised in Brazil, she got her BS in physics at Yale, after which she worked at MIT’s Nobel-Prize-winning LIGO lab and got her master’s at Columbia. She was one of the inaugural fellows of the Next-Generation Fellowship from the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, and received the 2021 American Physical Society 5 Sigma Physicist Award for congressional advocacy in nuclear disarmament.

Before starting her post-doc, Bárbara did research in a variety of fields, from particle and atomic physics to quantum optics and astronomical instrumentation. Her CISAC post-doc research, however, focuses on how to identify dual-purpose research developed by academics/civilians but of military interest, especially in the physical sciences, as a means to help on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear threat reduction initiatives.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Historically, research on racial differences in political attitudes in the United States has focused heavily on domestic politics. Recent work indicates that Black and White Americans often hold differing views on the use of force abroad and free trade at home; however, this article shows that racial gaps on international affairs are not confined to the realm of security or economic issues. Using a unique dataset of 1,504 foreign policy questions from nearly 19,000 Americans surveyed from 1975-2018, we show that racial gaps in foreign policy attitudes exist well beyond the issues explored in previous scholarship. Our results have important implications for the study of both public opinion in IR and race and ethnic politics.

Paper co-authored with Joshua Kertzer (Harvard University), Chryl Laird (University of Maryland-College Park), and Julian Wamble (The George Washington University).

About the Speaker: Naima Green-Riley is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests include Chinese foreign policy, public opinion, and international political communication. Her ongoing work focuses on public diplomacy as performed by China and the United States and the role of race in public opinion about foreign policy.

Her research has been supported by the Wilson Center China Fellowship, the Morris Abrams Award in International Relations, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Coverage of her expertise and research have appeared in the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post, The Root, and a series at the National Bureau of Asian Research; furthermore, she has made public appearances at the Aspen Security Forum and the CSIS Future Strategy Forum.

She has a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University, an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in International Relations with honors from Stanford University.  Prior to pursuing a Ph.D., she was a Pickering Fellow and a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State, serving first in Egypt and then in China. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is one of the most significant, observed, and contentious accords in world politics. How and why did the international community come to negotiate a treaty that divided nation-states between five authorized “nuclear-weapon States” and a teeming mass of nuclear unarmed? The Nuclear Club pushes back against interpretations that either attribute the NPT’s creation to the superpowers alone and to the United States in particular or that discount the importance of nuclear-security guarantees to the global nonproliferation regime. It also reveals the extent to which the Vietnam War both catalyzed and circumscribed U.S. support for nuclear internationalism as President Lyndon Baines Johnson sought to burnish his peacemaking credentials amid escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia. By reconnecting the origins of Washington’s commitment to nuclear containment to that of communist containment and by reconstructing the international consensus that arose for a closed nuclear club, processes that would go on to shape global nuclear politics for the rest of the Cold War and beyond are cast in sharper relief – an open-ended U.S. commitment to policing nuclearity across an endless frontier and an uneven nuclear order deliberately forged to avert great-power conflict while permitting and even legitimating limited wars.

About the Speaker: Jonathan R. Hunt is an Assistant Professor of History and Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in the Deterrence Studies Institute of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. His research comprehends the international and global history of the Cold War with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy on matters of war, peace, and commerce. He is the author of The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 2022) and the co-editor with Simon Miles of The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021). He received a B.A. in Plan II Liberal Arts Honors, History, and Russian and East European Studies and also a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin and has been a fellow or scholar at Stanford CISAC, RAND Corporation, and Harvard University, among others. He has previously taught at the University of Southampton and the U.S. Air War College. This year he is a fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs’ Nuclear Security Program, part of International Security Studies.

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About the Event: How do U.S. policy-makers develop national security strategy in the face of newly emerging dangers?  And why are many of these strategies deemed ineffective?  In my book project, Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World, I examine the way in which the cognitive processes associated with threat perception influence policy-makers’ preferences for specific, but sometimes incompatible, national security policy measures.  My theory linking threat perception to policy preferences is grounded in an original meta-analysis of the neuroscientific literature on human threat perception, as well as in extensive evidence from biology and cognitive science on threat learning and threat response.  In this talk, I will discuss the theory alongside data from two chapters covering the design of NSC-68 and its successor national security strategies during the early Cold War.  I combine an original corpus of digitized archival documents and new tools from natural language processing to show that much of the individual-level variation in preferences for how best to counter Communism can be traced back to differences in beliefs about the kind(s) of threat that Communism posed.
 
About the Speaker: Marika Landau-Wells is an Assistant Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.  She received a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the SaxeLab.  For the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Landau-Wells was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Her research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes - including perception, attention, learning, and memory - on political behavior and foreign policy decision-making.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.