FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
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Paul Stockton is the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and is director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Stockton is the editor of Homeland Security (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2005). His research has appeared in Political Science Quarterly, International Security and Strategic Survey. He is co-editor of Reconstituting America's Defense: America's New National Security Strategy (1992). Stockton has also published an Adelphi Paper and has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James Lindsay and Randall Ripley, eds., U.S. Foreign Policy After the Cold War (1997). Stockton received a BA summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1976 and a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1986. He served from 1986-1989 as legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Stockton was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship for 1989-1990 by CISAC. In August 1990, he joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of the NPS Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of the NPS School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.
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How do you stop a terrorist?
You can work hard: Post men and equipment at every street corner, every port, every bay, every slip of beach, every straight stretch of asphalt long enough to land a plane.
You will spend billions, and your lines will be thin. All you've done is build the "impregnable" Atlantic Sea Wall--which the Allies punched through in hours on D-Day.
You've got to work smarter, not harder.
The opening line of the Oscar-winning movie A Beautiful Mind is "Mathematicians won the war." During World War II, the mathematics underlying cryptography played an important role in military planning.
Thereafter came a new kind of war. After the first frosts descended in the Soviet East, perhaps $2 billion were spent in the development of Game Theory.
Now again we face a new kind of war. And we need a new kind of mathematics to fight it.
Since 2001, tremendous amounts of information have been gathered regarding terrorist cells and individuals potentially planning future attacks. There is now a pressing need to develop new mathematical and computational techniques to assist in the analysis of this information, both to quantify future threats and to quantify the effectiveness of counterterrorism operations and strategies. Concepts and techniques from mathematics--specifically, from Lattice Theory and Reflexive Theory--have already been applied to counterterrorism and homeland security problems. The following is a partial list of such problems.
1. Strategies for disrupting terrorist cells
2. Data analysis of terrorist activity
3. Border penetration and security
4. Terrorist cell formation
Jonathan Farley is a CISAC science fellow and a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. His work focuses on applying lattice theory and other branches of mathematics to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security.
In 2001-2002 he was one of four Americans to win a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to the United Kingdom. In the calendar years 2003 and 2004 he taught as a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 he received the Harvard Foundation's Distinguished Scientist of the Year Award, a medal presented on behalf of the president of Harvard University for "outstanding achievements and contributions in the field of mathematics." The City of Cambridge, Mass., declared March 19, 2004, to be "Dr. Jonathan David Farley Day."
He obtained his doctorate in mathematics from Oxford University in 1995, after winning Oxford's highest mathematics awards, the Senior Mathematical Prize and Johnson University Prize, in 1994. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1991 with the second highest average in his graduating class.
Farley's work includes the solution of a problem posed by universal algebraist George Gratzer that remained unsolved for 34 years, and the solution (published in 2005) of a problem posed in 1981 by MIT mathematics professor Richard Stanley.
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Sonja Schmid is a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and affiliated with the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University earlier this year. Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. Apart from the history and sociology of Soviet and post-Soviet science and technology, her research interests include risk communication, the popularization of science and technology, and international technology transfer.
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Post-9/11, the U.S. government instituted the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) Program, which compares two index fingerprints from every foreign visitor entering the U.S. against a watchlist of fingerprints from several million criminals and suspected terrorists. In the first part of this talk, we develop a new probabilistic model for fingerprint matching that allows for population heterogeneity in fingerprint image quality, calibrate this model using data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and embed the model into a Stackelberg game, in which the U.S. government chooses an optimal biometric strategy to maximize the detection probability subject to a constraint on the mean biometric processing time per legal visitor, and then the terrorist chooses his fingerprint image quality to minimize his detection probability. We predict that switching from a two-finger system to a ten-finger system would increase the detection probability in this game from 0.526 to 0.949. This work was the basis of Congressional testimony last fall, and the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that they are switching from a two-finger system to a ten-finger system. In the second part of this talk, we use new data from Cogent (the biometrics vendor for the U.S. Visit Program) to derive a two-stage, two-finger biometric strategy that works as well as a one-stage, ten-finger strategy. The second stage of this two-stage strategy employs texture matching rather than the traditional minutiae matching.
Manas Baveja is a doctoral candidate in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University and a CISAC science fellow. His doctoral research is focused on quantitative modeling of homeland security projects.
Lawrence Wein is the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC.
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Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Lawrence Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. After getting a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1988, he spent 14 years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the DEC Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science. His research interests include mathematical models in operations management, medicine and biology.
Since 2001, he has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on an emergency response to a smallpox attack, an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and an analysis of a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?", and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.
For his homeland security research, Wein has received several awards from the International Federation of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), including the Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the INFORMS President’s Award for contributions to society, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best research publication, and the George E. Kimball Medal. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
Lynn Eden is associate director for research/senior research scholar at CISAC. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. Her book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Michael May is professor emeritus (research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for Intenrational Studies. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988.
Charles Perrow is professor emeritus of sociology at Yale University. His current interests are in managing highly interactive, tightly-coupled-systems (including hospitals, nuclear plants, chemical plants, power grids, aviation, the space program, and intelligent transportation systems). These interests grew out of his work on "normal accidents," with its emphasis upon organizational design and systems theory. An organizational theorist, he is the author of a number of award winning books in the field of sociology.
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Not in residence
Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.
In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.
Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.
Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000.
May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971.
May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the International Institute on Strategic Studies, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards.
His current research interests are nuclear weapons policy in the US and in other countries; nuclear terrorism; nuclear and other forms of energy and their impact on the environment, health and safety and security; the use of statistics and mathematical models in the public sphere.
May is continuing work on creating a secure future for civilian nuclear applications. In October 2007, May hosted an international workshop on how the nuclear weapon states can help rebuild the consensus underlying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Proceedings and a summary report are available online or by email request. May also chaired a technical working group on nuclear forensics. The final report is available online.
In April 2007, May in cooperation with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Professor Ashton Carter of Harvard hosted a workshop on what would have to be done to be ready for a terrorist nuclear detonation. The report is available online at the Preventive Defense Project. A summary, titled, "The Day After: Action Following a Nuclear Blast in a U.S. City," was published fall 2007 in Washington Quarterly and is available online.
Recent work also includes a study of nuclear postures in several countries (2007 - 2009); an article on nuclear disarmament and one on tactical nuclear weapons; and a report with Kate Marvel for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on possible game changers in the nuclear energy industry.
During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union made launch-on-warning an important part of their nuclear strategies. To achieve the launch-on-warning capability both countries deployed networks of early-warning satellites and radars as well as command and control systems that allowed them to launch a retaliatory strike in response to a ballistic missile attack. These systems, which remain operational to this day, are believed to support the "hair-trigger alert" posture of strategic nuclear forces.
This presentation will consider the current status of the U.S. and Russian early-warning systems and the extent to which characteristics of these systems can contribute to the danger of an accidental ballistic missile launch. It will also analyze various proposals that aim at reducing the danger of accidental launch--de-alerting, reduction of strategic forces, repairing the Russian early-warning system, etc. It will be shown that most of these measures are inadequate and some may in fact increase the danger of an accident.
Pavel Podvig joined CISAC as a research associate in 2004. Before that he was a researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He worked as a visiting researcher with the Security Studies Program at MIT and with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and he taught physics in MIPT's General Physics Department for more than ten years. Podvig graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, with a degree in physics. In 2004 he received a PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
His research has focused on technical and political issues of missile defense, space security, U.S.-Russian relations, structure and capabilities of the Russian strategic forces, nuclear nonproliferation. He was the head of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces research project and the editor of a book of the same title, which is considered a definitive source of information on Russian strategic forces.
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Pavel Podvig is an independent analyst based in Geneva, where he runs his research project, "Russian Nuclear Forces." He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research and a researcher with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. Pavel Podvig started his work on arms control at the Center for Arms Control Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), which was the first independent research organization in Russia dedicated to analysis of technical issues of disarmament and nonproliferation. Pavel Podvig led the Center for Arms Control Studies project that produced the book, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (MIT Press, 2001). In recognition of his work in Russia, the American Physical Society awarded Podvig the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award of 2008 (with Anatoli Diakov). Podvig worked with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, the Security Studies Program at MIT, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His current research focuses on the Russian strategic forces and nuclear weapons complex, as well as technical and political aspects of nuclear nonproliferation, disarmament, missile defense, and U.S.-Russian arms control process. Pavel Podvig is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. He has a physics degree from MIPT and PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
For a list of publications, please visit http://russianforces.org/podvig/.
Zia Mian, a research assistant with the Program on Science and Global Security (PS&GS) at Princeton University and lecturer of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, has been with PS&GS since 1997. His interests include nuclear weapons and nuclear energy programs in South Asia, and finding alternative policies that can contribute to disarmament and sustainable development. With Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Mian co-produced Crossing the Lines, a documentary film about India, Pakistan, and the battle over Kashmir, which was shown at CISAC this past summer. He has edited and co-edited a number of books on South Asia, including Out of the Nuclear Shadow (co-edited with Smitu Kothari; Zed Press, London and Rainbow Press, New Delhi, 2001). Mian has also co-edited a volume with Iftikhar Ahmad and Dohra Ahmad, Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on Pakistan by Eqbal Ahmad (Oxford University Press, Karachi).
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