Dramatic improvements and cost reductions in renewable energy technologies have occurred over the past decade and even greater improvements are expected in the years to come. In addition, plentiful unconventional gas resources in North America and potentially broadly around the world provide prospects for a long-term lower carbon-emitting fossil fuel for electricity production and other uses. This optimistic outlook is in stark contrast to the energy situation in developing countries. Even today, several billion people lack access to electricity and clean cooking fuels. Additionally, industries in these developing countries--which are crucial for raising people from poverty, suffer from unreliable electricity and fuel supplies, which dramatically lowers productivity. This talk will first discuss the promising developments in advanced energy technologies and then explore the prospects, challenges and options for addressing energy access in the developing countries.

About the speaker: Sally M. Benson was appointed GCEP Director in January 2009 after holding the Executive Director post since March 2007. A Professor (Research) in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering (ERE) in the School of Earth Sciences, Benson has been a member of Stanford’s faculty since 2007. Her research group in ERE investigates fundamental characteristics of carbon dioxide storage in geologic formations as a means of climate change mitigation. She teaches courses on carbon dioxide capture and storage and greenhouse gas mitigation technologies.

Prior to joining GCEP, Benson worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), serving in a number of capacities, including Division Director for Earth Sciences, Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Sciences, and Deputy Director for Operations. Benson graduated from Barnard College at Columbia University in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in geology. She completed her graduate education in 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley, after receiving master’s and doctoral degrees, both in materials science and mineral engineering.

This presentation will describe the NRC’s mission, the traditional approach to regulation of nuclear power facilities, and the NRC’s more recent use of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) in regulation. The presentation will also explore uncertainties in PRA and the role they play in NRC decision making.

About the speaker: The Honorable George Apostolakis was sworn in as a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on April 23, 2010, to a term ending on June 30, 2014.

Dr. Apostolakis has had a distinguished career as an engineer, professor and risk analyst. Before joining the NRC, he was a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also a member and former Chairman of the statutory Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards of the NRC.

In 2007, Dr. Apostolakis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "innovations in the theory and practice of probabilistic risk assessment and risk management." He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety and is the founder of the International Conferences on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management. He received the Tommy Thompson Award for his contributions to improvement of reactor safety in 1999 and the Arthur Holly Compton Award in Education in 2005 from the American Nuclear Society.

Dr. Apostolakis is an internationally recognized expert in risk assessment. He has published more than 120 papers in technical journals and has made numerous presentations at national and international conferences. He has edited or co-edited eight books and conference proceedings and has participated in many probabilistic risk assessment courses and reviews.

Dr. Apostolakis received his diploma in electrical engineering from the National Technical University in Athens, Greece in 1969. He earned a master's degree in engineering science in 1970 and a Ph.D. in engineering science and applied mathematics in 1973, both from the California Institute of Technology.

The tools of molecular biology have augmented forensic biological analyses and contributed to solving crimes, developing investigative leads, and exonerating the innocent. The methods are exquisitely sensitive and highly resolving. Success stories abound and are reported almost daily in the media. Indeed, forensic DNA typing is the gold standard of the forensic science disciplines. Although the methods and interpretations generally are reliable, there are some limitations that scientists, stakeholders, decision makers, and the public may not appreciate. This presentation will provide insight into the applications extolling their value and discussing the problems that need to be overcome or avoided.

About the speaker: Bruce Budowle, PhD, director of the UNT Health Science Center's Institute of Investigative Genetics and vice chair of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Genetics, has been named a Health Care Hero by Dallas Business Journal. He joined the Health Science Center in 2009, bringing renowned expertise in the areas of counterterrorism, primarily in identification of victims from mass disasters and microbial forensics.

Prior to joining the Health Science Center, Budowle spent 40 years as a senior scientist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington, D.C. He was a principal advisor in efforts to identify victims from the World Trade Center attack in 2001 and helped establish a mitochondrial DNA sequencing program to enable high-throughput sequencing of human remains.

Budowle's commitment to helping families resolve missing persons cases led him to Fort Worth after a lifetime in the Virginia/Washington, D.C., area in order to collaborate with Health Science Center researchers and advance the knowledge and use of forensics and DNA to improve health and safety of the world's population. Budowle has also been instrumental in establishing the DNA-ProKids initiative to identify missing children on an international scale.

About the Topic: Japan’s March 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami led to core damage in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station. This presentation will describe both the short-term and long-term actions of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to implement lessons learned from the Fukushima accident and will highlight Commissioner Apostolakis’ views on the accident. The presentation will also describe the findings of the Commissioner’s Risk Management Task Force chartered to develop a strategic vision and options for adopting a more comprehensive and holistic risk-informed, performance-based regulatory approach for the NRC.

About the Speaker: George Apostolakis was sworn in as a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on April 23, 2010, to a term ending on June 30, 2014. 

Dr. Apostolakis has had a distinguished career as an engineer, professor and risk analyst. Before joining the NRC, he was a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He was also a member and former Chairman of the statutory Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards of the NRC. In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "innovations in the theory and practice of probabilistic risk assessment and risk management." He received the Tommy Thompson Award for his contributions to improvement of reactor safety in 1999 and the Arthur Holly Compton Award in Education in 2005 from the American Nuclear Society.

Sponsored by

The Preventive Defense Project and the

CISAC Science Seminar Series

Roughly 85% of the critical infrastructure systems in the United States is owned or operated by the private sector. Managers of these systems must keep everything running and try to ensure nothing bad happens, despite increasing system complexity and demand for continuing improvements in efficiency. This challenge naturally leads to the questions “which parts of an infrastructure are critical,” “how critical are they,” and “how should we invest limited budget to defend our infrastructure?”

We introduce two- and three-stage optimization models that represent the strategic, game-theoretic interactions between preparations to defend critical infrastructure, an “attacker” who observes these preparations before acting, and a “defender” who operates the surviving infrastructure as best as possible after an optimal attack. We identify worst-case disruptions in the operation of a system by solving a system interdiction problem. Then, given an available budget and list of possible defensive investments (e.g., hardening, redundancy, capacity expansion), we solve for a combination of investments that makes the system maximally resilient to worst-case disruption. We show some unexpected results that have proven insightful.

These models apply equally well to government, military, and commercial systems. Between our NPS student-officers and faculty, we have conducted over 150 case studies on systems ranging from electric power, to transportation, to supply chains, to the Internet.

About the speaker: David L. Alderson, Ph.D, joined the Naval Postgraduate School faculty in 2006 after working for three years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received a B.S.E. in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on the function and operation of critical infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how to invest limited resources to ensure efficient and resilient performance in the face of accidents, failures, natural disasters, or deliberate attacks. He currently serves as the Director of the NPS Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID). As part of a Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) team studying "Next-Generation Network Science," he studies tradeoffs between efficiency, complexity, and fragility in a wide variety of public and private network-centric systems. He has extensive experience working on the Internet and other complex communication networks, having been a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA. He is a member of INFORMS and MORS.

Location-based services from are quickly gaining popularity. Many such services track the user's location and make use of it as needed. While tracking raises privacy concerns, it is believed to be unavoidable if users want the benefits of location-based services. In this talk I will give several examples of services that provide location-based functionality without learning the user's location. Our goal is to show that privacy and functionality are not always in conflict. We will also discuss our experiences with deploying these mechanisms in the real world. This is joint work with Arvind Narayanan, Mike Hamburg, and Narendran Thiagarajan.

About the speaker: Dr. Boneh heads the applied crypto group at the Computer Science
department at Stanford University. Dr. Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to computer security. His work includes cryptosystems with novel properties, security for mobile devices, web security, digital copyright protection, and cryptanalysis. He is the author of over a hundred technical publications in the field and a recipient of the Packard Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Award, the RSA award, and the Terman Award.

November 19, 3:45PM
Breakout Session

Following a decade of war, the departure of all U.S. troops from Iraq and a significant drawdown of troops in Afghanistan are all but imminent.  These drawdowns – and the framework in which these drawdowns transpire – will have major implications for U.S. national security, bilateral and regional relations, and the image of the U.S. in the world.  We will be joined by Dr. Dan E. Caldwell, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University and the author of Vortex of Conflict: U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq; Ms. Anja Manuel, Principal at RiceHadley Group LLC; and Mr. Frederic Wehrey, Senior Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation, to discuss these timely issues.

Information on the event is available at: http://www.pacificcouncil.org/page.aspx?pid=730