Talk Thursday: The Last Mile: Grassroots Development and Technology in Africa

The Last Mile: Grassroots Development and Technology in Africa 
Liberation Technology Seminar Series 

October 13, 2011
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Wallenberg Theater
Wallenberg Hall
450 Serra Mall, Building 160
Speaker
Joshua Stern - Co-Founder and Executive Director at Envaya

ABSTRACT:

A system is only as strong as its weakest connections. The most fragile and easily disrupted links of international development and foreign aid structures are unfortunately the most important: those connecting community stakeholders with one another and with the larger system designed to support them. Grassroots civil society organizations are essential to sustain growth in developing regions. Across Africa, these groups do the hands-on, local development work that changes lives, but the overwhelming majority operate in isolation, unable to collaborate, to plan new interventions, share best practices, or communicate directly with funders and supporters.

Joshua Stern will discuss some of the systemic obstacles facing grassroots civil society organizations, and the impact that web technology is having in developing communities across East Africa. Stern co-founded Envaya whose mission is to build and deploy a software platform that provides “the last mile” of connection between grassroots activists and the larger development sector. Built to be easy-to-use and optimized to work in challenging, developing-world environments, Envaya's online and mobile tools empower community organizations to stake out an online presence, connect and coordinate with each other, and directly engage the international development sector. The tools encourage collaboration and transparency, inspire activism and civil society engagement, and increase the efficiency of established programs. In just over one year, the Envaya platform has become the largest online network of civil society organizations in East Africa.

Joshua Stern (Stanford '06) is the Executive Director of Envaya. After graduating, Joshua served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. He founded Envaya in 2010 with Jesse Young (Stanford '06, MS '07) and Tanzanian civil society leader Radhina Kipozi. Joshua splits his time between Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Contact: Kathleen Barcos at kbarcos@stanford.edu

Talk on Control System Security, Wed right after class

Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, Oct 12, 2011
Skilling Auditorium, Stanford Campus http://ee380.stanford.edu

Control System Cyber Security - State of the State 

Joe Weiss
Applied Control Solutions, LLC

About the talk:Industrial control systems are used in electric power, water, pipelines, etc. These systems were designed for performance and safety considerations, not security. Traditional IT security technologies, policies, and testing may not apply to these systems. Moreover, there is currently no university with an interdisciplinary program accross multiple engineering disciplines to address control system cyber security. There have already been more than 200 actual control system cyber incidents to date, though most have not been identified as cyber. In the US alone, there have been 4 control system cyber incidents that have killed people, 3 major cyber-related electric outages, 2 nuclear plants shut down from full power, etc. With the advent of Stuxnet, cyber has been introduced as an offensive weapon. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a state-of-the-state view of control system cyber security.
Resources:
Book: Joe Weiss, Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electrionic Threats
CNN video: Idaho 'ground zero' in cyber-terror war
Slides:
There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.
About the speaker:

Joseph Weiss is an industry expert on control systems and electronic security of control systems, with more than 35 years of experience in the energy industry. Mr. Weiss spent more than 14 years at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) where he led a variety of programs including the Nuclear Plant Instrumentation and Diagnostics Program, the Fossil Plant Instrumentation & Controls Program, the Y2K Embedded Systems Program and, the cyber security for digital control systems.

Artificial Intelligence - a legal perspective - Panel at Stanford

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6732


Stanford Law School, Thursday October 26 6-9 pm
RSVP for this free event: http://bit.ly/cis-ai-rsvpEveryone is invited.


In the summer of 1956, several key figures in what would become known as the field of "artificial intelligence" met at Dartmouth College to brainstorm about the future of the synthetic mind. Artificial intelligence, broadly defined, has since become a part of everyday life. Although we are still waiting on promises of "strong AI" capable of approximating human thought, the widespread use of artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape medicine, finance, war, and other important aspects of society. The Center for Internet and Society, along with the the Stanford Law and Technology Association (SLATA), and the Stanford Technology Law Review (STLR) bring together four scholars who have begun to examine the near term, short term, and long term ramifications of artificial intelligence for law and society. This panel follows up on our Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics panel from November 2009.

Virtual realities

After today's visit I thought you might be interested in a couple of virtual spaces that are quite different, from the early 90s.  Brenda Laurel's Placeholder (1992) was a two-person VR with mythological character avatars.

See http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/Placeholder/Placeholder.html

Char Davies Osmose (1995) was an underwater experience where you navigate by breathing.

http://www.immersence.com/osmose/
for a short video see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlV6pgVJapI

Article on Willow Garage, where we'll visit in November

Household robots are moving from science fiction to reality

Willow Garage's PR2 robot can fold clothes, set a table and bake cookies. It costs too much and does too little to interest consumers, but researchers are rapidly developing technology to make it more useful and less expensive.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-robots-20110928,0,2682137.story

Getting started - To the new students

By now, you're getting used to Stanford and finding out a lot of new things.  Welcome!

On Monday classes start, and we'll meet at 3:15 in Gates 100.  The course website has now been updated for this year and you can get a preview at http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs047n/
All of the readings will be available on line.

I'm really looking forward to the course.  See you next week!
--t

Welcome to 2011

I am again teaching the Stanford Freshman Seminar on The Internet and the Open Society.  This blog is for general discussion, updates, etc. about the course. Each student in the course will also be creating a blog on a particular topic, and I'll put links to those in here.
Looking forward to a great quarter.
--t