Past CSPO Events
- May 09, 2017CSPO DC - New Tools for Science Policy
Sorry Officer, I Wasn’t Driving—My Car Was
What are the legal and regulatory implications for automated vehicle technologies and driverless cars?
Diana Bowman
- April 19, 2017CSPO DC - New Tools for Science Policy
Unlocking Human Potential and the Role of Innovation
How can game playing improve our ability to make complex decisions?
Navigating our increasingly complex world can be a frustrating task, even for the most well educated and technologically literate. Assessing risks, understanding causality, and making the right decisions are challenging not only for individuals, but for our communities and institutions as well. Despite our best efforts, sometimes these responsibilities become overwhelming. This can lead to disengagement, apathy, and abandoning school or the workforce—producing broken, marginalized communities as these effects ripple out into society.
Powerful new innovations, such as game-enabled platforms and services, coupled with research on the art and science of learning, provide us an unprecedented opportunity to provide support for all individuals to realize opportunities and unlock futures that are meaningful to them.
S.A. Barab
- March 29, 2017CSPO DC
The End of Insight?
Ed Finn launches the Spring 2017 "Issues in Science and Technology" in this CSPO Conversations event
Drawing from his essay in the Spring 2017 Issues in Science and Technology and from his new book, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing, Ed Finn will explore how computer-generated knowledge is affecting scientific research, and how humans can become better users and architects of these powerful algorithms.
Edward Finn
- March 21, 2017
- January 27, 2017CSPO DC
Confronting Scientific Controversies: Do Facts Matter?
Launch event for the Winter 2017 Issues in Science and Technology
In science journalism, topics like genetically modified organisms, climate change, and vaccines have become so controversial that reporting on them can endanger one’s career. How have we gotten here? What are the consequences of such a toxic situation? What deeper disagreements are at play in these scientific controversies? Will understanding them help society address these broader issues?
Keith Kloor, Dan Hicks
- December 09, 2016CSPO DC - New Tools for Science Policy
Future Conflict & Emerging Technologies
This New Tools seminar explores the rapidly evolving environment for conflict, examining how destabilizing geopolitical factors and fast-moving technologies are making familiar institutions and assumptions questionable, if not obsolete.
Rapid advances in technology are making the world more complex, interconnected, and dangerous—while undermining the long-standing tools, institutions, and assumptions we have developed to manage conflict. From the digital frontier of cyber conflict to the use of autonomous lethal military robots, the arenas, actors, and objectives of modern conflict are changing in unpredictable ways. Political upheavals at home and abroad have only intensified the sense that we are entering uncharted territory.
Navigating this new geopolitical landscape requires understanding how emerging military and security technologies can affect strategy, warfare, and geopolitics. For our next New Tools for Science Policy seminar, join ASU Professor Braden Allenby and The Intercept national security reporter Sharon Weinberger as they discuss the shifting dynamics of modern conflict.Braden Allenby, Sharon Weinberger
- October 21, 2016CSPO DC - New Tools for Science Policy
The Illusion of Average: Renewing Research Infrastructure
When the Differences Matter: Implications for Research Infrastructure in an Age of Personalization
In this talk, Dr. William T. Riley and Paul Tarini discuss their experiences with establishing research portfolios to support research in an age of personalization. Dr. Riley provides insights into public sector management based on his work with the Precision Medicine Initiative and to transition the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) to a “data rich” endeavor integrating behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences for human health outcomes. He also speaks about balancing this transition in an office with a policy advising and public communications mission. Mr. Tarini discusses the goals and mission of the Pioneering Ideas portfolio within the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). His particular emphasis is on cultivating research at boundary of new modes of inquiry and discovery for a national “Culture of Health.” Dr. Eric Hekler moderates the session to draw out questions, challenges, and strategies facing public and private research managers advancing scientific research for human health.
Eric Hekler, William Riley, Paul Tarini
- September 23, 2016CSPO DC - New Tools for Science Policy
The Illusion of Average: An Open Science Approach to Research
Improving Scientific Research in the Age of Personalization and Open Data
Public participation for science or advocacy has an inconsistent history of effectiveness. New tools for crowdsourcing and challenge platforms have unflattering track records, revealing the current limits of technologies to enable the centralization or decentralization of power and influence. Local expertise can be harnessed toward a new reality in which communities provide feedback on their own conditions. When challenges arise, publics equipped with new tools can legitimately participate by studying their circumstances, testing alternatives for improving their communities, and advocating for the actions that best reflect their current values. Further, these strategies can be tailored to local realities to increase the likelihood of successful adoption and implementation.
Erik Johnston, Darlene Cavalier