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SCPKU hosts financial industry forums

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On March 30 and 31, 2017, Stanford held two events at SCPKU featuring the latest developments in quantitative finance and financial technology. 

On March 30, the university co-organized with SCPKU, Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and the Department of Mathematics, and Peking University’s  (PKU) Guanghua School of Management and Department of Financial Mathematics, a conference featuring new developments in quantitative finance and risk management with a particular emphasis on trade execution, financial technology, data analysis, and insurance.   This event was the third biennial conference following previous ones at PKU in 2013 and Tsinghua in 2015. Following opening remarks by Stanford Professor of Statistics and Director of Stanford's Financial and Risk Modeling Institute (FARM) Tze Lai, experts from academia and industry including J.P. Morgan, PKU, Tsinghua, Renmin University of China, Daokoudai and the Southwest University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, shared the latest developments in a wide spectrum of quantitative finance topics ranging from conditional quasi-Monte Carlo methods to China’s peer-to-peer lending market. 

FARM and SCPKU also co-organized a forum on financial technology and portfolio management on March 31.  Due to advances in artificial intelligence and big data technologies, the financial industry is facing tremendous pressure to develop and implement solutions yielding improved operational efficiencies.  This forum convened distinguished academic and industry speakers from quantitative trading, wealth management, asset management, financial consulting, and credit rating firms and agencies to explore the current development and future for financial technology and portfolio management.

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Social Media, New Technologies and the Middle East

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It is a global story, a new industrial revolution. The spread of the internet and the proliferation of social media have led to dramatic changes with salutary results: greater access to more diverse information, gateways to goods and services that have transformed the retail experience, and opportunities to engage and network with expanded communities, while still staying in touch with friends and family, all thanks to the blessings of these new technologies.

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The Caravan
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Russell A. Berman
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Landsat-based classification in the cloud: An opportunity for a paradigm shift in land cover monitoring

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Satellite-derived land cover maps play an important role in many applications, including monitoring of smallholder-dominated agricultural landscapes. New cloud-based computing platforms and satellite sensors offer opportunities for generating land cover maps designed to meet the spatial and temporal requirements of specific applications. Such maps can be a significant improvement compared to existing products, which tend to be coarser than 300 m, are often not representative of areas with fast-paced land use change, and have a fixed set of cover classes. Here, we present two approaches for land cover classification using the Landsat archive within Google Earth Engine. Random forest classification was performed with (1) season-based composites, where median values of individual bands and vegetation indices were generated from four years for each of four seasons, and (2) metric-based composites, where different quantiles were computed for the entire four-year period. These approaches were tested for six land cover types spanning over 18,000 locations in Zambia, with ground “truth” determined by visual inspection of high-resolution imagery from Google Earth. The methods were trained on 30% of these points and tested on the remaining 70%, and results were also compared with existing land cover products. Overall accuracies of about 89% were achieved for the season- and metric-based approaches for individual classes, with 93%and 94% accuracy for distinguishing cropland from non-cropland. For the latter task, the existing Globeland30 dataset based on Landsat had much lower accuracies (around 77% on average), as did existing cover maps at coarser resolutions. Overall, the results support the use of either season or metric-based classification approaches. Both produce better results than those obtained from previous classifiers, which supports a general paradigm shift away from dependence on standard static products and towards custom generation of on-demand cover maps designed to fulfill the needs of each specific application.

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Remote Sensing of Environment
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George Azzari
David Lobell
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Hub for global digital policy launches at Stanford

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University announced today that it has launched the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi). GDPi’s mission is to help develop governance norms for the global digital ecosystem that reinforce democratic values, universal human rights and the rule of law. It will serve as a multi-stakeholder collaboration hub at Stanford for technologists, governments, civil society and the private sector actors. GDPi will identify and incubate global policy and governance innovations that enhance freedom, security and trust in the digital realm. 

 

GDPi will be led by Eileen Donahoe who is widely recognized as a leading advocate for human rights in the digital realm, and as an experienced international lawyer and diplomat working to develop global norms for Internet governance and digital policy.  

Donahoe was appointed by President Obama to serve as the first United States Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. After leaving government, Donahoe served as director of global affairs at Human Rights Watch, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy, with special emphasis on digital rights, cybersecurity and Internet governance. 

“Silicon Valley is a natural locus for cross-sector international collaboration on global digital norms,” said Donahoe. “Our mission will be to facilitate development of operational policies and processes to address societal challenges that arise from technological innovation. I am so excited to have the opportunity to build this global innovation hub for digital policy at CDDRL, the perfect home for this dynamic and interdisciplinary project.”  

GDPi will explore the complex roles of government and private sector technology firms in the digital environment. While rapid adoption of digital technology has brought many benefits and challenges to society, most legal and governance institutions have not kept pace or adjusted to meet the corresponding changes.  

GDPi will address governance challenges in four interrelated areas: digital rights; digital security; artificial Intelligence-based governance and trans-national Internet governance. The initiative seeks to engage stakeholders in new articulations of existing international human rights and humanitarian law.  [[{"fid":"226716","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"Eileen with President Obama during her tenure as the first US Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. ","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","alt":"","title":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"Eileen with President Obama during her tenure as the first US Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. ","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","alt":"","title":""}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"style":"margin: 3px 10px; float: right; height: 393px; width: 300px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto","data-delta":"3"}}]]

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL, will serve as the principal investigator on the GDPi project.  

“We are really delighted that Eileen Donahoe has agreed to join CDDRL as adjunct professor and executive director of the new GDPi,” said Diamond. “Every month, it seems, social media and other digital tools are becoming more and more powerful and pervasive in their effects on our politics, government and daily lives. As digital technology races forward, it not only generates new platforms and possibilities for human empowerment, but it also poses growing challenges for human rights and individual, national and international security.”   

Diamond launched the Program on Liberation Technology (LibTech) at CDDRL in 2009 to examine how technology has empowered democratic progress. GDPi is a successor to the LibTech program, enabling the Stanford team to take a more comprehensive and policy-oriented approach to digital policy challenges - involving not only research but also innovation to incubate new ideas and approaches.  

Quarterly workshops and an annual global conference will be the foundation for GDPi’s work in the coming year.  

The GDPi initiative joins five other core research programs at CDDRL, which probe some of the most urgent issues facing the field of democracy and development. Working in partnership with other institutes on campus, the program will benefit from the guidance and active engagement of cross-disciplinary faculty from Stanford Law School, the Center for Internet and Society, the Stanford Cyber Initiative and the Center for Social Innovation at the Graduate School of Business. 

Michael McFaul, director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies expressed confidence that GDPi will help solidify Stanford’s role as a global thought-leader on governance challenges that flow from digital technology. 

“The Global Digital Policy Incubator will become an important hub at Stanford, as we seek to help government and private sector policymakers address governance challenges of the 21st century digital world.”  

More information about the Global Digital Policy Incubator can be found at http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/global-digital-policy-incubator

 

 

CAPTIONS:

The picture in the left upper corner: Eileen Donahoe addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where she served as the first US Ambassador 2010-2013.

The picture on the right: Eileen Donahoe with President Obama during her tenure at the UNHRC. 

 

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Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Perspectives from Chile

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Chile, being positioned on the Pacific-facing rim of South America, has a natural tendency toward Asia, not only geographically, but also politically, culturally and economically. Mr. Maruicio Rodriguez from the Chile Pacific Foundation, a public-private partnership established by the Chilean government that seeks to deepen Chile’s ties with Asia, will discuss the country’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, including an analysis of promotion strategies, financing conditions and policy challenges.

 

Mauricio Rodriguez has been the head of projects and content at Chile Pacific Foundation since August 2016. He is responsible for managing contents produced by the Foundation, including research, digital strategy and conferences and events, overseeing both planning and production. He also serves as an ABAC-Chile staffer and often represents the Foundation as conference speaker/moderator. As a journalist and a communications professional, he has accumulated vast experience in the media industry and in the public relations/affairs industry, where he represented private interests before moving to public administration, the legislature and the judiciary. He has significant experience in the financial industry after working in the investment banking sector and being a financial journalist for almost two decades.

 

Mauricio Rodriguez <i>Chile Pacific Foundation</i>
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Towards fine resolution global maps of crop yields: Testing multiple methods and satellites in three countries

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One of the greatest challenges in monitoring food security is to provide reliable crop yield information that is temporally consistent and spatially scalable. An ideal yield dataset would not only extend globally and across multiple years, but would also have enough spatial granularity to characterize productivity at the field and subfield level. Rapid increases in satellite data acquisition and platforms such as Google Earth Engine that can efficiently access and process vast archives of new and historical data offer an opportunity to map yields globally, but require efficient and robust algorithms to combine various data streams into yield estimates. We recently introduced a Scalable satellite-based Crop Yield Mapper (SCYM) that combines crop models simulations with imagery and weather data to generate 30 m resolution yield estimates without the need for ground calibration. In this study, we tested new large-scale implementations of SCYM, focusing on three regions with varying crops, field sizes and landscape heterogeneity: maize in the U.S. corn belt (390,000 km2), maize in Southern Zambia (86,000 km2), and wheat in northern India (450,000 km2). As a benchmark, we also tested a simpler empirical approach (PEAKVI) that relates yield to the peak value of a time series of spatially aggregated vegetation indices, similar to methods used in current operational monitoring. Both SCYM and PEAKVI were applied to data from all Landsat's sensors and MODIS for more than a decade in each region, and evaluated against ground-based estimates at the finest available administrative level (e.g., counties in the U.S.). We found consistently high correlations (R2 ≥ 0.5) between the spatial pattern of ground- and satellite-based estimates in both U.S. maize and India wheat, with small differences between methods and source of satellite data. In the U.S., SCYM outperformed PEAKVI in tracking temporal yield variations, likely owing to its explicit consideration of weather. In India, both methods failed to track temporal yield changes, with various possible explanations discussed. In Zambia, the PEAKVI approach applied to MODIS tracked yield variations much better (R2 > 0.5) than any other yield estimate, likely because the frequent cloud cover in this region confounds the other approaches. Overall, this study demonstrates successful approaches to yield estimation in each region, and illustrates the importance of distinguishing between accuracy for spatial and temporal variation. The 30 m resolution of Landsat-based SCYM does not appear to offer large benefits for tracking aggregate yields, but enables finer scale analyses than possible with the other approaches.

 

 

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Remote Sensing of Environment
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George Azzari
David Lobell
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What next for climate? Assessing the risks and the options

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Abstract: Over decades, assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and many others has bolstered understanding of the climate problem: unequivocal warming, pervasive impacts, and serious risks from continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases. Societies are increasingly responding with early actions to decarbonize energy systems and prepare for impacts. In this emerging era of climate solutions, new assessment opportunities arise. They include learning from ongoing real-world experiences and helping close the gap between aspirations and the pace of progress. Against this backdrop, I will consider core challenges in assessment, in particular: (1) integrating diverse evidence; (2) applying rigorous expert judgment; and (3) deeply embedding interactions between experts and decision-makers. Examples span climate risks and portfolios of mitigation and adaptation responses. For climate and broader global change, the presentation will explore how transparent, high-traction assessment can support decisions about contested and uncertain futures. 

About the Speaker: Katharine Mach is a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford University, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a Visiting Investigator at the Carnegie Institution for Science. She leads the Stanford Environment Assessment Facility (SEAF). From 2010 until 2015, Mach co-directed the scientific activities of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which focuses on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. This work culminated in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report and its Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. Mach received her PhD from Stanford University and AB from Harvard College.

What next for climate? Assessing the risks and the options
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Katharine J. Mach Senior Research Scientist Stanford University
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How low-carbon technologies will improve our climate, health, and national security and stabilize the world's economies

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Abstract: In 2015 nations agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals, including ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all. To accomplish them, we need to find synergies across the seventeen goals. Fortunately, some co-benefits are clear.  Cutting greenhouse gas emissions does much more than fight climate change.  It saves water and improves water quality. It saves lives, too, as witnessed by the ~20,000 or more people who die from coal pollution each year in the United States, with a million more people worldwide. The low-carbon economy will help stabilize national security, create net jobs, and more.

About the Speaker: Rob Jackson is Douglas Provostial Professor and Chair of the Earth System Science Department at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow in Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for Energy (jacksonlab.stanford.edu).  As an environmental scientist, he chairs the Global Carbon Project (globalcarbonproject.org), an international organization that tracks natural and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.  His photographs have appeared in many media outlets, including the NY Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, and he has published several books of poetry. Jackson is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Ecological Society of America and was honored at the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.

Rob Jackson Douglas Provostial Professor and Chair Earth System Science Department, Stanford University
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Computation and Society: The Case of Privacy and Fairness

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Abstract: Fueled with rapidly growing data sets and with breakthroughs in machine learning, algorithms are informing and often even making decisions that affect all aspects of life. All the way from which news articles we are exposed to and which ads we see to input to sentencing decisions and in the foreseeable future to the life-and-death emergency decisions of our cars. 
 
The centrality of automatic classification brings great utility to individuals, companies and society as a whole. Nevertheless, to unleash the full potential of such algorithms we must address substantial challenges in terms of the privacy of individuals, the protection of individuals from discrimination and the accuracy of the classification algorithms under adversarial manipulations.
 
In this talk, we will discuss some of the insights we learn from recent research in computer science. Specifically, we will discuss surprising connections and differences between privacy, fairness and correctness. We will also discuss the challenges and opportunities in stronger collaborations between computer science and social sciences on these topics.
 
About the Speaker: Omer Reingold is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Past positions include Samsung Research America, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Microsoft Research, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and AT&T Labs. His research is in the Foundations of Computer Science and most notably in Computational Complexity and the Foundations of Cryptography with emphasis on randomness, derandomization and explicit combinatorial constructions. He is an ACM Fellow and among his distinctions are the 2005 Grace Murray Hopper Award and the 2009 Gödel Prize.
Omer Reingold Professor of Computer Science Stanford University
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