To install click the Add extension button. That's it.

The source code for the WIKI 2 extension is being checked by specialists of the Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Apple. You could also do it yourself at any point in time.

4,5
Kelly Slayton
Congratulations on this excellent venture… what a great idea!
Alexander Grigorievskiy
I use WIKI 2 every day and almost forgot how the original Wikipedia looks like.
Live Statistics
English Articles
Improved in 24 Hours
Added in 24 Hours
What we do. Every page goes through several hundred of perfecting techniques; in live mode. Quite the same Wikipedia. Just better.
.
Leo
Newton
Brights
Milds

Estonian Salvation Committee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Estonian Salvation Committee (Estonian: Eestimaa Päästekomitee or Päästekomitee) was the executive body of the Estonian Provincial Assembly that issued the Estonian Declaration of Independence.[1]

The Salvation Committee was created on February 19, 1918, by the Provincial Assembly in a situation where Russian forces were retreating and forces of Imperial Germany were advancing in Estonia during World War I. The committee was granted full decision-making powers to ensure the continued activity of the Provincial Assembly. The members of the Salvation Committee were Konstantin Päts, Jüri Vilms and Konstantin Konik. It drafted a declaration of independence that was approved by elders of the Provincial Assembly. The Salvation Committee publicly proclaimed Estonia an independent and democratic republic on February 24 in Tallinn. The committee appointed the Estonian Provisional Government on February 24, 1918.

YouTube Encyclopedic

  • 1/1
    Views:
    523
  • Research Matters! Celebrating New Ideas and Discoveries. A Graduate School Symposium

Transcription

Welcome to "Research Matters!" My name's Vanessa Ryan, I'm Associate Dean at the graduate school. We're celebrating 250 years of Brown University. And we're celebrating 125 years of graduate study at Brown. Our graduate students, over 2,000 students are the next generation of faculty, of leaders, and innovators. Every day, our graduate students are making new discoveries, building on knowledge, and inspiring undergraduates in the classroom. Today, we're celebrating the power of their ideas. Graduate research is hard. By definition, any master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation offers something new. So each of our students today is blazing a new path and adding a new voice to a conversation. Graduate research is technical, building on years of study, immersion in a discipline, deep reading, travel, and study in archives and for field work, challenging hours in a lab. And for almost all of us, many, many hours in front of a computer. And for every researcher, there are also moments of failure, when the experiment doesn't work or the idea fails. And that's why the passion that you're going to see from our speakers today is so important. It's this passion that keeps them going as they pursue that eureka moment of their discoveries. We've also invited two graduate school alumni to speak. Their stories show that graduate research enables and sometimes demands innovative career paths. So if research in graduate school is hard, it also is fun and it matters. And it matters to us all. Our graduates students are the cornerstone of this university. So the students we've brought together today are I think a snapshot of all of our graduate students. And I hope you'll be inspired by their passion. It's my honor to introduce two special people. First, we're lucky today to have as our Master of Ceremonies Heather Bennett. Heather is a sixth-year graduate student in molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry. Her own research studies sleep regulation, specifically in C. elegans. That's a nematode or worm. One of her passions is bettering the relationship between the research community, especially the scientific community, and the general public. That makes her a particularly apt emcee our event today. And I'd like now to introduce our dean of the graduate school, Peter Weber, a professor of chemistry. In his research, he studies molecular processes, especially energy flow and reaction dynamics. He knows research matters. One of the first things he did when I joined his team at the graduate school was to give me a tour of his research lab. So welcome. Thank you, Dean Peter Weber. [APPLAUSE] Well, thank you, Vanessa. And thank you for the nice words and introduction. I'm going to have to quiz you on how the exact optical setup in my laser lab are going to work. Well, good afternoon all of you. Welcome to this exciting showcase of research by graduate students and alumni. The graduate school is very proud to host "Research Matters," an event that puts the ideas and discoveries of students and alumni front and center. So this year, we celebrate the 125th anniversary of the first Ph.D. And of course, the 250th anniversary of Brown University. You notice that it is exactly half of its lifetime that Brown University has awarded Ph.Ds. And so it is particularly meaningful to me and many of us that we are having this event today where we celebrate the research. Let me give a few acknowledgements. I would like to very much thank the Office of Brown's 250th Anniversary for funding, as well as the C.M. Culver Lectureship Fund for support. I would like to thank the talented and tireless Vanessa Ryan, whom you just heard, the Associate Dean for Student Development for bringing this to life. And Beverly Larson, our Director of Communications, for help in producing "Research Matters!" With that, I would like to introduce our provost, our Brown University provost, Vicki Colvin. And please welcome Vicki. [APPLAUSE] So it's a real pleasure to be here, and I really look forward to the talks. One of the things about choosing to be a graduate student is that you really have a special moment in your life to do something that, really, you don't do as an undergraduate. And that is to create new knowledge. And for those of us who have gone through that ourselves or are in the middle of it, it's really an intoxicating experience to realize that you are, through your daily work and interactions with your peers, pushing forward the boundary of a discipline that you love. And it's quite a privilege. And so I think all of the folks here who are engaged in that process understand what that means. And one of the challenges, of course, is that we all love our discipline if we're here. And we have to explain it to the world outside. And that's become so incredibly important. And I think that this event, "Research Matters!" really captures that. Because in the last century, and in fact in much of the history of the university, universities were places apart. They were places where scholars went to sort of think. And the term "ivory tower" was perhaps an apt one for many centuries. But certainly in this day and age, being an ivory tower doesn't work anymore. If you do that, people don't know why they're finding science and engineering research if they don't see a direct outcome on their lives. Or they might wonder what the value is of liberal arts and why it is we need to think deeply about the nature of people and how they interact. Those are things that we instinctively understand if we've chosen to participate in graduate education, but it's not something that 99.99% of the world understands. And in this century, we need to make the university much more of a marketplace, where people can come in. They can see our ideas. They can perhaps even shape them in their own ways. And they understand in a very deep way both our love for what we do and also the relevance to their lives. It is incredibly important now when society is facing so many difficult choices about where it spends its time and where it's put its focus to continually remind people the importance of charting new territory and never letting explorers simply sit there and do nothing. So I think it's incredibly-- a really, really important thing to hear these graduate students to speak. And it's incredibly hard to do. We selected them because they are technical and they are detailed. And they are willing to spend, let's hope, only six years of their lives focused in a very deep way on a very small set of issues. Because that's actually how you push the forefront of knowledge. But then we ask them to do what they're doing today, which is to step back out of that place and to relate what they do to the broader world. And so it's an incredibly important thing to do, an incredibly hard thing to do, and the people we're going to hear from have been through quite a process to be selected. So I'm looking forward to hearing from them why their research matters, and I hope you'll join me in welcoming our Master of Ceremonies to help us do that, Heather Bennett. Thanks so much. [APPLAUSE] Good afternoon. Thank you Dean Weber, Dean Ryan for the warm and generous introductions. I, too, want to thank you all for coming out and supporting our graduate student speakers. I have to say thank you to the organizers for orchestrating this event. Particularly the "Research Matters!" Selection Committee. They worked very hard to select diverse research across all disciplines. However, I have to say, this is meant to provide you with a taste of all of the research that is being done here. There is so much research that's being done here on campus. So many groundbreaking discoveries. And I'm very, very excited to hear from the student speakers today. They are very excited to share their novel discoveries here with you today. And I also want to say that I'm excited about the conversations that will transpire from the talks that you will hear today. So to not delay the festivities, I will introduce our first graduate speaker of the day. Please join me in welcoming Lauren Quattrocchi. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology Graduate Program here at Brown University. She is also one of the co-founding members of the Graduate Women in Science and Engineering organization. Today, she will be speaking on "Long Flights, Bright Lights, and the Cells that Tuck You in at Night." Please join me in welcoming Lauren. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Heather, for that lovely introduction. So for my talk, I'm going to start out with a bold statement. And that is Star Trek is wrong. Neuroscience is the final frontier. You have cells and circuits within your nervous system that we still cannot define or assign a function. Even entire nuclei of your brain that remain an enigma. My research attempts to combat those unknowns. Alongside my advisor, Professor David Berson, we study retinal ganglion cells, or the conduits connecting your eyes to your brain. If you've ever seen a scary movie where the eyeball pops out and is hanging by a thread, that thread is composed of 1 to 1 and 1/2 million retinal ganglion cells. And of those cells, there are over 20 different types each paying attention to a different piece of information about your visual scene and relaying that back to specialized centers within your brain. This also means that in our line of research, each type we assume has a different function. So where one may be keen on color, another may be interpreting information about motion. In fact, you have cells that are so sensitive within your eyes that they can track the movement of the stars across the sky, assuming we had the attention span to stare into space that long. Our laboratory focuses on one type in particular and it's called a ganglion cell photoreceptor. It has a really specialized protein that's light sensitive called melanopsin, which was first discovered in the skin of frogs. And what it does is it enables this cell to respond to light independent of any other cell around them. Moreover, these cells can integrate light over long periods of time-- upwards of 10 hours-- making them excellent candidates as light intensity detectors. Now, these cells were first discovered just over a decade ago here at Brown, though since then countless other researchers have contributed to discerning the functions of these light intensity detectors. And what they've found is that they're pivotal in these reflexive, unconscious behavioral movements that are elicited from light. So for example, pupillary constriction, regulating your wake-sleep cycle, hormone regulation, and perhaps even light-induced migraines. All of these seemingly disparate functions have implications within our daily lives. One such implication may be a piece of technology, called Flux, which is a free app you can download that actually changes the spectral composition emitted by your computer monitor over the course of the day so you can fall asleep at night. Another one is something called the Happy Blue Light from Brookstone, which is meant to ameliorate seasonal affective disorder. Imagine, if you will, if we could identify, characterize, and control these cells, we would no longer have ailments like seasonal affective disorder, jet lag, certain forms of insomnia, and perhaps even light-induced pain. Moreover, these cells have been proven to be the most resilient cells within your eye. So because we know that some blind patients share in these ailments with us, we know these cells are active within them, which means researchers can now leverage these cells innate ability to survive disease states such as glaucoma to create novel sight-sparing therapeutics. For my thesis, I've discovered a novel sixth subtype of the ganglion cell photoreceptor called the M6. It has an absolutely beautiful structure and incredibly refined brain targets. However, its main function still evades us. When I was in high school, or even college, I believed that every cell in the human body had already been identified and well characterized. Or so textbooks have led us all to believe. However, in reality we are on the verge of discovering completely new cells within you and me using breakthrough technologies. It always boggled my mind how Jean-Luc Picard could communicate with aliens, yet here now in the 21st Century, we scientists don't even know how we see what we see. However, it's discoveries like these novel cell types where we can begin to understand how light influences our health and behavior. And to that I stand resolute that neuroscience is the final frontier. Live long and prosper. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Lauren. That was an enlightening talk. [LAUGHTER] I'm glad that you got that. But I will not be launching my comedy career anytime soon. Our next speaker is Matthew Lyddon. Matthew is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department and Former President of the Graduate Student Council. Today, Matt will speak about "Crafting Citizens-- Facing controversy and Teaching Citizenship." With that, please welcome Matthew. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to start with a confession. I am not actually a political scientist. So I haven't come today equipped with some wonderful charts and graphs. And don't ask me who's going to win the midterms on the next presidential election. I'm a political theorist. And that means that I study the fundamental ideas, values, and assumptions that underpin our political life and our political institutions. How do political theorists do this? Well, we deeply read and analyze the works of great thinkers. We try out new ideas and interpretations at papers and conferences. We teach. We take long walks. We drink a lot of tea and coffee. And we look to current court cases and public controversies and try and figure out what's really at stake in terms of the values in those debates. So let's start by looking at one of those. I'm going to talk today about what's at stake when we educate citizens. Let me ask for a quick show of hands. How many of you are familiar with the 2010 Texas textbook controversy? OK, quite a few. So the State Board of Education in Texas is responsible for setting guidelines and standards which publishers have to follow if they wish to have their textbooks published. And since the market size of Texas is so large, quite often as goes Texas, so goes the rest of the nation. In 2010, the conservative majority on the Texas Board of Education wished to "rebalance" the curriculum by emphasizing more conservative ideas, figures, and movements. Now you might think, OK, balance is good. People disagree over moral matters and values, and students should be exposed to a mixture. But there's a problem. When the sole Hispanic representative on the board proposed that more Hispanic and Latino role models be included in the curriculum-- hardly an outlandish thing for Texas-- she was voted down by the conservative majority. So is this really balance being sought, or are we simply looking at yet another partisan struggle over civic education? Now, as a political theorist, I try and make sense of this by looking to the fundamental values of liberal democracy. Now, a quick note. That's not big L Liberal as in tax and spend and big government. A liberal democracy-- small l, small d-- means a society which encodes certain basic values into its institutions. Values like core basic rights, like equal respect for all citizens, and like the accountability of government to citizens. In a well-functioning liberal democracy, citizens are taught to respect a plurality of world views, moral and religious beliefs. The state doesn't just enforce one. And they're also taught to uphold basic rights. That's good liberal democratic citizenship. But it's a hard balance to strike. You push too hard on the promotion of liberal values and you risk endangering the wide variety of moral traditions that liberal democracy protects. You don't push hard enough and you undermine the commitment to liberal democratic values. So what do we do? Do we prize teaching liberal democratic civic values or do we prize protecting moral traditions from potential educational overreach? It's a really tough choice. And my research has shown me that political theorists, although we might want to do both of those things, usually end up having to pick one over the other. People who design citizenship programs usually have to try and avoid controversy or deal with it very lightly. And civic education ends at the subject of an uncomfortable balance of power between parents, the schools, and the state. Think about that for a second-- parents, the schools, and the state. What's missing? Well, you might ask, where are the students in all of this? In fact, only this week groups of high school students in Colorado staged walkouts in protest at the re-definition of their citizenship education to define good citizenship as excluding protests and civil disobedience. This, along with my own experience from teaching citizenship to pre-college kids, tells me that students themselves are engaged and want to be involved in their own development as citizens. So how can we help them make sense of being a good citizen while also upholding their own tradition? I'm working on a new approach, which I call value integrity. It's still in the blueprint stage, but basically it means including a lot of different voices from communities, from parents, from teachers, and allowing the students and supporting the students to be able to make sense of the connections between basic rights and civil values on the one hand and their moral traditions on the other. Why does this matter? And why is it important for education? Well, if we teach students in this way to build the connections for themselves between political values and their traditions, we avoid allowing the state to impose a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem on citizens. We also teach them to respect both sources of value, political and moral. And finally, when we teach students to engage with this problem of disagreement in this way, then we give them each a stake in their own development as citizens. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much, Matthew, for that very important civics lesson. I know that I will not mix up political theorists and political scientists again. And FYI, I like long walks and coffee. That works for me, too. Please, let me introduce you to our third speaker. Our third speaker is Tara Mulder. Tara is a Ph.D. candidate in the Classics Department. And Tara will be speaking on "Fetal Actors, Female Bodies-- Ancient Texts and Modern Debates." Please join me in welcoming Tara. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Heather. On April 30, 1965, Life magazine rant his cover photo that you see here. The title reads, "Drama of Life Before Birth." And the subtitle explains "Living 18-week-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac." It's a beautiful picture, absolutely groundbreaking for the time. But something is missing. Surely that umbilical cord is leading off somewhere. Where in all of this is the pregnant female body? I'm a classics scholar. And as such, I study the language, literature, history, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. In particular in my dissertation, I am focusing on childbirth and reproduction in the Roman Empire in the First through Fourth Centuries CE. When I first started researching for my dissertation, I was looking for pregnant women and childbirth within the literary and material culture of ancient Rome. And I kept coming up empty-handed. I was finding some evidence, but not as much as you might think given how important these things are to the reproduction and continuation of the human race. So feeling frustrated, I did what I do when I feel frustrated. I started reading around in feminist theory and blog entries about reproductive justice. And I realized something. I realized that I was asking the wrong questions. And as every historian knows, what's most important when you're studying history is the questions that you ask. Here I was looking for pregnant women when what I really needed to be looking for was fetuses, which takes us back to this image here. Scholars have seen this as an important turning point in our sociocultural conceptions of the fetus. Certainly, before this time, before 1965, we couldn't image the fetus in quite this same way with this degree of coloring and detail. But the idea of the fetus as an independent, disembodied actor is not a phenomenon of the last 50 years. The disassociation between a fetus and its pregnant female mother has been going on for a long time. So when I turned back to my research, I was looking into Galen. Now, Galen is probably the second most famous doctor of all time next to Hippocrates. And he wrote this absolutely enormous collection of medical texts around the Second Century CE. In fact, more than 10% of our extant Greek literature was written by Galen. And sure enough, he doesn't have very much to say about pregnant women or even about childbirth, but he was obsessed with the fetus. He wanted to know, what is the fetus? How does it form and develop? Is it alive? When does it first start being alive? And he wasn't alone, either. Many other doctors and philosophers of the time period had similar questions. They wanted to know, does the fetus have a soul? When does the soul first enter the fetus? At conception? When it's born and takes its first breath? Porphyry, who was a neo-Platonist in the Third Century, considered very carefully and came to the conclusion that the fetus was probably most similar to a plant. Which makes a lot of sense if you consider that it's attached by a stalk to a dense bed of nutrients, cannot live if untethered from that stalk, needs oxygen but does not breathe, and has limited movement capabilities. So these sorts of questions were in the air. So what? People 2,000 years ago had the same sorts of questions about fetal life, or lack thereof, that we do now. Why does that matter? Well, doesn't it seem suspicious that we are still asking the same questions? Maybe instead of asking if and when the fetus is alive, we should be asking what the sociocultural political impact of childbearing is on women and their bodies. Let me give you one more example. There's a portion of the Hippocratic oath that reads, "I will not give a woman an abortive pessary." And when the court case Roe v. Wade was being decided in the United States, to determine whether or not women should have access to abortion, people said, well, we can't give women access to abortion because the Hippocratic oath explicitly forbids it. And so they consulted a classics scholar who said, we should not take into account the Hippocratic oath because this view right here was probably a minority viewpoint at the time that it was written. And I say, that's great because women have access to reproductive services in this country, but why is that the foundation for those services? Why not instead saying we shouldn't even consider the Hippocratic oath and its view on abortion because it was created within a cultural context that did not value women, their bodies, and their reproductive labor. As a classicist, I am able to look over a span of 2,000 years. And I am able to see that we are asking the same questions and having the same debates. And that if we ever want to come to different answers, we need to start asking different questions. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Tara. Fascinating that we're still asking the same questions over 2,000 years, and we should continue to discuss this. Let me introduce you to our fourth speaker. Our fourth speaker is Vale Cofer-Shabica. Vale is a Ph.D. candidate in the Chemistry Department. And I just recently found out that Vale has five chickens and 40,000 bees in his backyard. Interesting, Vale. But not nearly as interesting as what he will talk about today. The title of his talk is "Wandering Molecules, the Mysteries That Matter." With that, please join me in welcoming Vale. [APPLAUSE] Thanks for that introduction. It's actually 40,000 bees give or take 20,000. I'm not really sure. So on a Saturday 15 years ago, I was falling in love with chemistry by blowing things up in my parents' suburban backyard. Now, on a Saturday like today, the greatest hazard that chemistry poses to me as a theorist probably comes from carpal tunnel. I get to use a wrist brace, though. It's OK. Chemistry is the study of chemical systems, how one or more things turns into something else. As chemists, we'd like to be able to understand, maybe control, or at least take advantage of these transformations. And you care a lot about how they happen if you're trying to synthesize a new drug, or if you're trying to understand how something like protein misfolding leads to something like Alzheimer's. Precise descriptions of how these reactions occur are called chemical reaction mechanisms, which are what I study. A chemical reaction mechanism tells us how, on an atomic level, what happens when one thing turns into something else. Now, for simple systems containing only a few molecules, we thought we'd seen it all. Well-established theories backed by ample experimental evidence gave us a tidy picture of what happens when a chemical reaction occurs. Now, formaldehyde, or embalming fluid, is one such simple system. It's made up of just four atoms-- a carbon and an oxygen and two hydrogens. And we knew that because formaldehyde's such a simple system, it makes a great case for the study of how light interacts with chemical reactions. In fact, it's such a good system that theoreticians and experimentalists alike have beaten it to death for the last 40 years. We knew that if you shone a particular color of light under formaldehyde, it would fall in half, turning into carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. And we had a pretty good idea of how it happened. The hydrogens would wander around-- go ahead and play, Shane. The hydrogens would wander around. I'm going to do this by hand. There we go. The hydrogens wander around. Eventually, they would bump into each other and head off on their way. Now, that's nice. But a decade ago, scientists noticed formaldehyde do something they'd never before seen or imagined anything to do. Instead of just falling apart the way we expected it would, something strange happened. Instead, the hydrogen popped off and did a full orbit around the molecule before coming back through and falling off with its partner. This is really strange. In fact, it's so weird that it left a lot of people really puzzled about it. This is like driving from Providence to Boston but taking a pit stop in Chicago. Really. It was so weird that people said, oh, it's an isolated oddity. This doesn't really happen very much. It turns out they were wrong. Roaming happens in all kinds of systems and represents a totally new class of chemical reaction mechanisms. And 10 years out, we don't really have a good understanding of why it's happening or how to explain it. And that's where Rich and I come in, my advisor. Strange experimental results are nature's invitation to new ways of looking at the world and at a problem. For roaming, we're using a strange new lens to try and come up with a way to give us insight and unlock this riddle that we have before us. Here's the idea. One of the ways that you can consider chemical reactions is by imagining a landscape or with a map for it. The landscape has mountain passes and peaks and plateaus and other things. And these features determine how the system evolves in time. Once we have such a map, which we can create for formaldehyde using something like quantum chemical calculations, we can ask the map questions. One of the questions we might ask is, what's the mechanism? We want to understand how roaming works. Finding the mechanism is as simple as saying, OK, here's the reactants area. Here's the products area. I want to get between the two of them. If we find the route, then we've found the mechanism. For formaldehyde, this problem is akin to choosing the route from an infinity of options between two cities separated by a wide range of mountains. Now, it is possible using molecular dynamics to find such a path for formaldehyde. Unfortunately, when we do, the paths are tangled like a bird's nest of wires. They go all over the place. We can't really see what's going on. Now, what we really want somehow is a filtered version of this path. We want something to show us the well-worn and well-traveled paths of the map, to show us what the true mechanism behind roaming is. So our idea is this. We say, OK, we'll look for the shortest paths or the optimal paths on this map. Maybe once we find those, that'll work out. Well, some of our previous research suggested that these paths might be the filtered version we were looking for, the routes without all the tangles. For the last year, my work has been to look for these particular routes, and then to understand what makes them special. In this first part, I've had great success. I've managed to write a program that can start in the reactants area, make it to the products area of formaldehyde. And we know that it's short. Or, we hope that it's short at any rate. But when we look at the paths, we see that they're smooth and clear. They're free of tangles, which means this filter is working. That's really great and new all on its own. But the next step is to figure out what makes these paths special. Perhaps there's a particular mountain pass or valley overlook that they all go by. I'm not sure what I will find, or even if there is anything to be found. But that's the excitement of science and I'm excited to wade in. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Vale. Who knew that formaldehyde could be so fascinating, dynamic, and can roam? So with that, let me at this time introduce our first alumni speaker of the afternoon. Sophie Lebrecht received her Ph.D. in 2012 in Cognitive Sciences. She is the co-founder and CEO of Neon Labs, a software technology company located in Silicon Valley. Please join me in welcoming Sophie, whose talk is entitled "Discovering the World Through Images." [APPLAUSE] Thanks. And it's really great to be back at Brown. So the world was a pretty different place when I started at Brown. The iPhone hadn't been invented. And so we had never seen touchscreen technology. People typically weren't walking around with an eight megapixel camera in their back pocket. Twitter was not yet founded, so we had no sense of the importance of 140 characters. And people actually watched television on a TV. Or if they were pretty advanced, Netflix mailed them a DVD. And now, things are a little bit different and content is everywhere. And images are really the central part of exploring that content, which is a really exciting time for me because I've been trying to understand how humans see and respond to images for the best part of my career. I came to Brown to study the human visual system. I started my work with Professor Michael Tarr and Professor David Sheinberg. And we were looking at how humans see faces. And not just regular faces. We were interested in understanding how you see other race faces. So some of you may be familiar with an effect known as the other race effect, where if you are born into a community where you see just one predominant race, you can effortlessly basically distinguish between those faces. But then in fact, faces of other races can be hard to tell apart. And we were interested in, how does this well-known perceptual bias impact our social and emotional decisions? So we set about to train so that people could tell the difference between these faces. And what we were able to discover is actually when people can see the difference between other race faces, it removes their social bias or it ameliorates it to some degree. And for me, that opened up a new question, which is maybe everything we see in the world has an emotional response associated with it. And maybe even objects and images of the everyday that we might think of as being neutral actually generate a very subtle emotional response. And so in my thesis I asked the question, is anything in our visual world ever neutral? And we started to look into behavioral response. We used functional MRI. And we figured out that, in fact, yes. Like even objects that you would typically think of as neutral-- chairs, watches-- actually possess a small affective response that we called valence. And knowing this valence, you could predict the likelihood that people would choose an image. And so as I was finishing my Ph.D., I really thought, maybe this is useful. Maybe there is someone somewhere in the world that would want to know the type of images that people would choose. And I'm going to share a story with you now that I don't typically talk about when I tell this story. But I want to go back to the time, how I was feeling at that time. So I was excited about the science. I knew that there was someone, somewhere that would want to use it. That it could have a big impact. But I was really shy and kind of almost embarrassed to say to my colleagues, maybe we could start a business on this. Or, maybe we could take this out of the university. And so I turned up on Dean Weber's doorstep. I had never met him, but I was finishing up and I said, you know, I want to talk to someone about this. I've had an amazing time at Brown. I've loved my Ph.D. We've published papers. I could do a traditional post-doc, but I'm thinking about this other path. And he said something that has really stayed with me to this day. He said, Sophie, if you've discovered something that can disseminate knowledge and create jobs, then you've done everything that Brown trains in you. And you should hold your head up high and go out into the world and figure it out. So I was like, OK, how am I going to figure it out? And at that time, the National Science Foundation had launched a program called Innovation Core. And the Innovation Core program is designed for scientists or engineers who have NSF-funded research that they think has a commercial potential, but they don't know what they're doing. And it's, of course, different from a lot of the NSF's typical programs. It's taught by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. And they put you through this grueling three-month program where you try to figure out, is there a commercial potential? Is there a product in my science? And through that program, we realized, actually, there is a need. And that need at the moment is in the video space. So online video was really gaining momentum. And there were a lot of companies out there that needed to get more views on their video content. And they asked us, well, if you know what image people like, will you be able to pick the frame from the video to represent it? And I thought, yeah, that's actually a really interesting problem to solve and we can do that. And so we set about forming a team. So I had an expertise in cognitive neuroscientist, but I brought together a group of people from machine learning, computer vision, large-scale system architectures, software engineering design. And together, we built a product that can take in any amount of video and select the frame to represent that video or the thumbnail to drive video views. People often ask, how is it different? How is it different doing research in a startup as opposed to doing it in academia? And I think one of the things that's particularly interesting is the scale. So I remember when I was in the lab, if we had brought 30 people in for a week, that was a big week. And we'd collected a lot of data. Today, Neon serves over a billion thumbnails. People are seeing and responding to our images 24 hours a day globally. Our images have told a story around events like the Winter Olympics through to the Syrian conflicts, to today we're representing the coverage of the Ryder Cup. And so by working with these large-scale media publishers, we suddenly have so much data to be able to solve the problem of how people see and respond to images. And I think another question that people often ask is, but is it fun? What is the most fun part of being part of an early-stage company out in the Valley? And it's interesting. I would be lying if I said there's not a lot of fun in meeting people, finding yourself in these unpredictable situations. But I think one of the most special moments for me was when we were all sitting in the office and the first thumbnail went live on a newspaper's website. And I realized that the algorithms that selected that image had come from science that we had worked on here at Brown. And to see that translated and to see that image live in the wild driving views was an incredibly powerful moment for me. So as I look to the future, I think that I'm still in a very privileged position to be conducting research within a slightly different format than I was before. But myself and my team are still very much interested in understanding how we see and respond to images. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Sophie, for your transparency. and encouraging us to take in the images around us as it may change the way we see the world. And perhaps, how we see our Ph.D.'s I will introduce our first speaker of the second session, Ashley Bowen-Murphy. Ashley is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies. I also learned yesterday that she's training for the New York City Marathon. So not only is she a diligent researcher, but she's also a dedicated athlete. So today, Ashley's talk is entitled "Irritable Heart, Soldier's Heart-- How Civil War Veterans and their widows Mended Broken Hearts." Please join me in welcoming Ashley. [APPLAUSE] So I ran 18 miles this morning and I'm wearing heels, so I want lots of applause at the end. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] I'm in the American Studies Department, which is something of-- it's a very interdisciplinary field. And I use the kinds of insights from history, from literature, and from medical science to think about a particular diagnosis that was in use from, roughly, the Civil War until World War I. It's called irritable heart. And the way that I find out about this illness, the way I learned about not just the way physicians talked about it, but what patients understood about it is by using pension records. These records come from the National Archives and they tell incredible stories about Civil War soldiers. Some of whom were at the front for only a few weeks, others who were at the front for the duration of the war and then went West afterwards. These records include everything from individual medical care, to pulses, to family stories that can tell us something about what it was like to be a veteran of the American Civil War. After the war, we saw lots of men come back to the United States-- come back to the North who had what we might now think of as something of a panic disorder. So they had things that were like high heart rate. They had irregular heart rates. They had incredibly intense chest pain that they would complain about. And this was something that was called irritable heart. It was identified by a man named Jacob Da Costa in 1862 at Turner's Lane Hospital outside of Philadelphia. What he found among Civil War soldiers were an incredible kind of heart disease that he thought was fairly new to the American Civil War. He sent a letter to the Surgeon General in 1862 explaining that an over-excitement of nervous energy-- and keep in mind that in the 19th Century, nervous energy, it's not quite the same thing that we think of today when we think of nerves. It really was more nerves-- combined with exposure to battlefield conditions and poor nutrition were the kinds of things that would generate this sort of physical feeling in someone. At the same time, we know that today soldiers continue to suffer from heart problems at a higher rate and earlier than we might expect. So just this past year, the VA hospital system released a report in which they found that even men who have been to combat, even if they don't end up with post traumatic stress disorder or an anxiety disorder that's sort of clinically recognizable, they do you have heart problems at an earlier age than we might imagine and in higher numbers than we might expect. Jacob Da Costa totally knew this. Like my guy, he knew. So what my research does is try and think through the ways in which medical history can tell us something about what we're still seeing in the present. My research also looks at how individual soldiers made sense of their illnesses. So we have soldiers who would say things like, it felt like my heart stopped. But his heart rate was measured at 104 beats a minute in this case. So this isn't just a question of how physicians understood illness, but how individual patients understood that illness as well. So that's one half of my work-- patients, physicians, the people who either have the illness or study it. But I'm also interested in all the irritable hearts around these soldiers. The people who ended up caretaking. The people whose lives were impacted because the men in their lives came home from the war different. So the story I like to tell on this front is about a woman named Sofia Fife. In the years after the war, she told the pension office that she noticed the change in her husband immediately. When he came back from the war, his hands shook so much that he couldn't hold a coffee cup. It would shake whenever she handed it to him. She also told the pension officer that she would shave him before the war, but not because he couldn't do it himself. It was common. That was a form of affection. It was a way to demonstrate care for a male family member. But after the war, she was afraid to let him do it. Keep in mind this is a man diagnosed with a heart condition, but the shaking of his hands was indicative of so much more and it changed their entire family dynamic. Eventually, the pension office decided that the Fifes weren't-- they weren't eligible for pensions. There were some irregularities in his family history. There were some concern about drinking, about loose women. It was the 19th Century, so your value as a person that the government was going to pay was determined by those things. But after Jacob died, Sofia did receive a pension. And in the documents, the pension officers talk about how her life changed because of his experience in combat. And that itself was worth pensioning. So what I think that we can get from these records is not just the story of a particular illness, but about the way illness is experienced and made sense of by all of the people around them. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Ashley, for giving us a valuable lesson of how history can influence what we know today, and how it's important for how we treat our patients today. Our second speaker is Eric James. Eric is a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. Eric is also the president of an organization near and dear to my heart, SACNAS, the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos, Hispanics, and Native Americans in Science. And today, Eric will speak on "What Can Tadpoles Teach Us About Autism?" With that, please join me in welcoming Eric. [APPLAUSE] Thanks That's our national liaison there for the SACNAS Office. So what can tadpoles teach us about autism? Well, our brains-- indeed, all brains-- are made up of specialized-- well, highly specialized brain cells. And they're called neurons. And neurons have this amazing ability to self-assemble into highly organized neural circuits. Now, these neural circuits, they give rise to our perceptions and they dictate how we experience the world. Now, when abnormalities occur in this circuit function or in circuit form, well, that can profoundly affect how we experience, perceive, and interact with the world around us. Oftentimes, these circuit abnormalities-- well, they present in the form of the behaviors that we ascribe to neural developmental disorders like epilepsy, or schizophrenia, or even autism. Animal models that lend themselves to the study of the brain, both developmentally and functionally, from different levels and different perspectives-- well, they can provide us insights into how human brain disorders arise. One specific example of this is valproic acid. The world over, valproic acid is one of the most commonly prescribed anti-seizure medications. It's also often prescribed as a mood stabilizing drug for bipolars as well as schizophrenics. However, despite its utility as a medication, it has known deleterious effects. If a developing fetus is exposed to valproic acid, because the mother has to take valproic acid to control her seizure history, this causes some 12% to 15% increase in the risk that that child will be diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder. Even more surprising is that of these children that are prenatally exposed to valproic acid and diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder-- well, they're ultimately diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. Now, autism spectrum disorder, if you're not familiar, is made up of what's known as the triad of impairments. This is a decrease of socialization, a decrease in communication, however, an increased propensity for repetitive or stereotype behaviors. Now thus far, we, as scientists, we have been unable to understand how valproic acid is causing these neurodevelopmental disorders. And that's in part due to the fact that we don't have an ethical way of accessing the developing functional brain during pregnancy. Now in Aizenman Lab here at Brown University, we use tadpoles to study brain development, brain function, and brain disorders. Now, what makes this model organism such a useful model system, particularly within this case, is that tadpole embryos develop very similarly to human embryos. Moreover, their brains or nervous systems develop very similarly to human embryos as well. Or, human brains as well. This means that we can access the developing functional circuits and we can look and test how changes in circuit formation and circuit function ultimately dictate changes in behavior. So when we expose these developing tadpoles to valproic acid, we find that the neural circuits have significantly changed. They become hyper-connected. They become hyper-excitable. And somehow, the individual neurons that make up those circuits-- well, they become less excitable. Now, how do we test for socialization in tadpoles? Well, tadpoles school very similarly to how fish school. And this is a social behavior. So again when we expose these tadpoles to valproic acid and we measure their ability to school, we find that they school abnormally. Meaning they have decreased ability to socialize. So what can we learn from tadpoles, particularly about autism? Well, we can learn three things. One, we can use this animal model to understand how valproic acid is causing these neurodevelopmental disorders. Two, we can use it to identify potential therapeutic targets that we can manipulate in order to reverse and/or-- well, reverse the effects and/or protect the developing fetus against the deleterious effects of valproic acid. And three, and most importantly, is that we can use these quote, unquote "autistic" tadpoles to identify whether neurodevelopmental disorder that arise from genetic or environmental risk factors have the same sort of mechanisms as valproic acid-induced neurodevelopmental disorders. And if we can find these conserved biological targets-- well, that may be the key to unlocking the mystery that is human brain disorders. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Eric. Who knew that tadpoles could be autistic? And secondly, thank you, Eric, for telling us and explaining to us why less complex model organisms are just as valuable. So let me introduce you to our next speaker, Jessica Tabak. Jessica Tabak is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. The title of her talk is, "When Stories are Difficult." Please join me in welcoming Jessica. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Heather. Illnesses don't make sense. They're sudden, unpredictable, and arbitrary. This senselessness compounds the pain that illness sufferers experience. In addition to their physical symptoms, they have the painful confusion of not understanding what is happening to their bodies or why. In order to ease this painful confusion, we turn to stories. Doctors, social workers, families, friends encourage illness sufferers to re-imagine their suffering along pre-scripted optimistic storylines. And one that many of us are familiar with is the overcoming storyline in which someone is encouraged to think about their illness as an obstacle that they'll both tactical and be a stronger person for having overcome. But different cultures use different illness stories. And today, I'd like to share with you an example from the culture that I study, which is the culture of Renaissance England. Back then, medicine wasn't what it is today. So it was impossible for sufferers to have the same sort of optimism that they would, in fact, overcome their illnesses. And so what they did was they imagined that their illnesses themselves had positive meaning that was given to them by God. They saw their physical symptoms and suffering as steps along a path to spiritual salvation. Now, during this time, there were a number of very popular spiritual guidebooks published. And these guidebooks were designed to teach sufferers how they, too, could fit their illnesses along this salvation story. And in 1624, one of the great English Renaissance writers made his own contribution to this literary field. His name was John Donne, and his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions described his own experiences with an illness that almost killed him. The Devotions is a notoriously difficult text to read for a number of reasons. But the one that I find most interesting is that its twisting, turning plot often resists this very salvation story that we, as readers, expect it to follow. I examined this twisting, turning plot in my dissertation and I'd like for us to think about it together today. So oftentimes on the Devotions, Donne does exactly what you would expect him to do. He describes his physical symptoms as blessings from God and he praises God for them. But here's the trick. For every moment when Donne praises god and piously accepts his suffering, there's a moment in which he doesn't. A new, unexpected symptom will emerge or a treatment will hurt instead of making him hurt less. Donne struggles to understand these moments. And in doing so, he questions god. He challenges god instead of offering him the praise that the salvation story tells him that he should. I think that these difficult experiences are important in and of themselves. But what makes the devotion such an extraordinary book is what Donne does with these moments. Instead of ignoring them, pretending to his readers that his experiences fit the script he's been given, Donne records his difficulties. And in doing so, he allows each and every one of his readers to see exactly when and where this salvation story fails to provide him the comfort it's been designed to give. This is why I think the Devotions is such an important book for us to read, even today. It reminds us how hard it is to fit illness inside any one-size-fits-all story. Whether it's a story from the East, or the West, or Renaissance England, or modern America. And in reminding us of this, I think that this strange old text in an obscure genre poses a very immediate challenge to us all. Can we, like Donne, resist the very understandable temptation to ignore those moments when our friends or family members, our patients, or even our own sick bodies experience illness in ways that don't fit the stories we've been given? When they are messy, counterproductive, or regressive. By studying the literature of illness, it is my hope that we all may become more responsive to hearing other people's stories of suffering. Even when those stories are difficult to hear. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Jessica, for sharing with us insights on how we can navigate difficult conversations and doing it in a meaningful and purposeful way. Our last graduate student talk of the day is by Steve Zins. Steve is a Ph.D. candidate in the Pathobiology Graduate Program here at Brown. He is also the Current President of the Graduate Student Council. Today, he will talk about his dissertation research, which is entitled, "Are We Safe? Responding to a Global Persistent Infection." With that, the stage is yours. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much, Heather. And thank you all for coming. It's really an honor to be able to share with you today why my research matters. I want to start off with two numbers, 35 million, 36 billion. 35 million people worldwide are currently living with HIV. And a recent study indicated that the economic burden of new HIV infections in the United States alone in 1 year was $36 billion. Hold that thought. I work on viruses. Simple enough. In the Atwood Laboratory at Brown University, we study human polyomaviruses. And you've probably never heard of these viruses for a very good reason. They don't do anything to you if you're healthy. But it turns out that these viruses infect up to 70% of the human population. And if you have a severely weakened immune system, these viruses reactivate, travel to your brain, and cause a fatal neurodegenerative disease called PML for short. So here we have a situation where we have a virus that's either really good at hiding from your immune system or your immune system is really, really good at controlling it. I work on how polyomaviruses interact with your immune system. And your immune systems over time have developed really cool ways at generally dealing with pathogens. One of these cool ways is that cells in your body have specialized proteins that recognize patterns in molecules that shouldn't be there. And so when one of these cells and specialized proteins recognizes a pattern that screams, hey, a virus is here, it signals to other immune cells to clear the infection. I'm working on how after polyomavirus infection the virus manipulates these signals, turning them on or off, up or down, and the subsequent downstream signals from that. Understanding this can help us understand why these viruses are not cleared completely from your body and they remain persistent. Another really cool way that your immune system is developed to deal with pathogens are by producing proteins called defensins. They're named that way for a reason. They provide a very good first line of defense by either being able to directly neutralize viruses and bacteria or by signaling just like the specialized pattern-recognizing proteins. And I am following, using different microscopes, a polyomavirus infection throughout the cell after being treated with defensin and figuring out where the virus is stuck in the cell. Because the defensin, indeed, neutralizes infection and I'm trying to figure out where on the virus's journey it does this. And by figuring this out, we can more directly target what compartment in the cell to use for treating this virus infection. And it could potentially have other implications with other persistent pathogens. But let me bring you back to that thought I told you to hold onto a little while ago. Why did I start off with HIV when I work on polyomaviruses? Well, if you didn't know, HIV destroys your immune cells. And PML was originally thought to be an AIDS-defining illness. But I bet many of you in the audience know somebody with multiple sclerosis, or Crohn's, or lupus, or any other autoimmune conditions. It turns out that the treatment for these conditions, or turning down your immune system, or in some cases turning it off, provide a really ripe environment for polyomaviruses to reactivate. So with new medicines and new elegant treatment strategies, we have unforeseen complications that we may not have been aware of before. So it's interesting. This summer I taught with a colleague of mine a summer course for pre-college kids called "Exploring Infectious Diseases-- Are We Safe?" And I think we have a pretty good idea on the answer to that question for better or for worse. For popular infections, such as flu, Ebola, salmonella. But my research hopes to answer a more nuanced and difficult question, are we really safe from these pathogens and persistent infections that so far we've been able to control? With new medicines and new treatment technologies, some of these questions are harder to answer because they open up different problems. So in my mind, at least 35 million people and $36 billion are at stake. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Steve, for once again reminding us how lucky we are to have a functional immune system, and why we must continue to study it. At this time, let me introduce you to our second and final speaker of the day. He is a graduate student alumni. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2006, Shankar Prasad. He is also returning to us to Brown University. And as a student who is about to complete the Ph.D. process, the topic of his talk today is very meaningful to me and strikes a chord. So please welcome Shankar, as he's going to talk to us about "Exploring Non-Traditional Career Options, and Not Feeling Guilty About It." With that, please join me in welcoming. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Heather, for that introduction. And thank you so much for having me here today. When Dean Ryan had asked me to join this panel and to join this event, I jumped at the opportunity because I wish close to a decade ago when I graduated somebody had told me the same thing that I want to talk about today, which is that it's OK to explore options outside of traditional academia. In part because our training allows us to do so. My journey here, a little more than a decade ago, started in the Department of Political Scientist. I came to do my Ph.D. in a bright hot pink, hideous building on the corner of Prospect Street and Water-- Prospect and-- I'm blanking now. But it's there. And it's no longer pink as it turns, which I thought was wonderful. And I started because I was really interested in understanding political behavior and civic engagement. And specifically, mechanisms that drive political behavior and civic engagement. My research at that time that translated into a dissertation focused on political learning among immigrant communities. Understanding how new people come to this country. They understand the political process, and then they translate that specifically into partisan affiliation. And I was really fascinated with this research topic. I conducted a national survey, got to travel around the country and do focus group research as well. And then one day I walked into my dissertation advisor's office and I give him a bit of a heart attack by telling him that I was going to, upon graduation, go to work at a hedge fund in mergers and acquisitions as a financial analyst in New York City. About as opposite or as far a departure from studying political science at a place like Brown. And I went there and it was a really interesting experience. After two grueling, sort of soul-sucking years in finance, I realized finance wasn't for me. But what I did-- and this is right around the time of the financial crisis-- was gathered a couple people that I worked with in the fund. And we started a health care technology firm. And the goal for us was to think about how we could use or really harness the power of technology to think about better ways, more efficient ways to collect health data, clinical data, especially in the emerging world. And then, to repurpose that data in a way that researchers, academics in particular, administrators could take that data and try to drive meaningful conclusions. To, in other words, give them the power to query their data in more powerful ways. And it was a really fantastic ride. We started in India. We built it out to the UAE. We then went to South Africa. And now we're in the United States as well. And at the moment, it's the largest provider of clinical data systems in India, in particular. While I was doing that though, that dissertation topic at the back of my mind sort of was always there, always sort of questioning sort of the relevance of the research that I had done. And so what I did was think about, if technology could sort of re-imagine the way we think about collecting health data. And if technology could do such an incredible thing about re-changing or changing the ways we do so many other things in our lives, like traveling or shopping or looking for a variety of services or traveling, why can't we think about using technology and harnessing the power of technology to repurpose or rethink the way that we engage in the democratic process? And so I started a little start-up called Yourlist.org that used a basic NLP algorithm to go out there and ask citizens to identify what are the issues that you care about. Tell us what you care about. Tell us what your issues are. Whether it's the fact that your school doesn't have enough supplies for your children. Whether it's that transportation locally has broken down. Whether it's a pothole sort of in your local area that you want fixing. And the idea is to take those issues, to identify across a geographic region, aggregate sort of the most popular issues based on that, and then use it as a matching tool. One, to be able to help to drive the conversation in political institutions. But two, to also use as a mechanism for accountability. To say, if people care about these top three things, why is it that our political institutions are doing these other 3 things? Or 10 things? Or really, nothing as the case turned out at that time. And it was really fantastic. I loved it. We launched it in New York City. We got 150,000 responses in our first campaign, which was outstanding. Except that when I looked back and looked at what the work I was trying to do in terms of democratic engagement, I saw that we had barely pushed the needle. We had barely moved the needle in terms of trying to change the democratic process and re-engage citizens. Because just asking people what they care about doesn't really go anywhere. What you have to do is to change the culture in political institutions and make them much more open and accessible to using this data to actually driving problem solving and agenda setting and all these other factors. And so at that time, I had already moved to NYU. I started teaching. And then I joined two of my colleges and we started something called the Governance Lab. And the Governance Lab's job was to basically rethink institutional redesign, to use technology, to create more opportunities for collaborative problem solving in public and private institutions. We started with a couple basic clients. We started with the procurement process at the World Bank. We started with a smaller series of projects. One with the NYPD at the time in trying to think about using sentiment analysis to rethinking how we do community policing. And we basically branched out our work in a short period of time to a number of institutions both local and national in scale. We actually worked with NYU itself which ended up being a 70,000-person organization to think about how we can engage the community of people involved-- students, faculty, staff-- across decision-making to rethink things like, what to do with the university bookstore in an era when bookstores don't make sense. Or, how do we improve employee engagement so that we can directly ask employee experts how we can think about things like working with retirement benefit plans and a whole host of other issues? It was an incredible ride. It continues to be so. In a short span, about 8 months, we raised $15 million from basically foundations primarily and from generous grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Omidyar, and a couple of other smaller groups. We also were able to work with a number of smaller clients. I bring this up, one, because in political science it's an unheard of amount of money. But two, it identifies the appetite that people had for using technology to rethink the political process. And that's what we continue to do even now. In that time, that money allowed us to grow our staff from 3 to 35 people. We now have branches at MIT, at NYU, obviously. Hopefully at Brown now that I'm here. And also, in Mexico, and Chile, and Argentina, Brazil, NHS in the UK. So we're doing a bunch of work everywhere. And basic goal of the Governance Lab is to use technology, test out a bunch of theories about how we can re-engage the political process, and then go through the process of testing what works and what doesn't. Our basic frame with the Governance Lab is threefold, is to rethink governance or sort of decision-making in three different ways. One is in terms of engaging citizens to collect better information and really tap into the expertise of the public when we make decisions. And we've done this in pretty extraordinary ways, I think. Sort of this is a time now where we're seeing a lot of this kind of movement in a very exciting way across the board from there in terms of work that's being done in Iceland, in terms of sort of co-creating the constitution there. In terms of work that's being done in Estonia. In terms of work that's being done in Libya, as well, where we're engaging citizens directly in the process of identifying what rules and regulations for these country should be, which is pretty exciting. The second phrase that we've been focusing on is thinking about how we can push data out in a more efficiently. How we can use public data, agency data, and basically push it out to spur innovation. We publish something called the Open Data 500 Report. And it was the first of its kind, which was great. President Obama has now put an economic value to open data at $3 trillion. And our goal was basically to identify what are best practices for agencies to be able to open up their data in a way that can then spur this economic innovation. And then finally, our interest was to think about how we can harness technology to co-collaborate or collaborate with citizens in directly solving problems. And some of the work that we've seen in participatory budgeting is a nice example of this kind of work here. So these are three instances of work that's happening. It's pretty exciting. It continues to grow. And I bring it up because the work that I was able to do with the Governance Lab was so significantly based on the work that I did as a graduate student here with these questions that I got to ask in our dark basement in Prospect House sort of during those lonely hours. And so recognizing that I'm all that stands between you and what looks like a very delicious reception, let me end by saying the following. If your path is not clear, if you feel lonely and you're sort of not quite sure what to do with your research, or you're trying to figure out what the next step is with that master's or Ph.D. degree that you want to explore other alternatives, I think it's really important to recognize that this program and graduate school, in particular, trains you to be an entrepreneur whether you recognize it or not. The seeds for being an entrepreneur for me were sort of sown so long ago without me recognizing it. And I was able to continue to use this training to try and fail, and try and fail, and try and try in different arenas about things that I were interested in. There's no better way to do that than to start here in your graduate training. So let me end with that. Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Shankar. I am very encouraged by hearing those words. And it's OK to navigate different paths. And I'm reminded of a famous story that's entitled, Oh, The Places You Will Go. Have faith, it will lead you back to the same spot. So this concludes all our talks for the day. Are you excited? Did you hear something that you loved? Yes? [CHEERS] I told you, they would be fantastic. So I'm going to invite Dean Ryan to come back up for closing remarks. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Heather. That was. Great thank you all for joining us. What wonderful talks. The passion, I think, was just evident. I could feel it in each of those talks. I just also want to thank, again, our sponsors. We're grateful for the support of the Office of Brown's 250th Anniversary. We're also grateful for the C.M. Colver Lectureship Fund. I encourage you to continue to enjoy the many events that are taking place this weekend. So some of you may be peeling off from our reception to tailgating and heading to the football game. I also remind you of Sweeney Todd that's happening tonight. So there's much more in your program for this weekend. And I hope you take advantage of these many ways to celebrate Brown's 250th. Right now, I'd invite you to join us in the lobby right outside the auditorium for a reception to celebrate our speakers, and to celebrate graduate school research because research matters. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

See also

References

  1. ^ Miljan, Toivo (2004). Historical Dictionary of Estonia. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-4904-4.
This page was last edited on 1 May 2023, at 07:17
Basis of this page is in Wikipedia. Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported License. Non-text media are available under their specified licenses. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. WIKI 2 is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wikimedia Foundation.