Insights and Provocations from An Expert
It is often forgotten that laws concerning data privacy serve purposes other than protecting privacy alone. Research conducted by this writer in New Zealand over the last decade has conclusively established in the first place that the vast majority (around 80% in one study) of litigation brought under the Privacy Act 1993 (the Act) was[…]
As more of our personal data is held in centralized, remote storage, it has become a tempting target for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Through various investigatory powers, these government agencies can demand that social media companies, e-mail providers, ISPs, and other intermediaries turn over sensitive records and message content. Are governments abusing their investigatory[…]
# 1 When I think of AI, I think of HAL. HAL 9000 is the computer in *2001: A Space Odyssey*. HAL runs the systems on *Discovery One*, the spacecraft sent to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious signal. Along the way, one thing leads to another and HAL ends up trying to kill his human[…]
Automated technologies using artificial intelligence are increasingly being applied in daily life, and Australia is no exception. Transportation has emerged as a prominent area in which AI and automation are being deployed among the general population, prominently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs – better known as drones) and autonomous vehicles (better known as ‘driverless cars’). While[…]
Earlier this year, the defeat of Go world champion Lee Sedol by Google’s AlphaGo underscored the coming-of-age of artificial intelligence (or AI for short). Since 1956, when the term AI was first coined, billions of dollars of investment have flowed into the development and commercialization of AI – a term referring to computer systems that[…]
By definition, the project of artificial intelligence has largely been concerned with replicating human capability for logic and thought. The engineering history of AI reads like a narrative conflict of man versus himself, driven to model the next great feat of thought, capability for strategy, and even humor and punning. Those engineering benchmarks met, we[…]
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group – the company that had caught the attention of the global media with its historical IPO of $25 billion in 2014 – once again grabbed the headlines recently due to a standout $1 billion deal in April for a controlling stake of Lazada, an e-commerce company that operates across six[…]
The extraordinary recent growth of the mobile internet across Asia and the Pacific carries the promise of a more inclusive digital economy, accessible to everyone with a cheap smartphone. A low-cost, mobile internet could reconfigure the provision of health and education, open new economic opportunities, and expand cultural, civic and political engagement. But as we[…]
It took only weeks for Pokemon GO to become the world’s most viral mobile app of all time. Developed by Niantic Labs, and with over 550 million downloads in 80 days, the augmented reality (AR) game has mainstreamed and altered how handheld technology allows users to interact with their immediate surroundings. Taiwan’s rare Pokémon stampedes[…]
South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (“PIPA”), promulgated in 2011 and subsequently amended, has been described as the “most innovative” and “toughest” data privacy law in Asia. PIPA is designed to ensure individual agency over personal information, bring transparency to data collection practices, and empower regulators and the courts to hold collectors and users of[…]