China’s Techno-Utilitarian Experiments with Artificial Intelligence

Any article talking about China’s journey with Artificial Intelligence (AI) has to begin with the board game Go. More specifically, the face-off between Lee Sedol, winner of 18 world titles and widely considered to be the greatest player of the past decade, and Google’s DeepMind-AI-powered Alpha Go. In a now landmark match, Alpha Go didn’t[…]

Asia Pacific-US AI Workshop: Measuring Impact and Building Trust in AI

In order to establish a cross-cultural dialogue and learning network on specific AI issues and potential methods for addressing them within and across the US and APAC region, the Asia Pacific-US AI Workshop was convened by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University with the Digital Asia Hub, in collaboration with[…]

Artificial Intelligence and Trust: A Global Roundtable

Given the data-intensive nature of approaches such as machine learning, and the increasing ubiquity of AI in everyday products and services, there is a growing interest within the privacy community to understand its implications. At the same time, a tremendous amount of innovation and entrepreneurship in the AI space is emerging from Asia and Latin[…]

Lead Leapfrogger: Chinese O2O Commerce and The Nature Of Cultural Innovation

I. The Remarkable Story of Everyday O2O Commerce in China Let’s say you were planning to visit China ten years ago. You would have your visa and flights booked, perhaps even a hotel. But the preparations wouldn’t end there. You’d have withdrawn plenty of RMB in cash, which you’d need for just about everything, except[…]

AI in Asia: Ethics, Safety and Societal Impact

Digital Asia Hub, in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, held the second AI in Asia workshop titled ‘AI in Asia: Ethics, Safety and Societal Impact’ on December 16, 2017. Digital Asia Hub invited experts from across Asia, Europe and the U.S., including among them leading lawyers, data scientists, ethicists, engineers,[…]

AI in Australian vehicles – how is privacy faring so far?

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[…]

Is Artificial Intelligence a Weapon of Mass Disruption?

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[…]

Encounters with Other Intelligences: Reflections from Digital Asia Hub’s AI in Asia Conference

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[…]

Artificial Intelligence in Asia

Digital Asia Hub, in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, kicked off its Artificial Intelligence(AI) in Asia series of workshops examining AI in the Asian context on November 21. Designed as a framing event for the region, it brought together a fantastic group of scholars, policymakers, investors, technologists and artists. We celebrated our anniversary with[…]