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,[…]

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[…]

Digital Shanzhai: Connected Manufacturing, Memes and Our Hardware Future

I’ve become fascinated as of late by the manufacturing culture in Shenzhen and, having studied different aspects of Chinese Internet meme culture, I was interested specifically in the role of the Internet in the context of manufacturing. This interest is both academic and pragmatic—as a software product manager myself, I was also interested in what[…]

Chinese Apps Find Familiar Market in India

With years of experience catering to budget users with entry-level phones, Chinese app-makers are taking on the Indian smartphone market and its hundreds of millions of new customers. Ajinkya Kolwankar, 25 and self-employed in Mumbai, recently deleted the Facebook app on his phone in favour of UC Browser, an app made by a subsidiary of Chinese[…]