Singapore in Southeast Asia and Stanford University in the United States are focal points for discussions of AI and how it can be made to help—not hurt—human beings. In a piece written for RSIS Commentaries, Don Emmerson, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at APARC, uses a recent panel at Stanford to illustrate the difficulty and necessity of bringing both generalist and specialist perspectives to bear on the problem.

Singapore has been described as “a thriving hub for artificial intelligence.” In May 2019, Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) released the first edition of “A Proposed Model AI Governance Framework.”

That “accountability-based” document would “frame the discussions around harnessing AI in a responsible way” by “translat[ing] ethical principles into practical measures that can be implemented by organisations deploying AI solutions”. The guiding principles it proposes to operationalise are that AI systems should be “human-centric” and that decisions made by using them should be “explainable, transparent, and fair”….

Read the full article on RSiS Commentaries.

Trust but verify. That mantra from nuclear-weapons negotiation discourse during the Cold War is newly relevant today. Versions of the advice are circulating among governments in Southeast Asia and elsewhere as they weigh the security risks of partnering with this or that company to install the fifth-generation telecommunications technology known as 5G.

It is tempting to believe that a technical solution to the problem of unwanted risk exists — a clever digital tweak that will fully and permanently protect a 5G network’s users. It does not. The best one can hope for is a “good enough” balancing of faith and proof that is — arguably, not assuredly — reassuring and realistic. Characteristics of the network-offering company in its home country and of the network-purchasing government in its own country will shape the 5G seller-buyer bargain and its location. This will occur on an eventual spectrum of arrangements between the unwise and the unworkable: unverified trust at one extreme end, trust-eliminating verification at the other....

Read the full article on RSiS Commentaries.

On Thursday, the third Asia-Pacific Geo-Economic Strategy Forum (APGEO) saw discussion on issues of international strategic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific with a particular focus on the U.S.-Japan relationship. Speakers included experts on defense and foreign affairs, including former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Japanese Ministers of Defense.

Organized by the Hoover Institution, Nikkei Inc. and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI), the talks occurred within the context of the United State’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIP) and Japan’s Medium Term Defense Program, both recently updated to outline the U.S. and Japan’s respective regional commitments.

The forum’s speakers focused on the rise of China as a common theme underscoring the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Particularly, the speakers shared a general consensus that China’s attempts to increase its economic and political influence and its initiatives to drive progress on technological frontiers such as 5G networks and artificial intelligence pose a threat to the current international order...

Read the full article in The Stanford Daily

This post was originally published on Axios.

Where it stands: Trump and Kim each face immense pressure, both international and domestic, to make progress.

• Trump needs to earn political trust back in Washington to continue negotiating with North Korea. His strategy so far has been to convince Kim that North Korea’s denuclearization would bring the country a “bright future.”
• At the same time, Trump must address Kim’s concerns about whether any agreement reached with his administration will withstand the Democrat-controlled House and survive the post-Trump era.

Between the lines: Successful diplomacy sometimes entails purposeful ambiguities, and the ambiguities of the first Trump-Kim summit might indeed have been strategic. At this critical juncture, however, a failure on Trump’s and Kim’s part to commit to defined objectives could hurt the bilateral relationship.

The bottom line: Trump and Kim need support more than ever to advance their diplomatic endeavors. While spectators have good reason to be skeptical, and one can only be cautiously hopeful with North Korea, a return to confrontation or "strategic patience" is in no one’s interest.

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

As tension grows between China and the United States, its effects are felt across Asia. APARC's Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson sat down with Michael McFaul, FSI's Director and host of FSI's podcast World Class, to talk about why Southeast Asia in particular is caught in that rising tension between China and the United States and what can be done to prevent it from becoming a battle ground for a new Cold War between the two superpowers.

Listen to the conversation:

Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries. New research points to a more sustainable path forward through engagement with small-scale producers.

Nearly ubiquitous in products ranging from cookies to cosmetics, palm oil represents a bedeviling double-edged sword. Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries, contributing to large-scale habitat loss, among other impacts. New Stanford-led research points the way to a middle ground of sustainable development through engagement with an often overlooked segment of the supply chain (read related overview and research brief).

"The oil palm sector is working to achieve zero-deforestation supply chains in response to consumer-driven and regulatory pressures, but they won’t be successful until we find effective ways to include small-scale producers in sustainability strategies,” said Elsa Ordway, lead author of a Jan. 10 Nature Communications paper that examines the role of proliferating informal oil palm mills in African deforestation. Ordway, a postdoctoral fellow at The Harvard University Center for the Environment, did the research while a graduate student in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

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An oil palm plantation in Cameroon (Image credit: Elsa Ordway)

Using remote sensing tools, Ordway and her colleagues mapped deforestation due to oil palm expansion in Southwest Cameroon, a top producing region in Africa’s third largest palm oil producing country (read about related Stanford research). Contrary to a widely publicized narrative of deforestation driven by industrial-scale expansion, the researchers found most oil palm expansion and associated deforestation occurred outside large, company-owned concessions, and that expansion and forest clearing by small-scale, non-industrial producers was more likely near low-yielding informal mills, scattered throughout the region. This is strong evidence that oil palm production gains in Cameroon are coming from extensification instead of intensification.

Possible solutions for reversing the extensification trend include improving crop and processing yields by using more high-yielding seed types, replanting old plantations, and upgrading and mechanizing milling technologies, among other approaches. To prevent intensification efforts from inciting further deforestation, they will need to be accompanied by complementary natural resource policies that include sustainability incentives for smallholders.

In Indonesia, where a large percentage of the world’s oil palm-related forest clearing has occurred, a similar focus on independent, smallholder producers could yield major benefits for both poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, according to a Jan. 4 Ambio study led by Rosamond Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies(Naylor coauthored the Cameroon study led by Ordway).

Using field surveys and government data, Naylor and her colleagues analyzed the role of small producers in economic development and environmental damage through land clearing. Their research focused on how changes in legal instruments and government policies during the past two decades, including the abandonment of revenue-sharing agreements between district and central governments and conflicting land title authority among local, regional and central authorities, have fueled rapid oil palm growth and forest clearing in Indonesia.

They found that Indonesia’s shift toward decentralized governance since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 has simultaneously encouraged economic development through the expansion of smallholder oil palm producers (by far the fastest growing subsector of the industry since decentralization began), reduced rural poverty, and driven ecologically destructive practices such as oil palm encroachment into more than 80 percent of the country’s Tesso Nilo National Park.

A worker in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, loads palm fruit for transport to a factory that will process it into palm oil (Image credit: Joann de Zegher)

Shorenstein APARC's annual overview of the Center's 2017-18 activities  is now available to download. 

Feature sections look at the Center's seminars, conferences, and other activities in response to the North Korean crisis, research and events related to China's past, present, and future, and several Center research initiatives focused on technology and the changing workforce.

The overview highlights recent and ongoing Center research on Japan's economic policies, innovation in Asia, population aging and chronic disease in Asia, and talent flows in the knowledge economy, plus news about Shorenstein APARC's education and policy activities, publications, and more.