In-Person Event, September 22 at 11:30 a.m., the Capital City Club
For your safety and the safety of others,
ACIR requests that only fully vaccinated people attend.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities have advanced considerably in the last decade and are expected to see increased employment by states and, potentially, non-state actors in the ensuing years. Case in point: 20 years ago, China was spending very little on Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and the U.S was leading the world in AI. Now, China has surged well ahead of other nations in AI. Is the U.S. rising to this challenge with the necessary budgetary response for AI?
Dr. Margaret Kosal, Associate Professor of the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, will discuss differing geopolitics, capacities and rhetoric of global AI competitors like Russia and China. She will explore how political and security factors surrounding the research and development of AI-enabled capabilities interact and the implications for national security. The widespread emphasis on the importance of AI globally, especially in the context of military capabilities and balance of power, is uncontested politically, and at the same time, it is also an area in need of more investigation and better understanding.
Venue: Capital City Club (Downtown)
7 John Portman Boulevard
Atlanta, GA 30303
About Margaret E. Kosal, Ph.D.
Dr. Margaret E. Kosal is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is the Director of the Sam Nunn Security Program. She holds appointments as affiliated faculty in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and the Georgia Tech Institute for Robotics and Intelligence Machines (IRIM) at Georgia Tech. Her research explores the relationships among technology, strategy, and governance. She focuses on two, often intersecting, areas: reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and understanding the geopolitics of emerging technologies.
Kosal is the author of Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense, which explores scenarios, benefits, and potential proliferation threats of nanotechnology and other emerging sciences; editor of the volume, Technology and the Intelligence Community: Challenges and Advances for the 21st Century, and editor and contributor to the volume Disruptive and Game Changing Technologies in Modern Warfare: Development, Use, and Proliferation and the forthcoming volume Weapons Technology Proliferation: Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic Approaches to Technological Proliferation.
Formally trained as an experimental scientist, Kosal earned a doctoral degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on biomimetic and nano-structured functional materials. She is also the co-founder of a sensor company, where she led research and development of medical, biological, chemical sensors and explosives detection. During AY 2016-2017, she served as a Senior Adjunct Scholar to the Modern War Institute at West Point. Kosal previously has served as a Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, as Science and Technology Advisor within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and as an Associate to the National Intelligence Council (NIC). She is the recipient of multiple awards including the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence and most recently honored as Georgia Power Professor of Excellence. In January 2017, she was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge University Press journal, Politics and the Life Sciences.
