Upon serving as the keynote speaker for the Defence Technology Institute (DTI) of the Thai Ministry of Defence 2018 Technology Challenge Day, START’s Unconventional Weapons and Technology (UWT) Director Steve Sin received the Collaboration Award. Presented by the Director and Secretary of DTI, Air Chief Marshal Dr. Preecha Prachamuk, the award recognized Sin and START’s UWT team for their multidisciplinary collaborative work examining how non-state actors adopt new technologies.
Sin’s keynote, “Violent Non-state Actors and Technology,” focused on how violent non-state actors have used technology to their advantage in the past and how they continue to do so.
“A big piece of my talk also focused on how we - those who are engaged in fighting against violent non-state actors - can stay ahead of violent non-state actors' adoption of new technologies by thinking about the problem systematically,” Sin said. “I presented the idea of utilizing a technology risk assessment framework to prioritize resource allocation as we attempt to determine which technological threats to address first.”
More than 300 explosive ordinance disposal technicians from Thailand and surrounding Southeast Asian countries attended the event. Other participants included delegations from the U.S. government (representatives from the Army, Air Force, Navy, FBI, DHS and American Military University) and their government counterparts in the UK, France and Canada.
