Atlanta 6/20/2014 10:48:11 PM
News / Events

Five Day Lecture Series on U.S.-China Cyber Relations and its Future

While the internet has deeply interconnected the world, this means that very different countries are now a mouse click away from each other. In many ways this shows how China and the U.S. are a great enigma to each other despite how we rely on each other. In 1996, the Office of the Secretary of Defense commissioned University of Arizona to evaluate the impact of the internet. In this series of lectures starting Monday June 23, Dr. William Abbott Foster will discuss the results of his 15 years of research into U.S.-China cyber relations and his recommendations to the Administration. 

Dr. Foster will also discuss the possibility of a cyber war that has begun between the U.S. and China. It is critical that we understand whether the Chinese people and their leadership are becoming more “militantly nationalistic” because of the internet, or if they are becoming committed to planetary sustainability and “universal values”. 

The main focus of these lectures will be to explain and then answer the question, “Will we be able to rely on China should we ever need them financially?” On the first day the lecture will be focused on the birth of the internet in China. Dr. Foster will discuss some of the hopes and fears surrounding this development. The second day will be a lecture on the battle in China for who would control the internet. The third day will talk about The People’s Liberation Army and how it views the Internet in China as a tool for cyber-espionage against militantly aggressive forces in the U.S. On the fourth day of the lecture Dr. Foster will discuss how China leverages its telecom market to create competition among ministries and finally on the fifth day we will end with U.S.-China Cyber Relations 20 years or more into the future. 

These lectures are very important financially and politically as they delve deeply into a very real issue between two great superpowers and the war they are having on a very big medium, the internet. 

Lectures on U.S.-China Cyber Relations will be held from Monday June 23 to Friday June 27 in Room 420 of the Goizueta Business School at Emory University (1300 Clifton Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30322) between 12p-1p and Broadcast Online.  

About Dr. William Foster

Dr. William Foster got his PhD and studied at University of Arizona under Dr. Sy Goodman. His PhD dissertation on the Diffusion of the Internet in China was published in 2001 by CISAC at Stanford. Sy’s research team, the MOSAIC Group, has studied Internet diffusion in 40 countries. 

Dr. Foster was in charge of government for the Commercial Internet Exchange, the world’s first ISP association. He then taught information systems at Arizona State University and then left to found the Institute for Next Generation Internet.