In today’s rapidly evolving world, we face unprecedented societal challenges – social and economic inequality, climate change, unemployment, and technological disruptions, among others. These complex issues call for critical thinking perspectives and innovative solutions. Against this background, social innovation stands out as a crucial catalyst for addressing these challenges and fostering new strategies and sustainable solutions that traditional methods often overlook.

This instructor-led training course, Strategic Foresight 201, is all about helping acceleration centres understand how to plan for the future in a digital world. It focuses on trends in research readiness and is based on the Playbook for Strategic Foresight by the ITU/BDT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Alliance for Digital Development. Equipped with hypothetical case studies, this course is designed to speed up the change to digital technology, encourage new ideas, and support national growth goals.

During this 8-hour deep dive, you will be introduced to the key techniques, services, and trends that will help you understand foundation models from the ground up. This means breaking down theory, mathematics, and abstract concepts combined with hands-on exercises to gain functional intuition for practical application. Throughout the course, we focus on a wide spectrum of progressively complex generative AI techniques, giving you a strong base to understand, design, and apply your own models for the best performance. We’ll start with recapping foundation models, understanding where they come from, how they work, how they relate to generative AI, and what you can to do customize them. You’ll then learn about picking the right foundation model to suit your use case.

This course seeks to outline AI applications of particular relevance to peace and conflict settings from a gender perspective. Ultimately, it aims to demonstrate how the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda can be leveraged to ensure that AI technologies are deployed in a gender-responsive and conflict-sensitive manner, drawing on observations and experiences from Southeast Asia.