Fiel Aquino is a Filipino researcher working on foresight, institutional transitions, and risks, with University of the Philippines leadership and the Atlantic Institute. His engagement with these questions began with fossil fuels in high school, through Youth for Climate Hope. There, he co-leads education and public engagement for the #FossilFreeNegros campaigns, which secured the cancellation of proposed coal-fired power plants in his province in 2019 and again in 2022, establishing Negros as a national model for energy justice. His broader work addresses legibility failures, instances where capital and institutions fail to register or respond to beings beyond their existing moral and legal frontiers, and focuses on building the evidence and ecosystems required to sustain response.

In 2023, Fiel co-chaired and co-founded an AI governance network representing the Global Majority. It developed early rights-aligned frameworks across Southeast Asia and advised the 19th Philippine Congress and Indonesia's national AI strategy. That work helped position the Philippines as a second-ranked bright spot out of 130+ countries on defending human rights and AI, as reported in the 2024 Global Index for Responsible AI and the European Commission. Fiel now builds civic capacity for AI policy at AI Safety Diliman and Safe AI Philippines, including an AI Governance Career Accelerator training policy practitioners and legislative staffers, several of whom now bring public-interest oversight directly into the House Committee on ICT and the Department of Defense Policy Group.

These concerns with legibility carry into what he is building through the civic tech Roundtable, which indexes Philippine bills, executive orders, and circulars into a searchable corpus, and listens to legislative hearings in real time that later surfaces relevant documents the moment it becomes relevant to what's being discussed. That kind of access to knowledge was previously out of reach behind institutional barriers civil society groups and journalists did not have. Fiel is in his final year of his undergraduate studies, has been a visiting scholar on dispute mechanisms at the University of Canberra, and is affiliated as a summer fellow on human-aligned AI at the Center for Theoretical Study at Charles University.