Caroline Laurent: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: How are you doing?

Caroline Laurent: Fine, thank you. It was quite short last year. I wanted to ask you to enjoy more time to ask you questions if you don’t mind.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Caroline Laurent: I want to first of all to catch up the time since last year to know what new projects are ongoing here right now and in Taiwan broadly respective to the ICT.

Audrey Tang: Our Presidential Hackathon is at the second year. Last time, I talked a little bit about how the president hands out awards that are guaranteed presidential permits that whatever they propose – it could be telemedicine, tele-diagnostics, or things like that – will be realized within 12 months.

Audrey Tang: We kept our promise. They are all realized within a year. Now in more than 100 places – indigenous, and offshore, and so on – nurses can connect to a doctor in mainland Taiwan and then talk through telepresence and make diagnostics and medicine without over relying on helicopters and so on.

Audrey Tang: All this is done. We have telemedicine law and everything. Presidential Hackathon gets street credibility with the civic hackers. This year, we see a record number of proposals and also across the world, we also have an international track. That worked really, really well.

Audrey Tang: One of the winners of the domestic track is specifically I think something that’s really exciting, the use of machine learning to look at all the judgments around illicit financial flows, like Panama Paper thing, and compare it with all the public listed companies disclosures, land price, all the public data, and training a deep learning model like “Minority Report” style to reveal which companies could be actually indicted within the next quarter and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think that is a really interesting use of deep learning, and that puts us at the edge of ethics and the use of algorithms in governance and things like that. I think that’s particularly interesting. It arrived earlier than I would have predicted. Every other cases are pretty good as well.

Caroline Laurent: Thank you very much on that. I wanted also to talk with you. I read that in 2017, Tsai Ing-wen gave a speech promoting Taiwan as a digital nation and smart island. I wanted to find out what does it mean. What are the main purposes of that kind of policy, etc.?

Audrey Tang: As part of the sustainable goals like goal 9.c, it’s universal broadband access, broadband as human right. It’s not only a campaign promise, but we deliver on it. As of this year, all the remote, rural – it could be as high as the Yu Shan, 4,000 meters – you still have 10 megabits per second.

Audrey Tang: It could be as south as the Pacific island of Dongsha and Taiping, which are very far from here. They still have 10 megabits per second 4G connection.4G unlimited is US$16 per month. It’s very affordable. The accessibility rate for those remote and offshore indigenous lands is now at 98 percent.

Audrey Tang: Our ministry of interior just said that they are willing to use helicopters as their training rehearsing runs to help all the other mountains that are above 3,000 meters high, of which there are hundreds, to complete the final two percent.

Audrey Tang: This is important because all the digital governance technologies that we roll out, if we don’t have the broadband access as universal, as affordable, as digital opportunity centers that can give people or lend people tablets that are new and so on, we will be systematically leaving people behind, and we must not let that happen. That’s why we provide digital opportunity centers.

Caroline Laurent: That leads me to another thing. I’m not really aware of that, but I heard that in Taiwan, the 5G network is also moving very fast.

Audrey Tang: Yes, very quickly. The TSMC just invested a lot on this technology. Also, because back five years ago, we made a decision that no PRC component can enter into our 4G infrastructure. In the past five years, we’ll have to make a different supply chain.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like we don’t have other companies in Taiwan that are also doing business with the PRC supply chain, but when the domestic needs as well as the other cyber security agencies. As we speak, there’s at the moment a drill going on. The cyber security agencies from all over the world are currently doing a penetration testing of the Taiwan infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: Not only keeping us safe, but also using this methodology to make sure that when we work with other, for example, Pacific islands, Caribbean islands, and so on, to help them on their infrastructure, they can rest assured that no place in the stack is vulnerable to coordinated inauthentic behavior or to advanced persistent threats.

Caroline Laurent: I am going to change a bit of subject. I made some research online, and I read that you currently work promoting a lot, you and your staff, and everybody is here work promoting the civic IoT Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The what?

Caroline Laurent: Civic IoT Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Civil IoT.

Caroline Laurent: Civil, yeah.

Audrey Tang: CI Taiwan. The web address is ci.taiwan.gov.tw. Yes.

Caroline Laurent: What is it? What’s that?

Audrey Tang: It’s a data collaborative arrangement. In Taiwan, many people measure their own air quality. There is air quality, like PM 2.5 sensors like here. It’s used as education material as well to teach data stewardship in basic education as part of environmental activities.

Audrey Tang: There is more than 2,000 of those civil-society-run air detectors.

Caroline Laurent: These detectors, are they the air box?

Audrey Tang: They are the air box. They form a data collaborative where they use ledger technology and so on to keep each other honest. They totally together show a lot of the air qualities that the official detectors are unable to go to.

Audrey Tang: Conversely, they also want to install air boxes in places where they cannot go to, for example, industrial parks. These are private property. You can’t just break in and bring an air box there. It turns out we own the lamps in the industrial park, so we installed the air boxes.

Audrey Tang: The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency also set up 10,000 of those air boxes compatible devices. Those together give a much closer to reality picture than just the 77 official high-quality detectors.

Audrey Tang: Now we have two problems with this picture. The first one is that each party has no reason to believe the other one’s numbers.

Caroline Laurent: What do you mean?

Audrey Tang: Like the industry parks. The people setting up the air box, the school teachers, and the EPA. If we rely on each other’s numbers, we have to know that they cannot tamper the numbers after the fact, for example, the day before election.

Audrey Tang: If you tamper the numbers so that it looks like after a certain mayor gets elected, the air gets worse, then it’s not a good idea. We really need not just a data collaborative but also governance around the data collaborative. We need a trust layer, a trust infrastructure. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The civil IoT, we use the national high-speed computing center to aggregate all the data, normalize it into the same specification, work with distributed ledger technology or DLT practitioners to make sure that it’s an immutable, blockchain-like structure so that people cannot go back and change the number. Even though you own a supercomputer center, you cannot. That’s the trust layer.

Audrey Tang: The second is the application layer. Every year, we allocate a lot of money, I think something like some millions of NT dollars so that anyone who think of novel implementations that can use not just air quality, because we also do water quality, like the high-level waterways, floods, tributary, as well as earthquake early prevention and real-time disaster notifications.

Audrey Tang: Actually, a lot of those civil IoT, anything that cannot claim privacy is subject to civil IoT. A river cannot say this is private information. You’re going to measure my temperature. Environmental data is then aggregated here.

Audrey Tang: We give out very large sums of award to anyone who can show that they can use this technology to further a sustainable development for everybody.

Audrey Tang: We just recently decided on the top, I think 13, that we are going to incubate for another month before deciding what are the three winners that we must incorporate into the multi-stakeholder governance structure.

Audrey Tang: It’s not the same as presidential, because many of them are governed by the civil society, by the academic. They probably don’t really want the president saying, “This is going to be my campaign platform,” because they are here to hold the president accountable. They would make good use of the grant money and prize money.

Caroline Laurent: If I understood well, civil IoT Taiwan is mainly focused on climate data or environmental.

Audrey Tang: Anything that’s not protected by privacy.

Caroline Laurent: If we put on the side the environmental data, are there other examples?

Audrey Tang: Statistics, for sure. Although individual data sets may be private, in the aggregate, of course, is public information. The civil IoT does focus on real-time data. It needs to be produced in a real-time manner.

Audrey Tang: One case in point, for example, the telecom operators know all the mobile phones, where they are. If they revealed a fine-grained dataset, that would be a compromise of the privacy. But if we agree on the aggregate statistics area about how one populous one area is, that has no privacy concerns.

Caroline Laurent: For example, here or let’s say downtown, right now there are 1,000 people.

Audrey Tang: Something like that. But we don’t say that. We say there is between 1,000 and 1,100 people. The reason why is that if there is only two people.

Caroline Laurent: What kind of use can you make of that kind of data, for example, to know that right now, there are 1,000 people in downtown?

Audrey Tang: For disaster recovery and prevention, you can very easily see how many people are stranded. For example, if they install some apps, just by the app being able to read the battery level of the phone, you know whether there is electricity supply in that area. I can go on. The idea is that for humanitarian purposes, it’s very useful to have the aggregated data.

Caroline Laurent: Maybe it would be a tricky question, what about the people who don’t use cell phones?

Audrey Tang: You mean like nobody?

Audrey Tang: Like very young children and very old people maybe. For people who don’t use cell phones, you mean that they don’t get counted? Is that the question?

Caroline Laurent: They don’t get warned, for example.

Audrey Tang: There is several things. The first thing is that if they don’t use cell phones, they still can benefit from the people around them who use the cell phone.

Audrey Tang: If the people around me…For example, I don’t have my cell phone with me right now, but if you receive an early earthquake prevention warning that says we must lie down and hold on something, then I also benefit from your 4G network’s broadcasting.

Audrey Tang: But if I am without cell phone, without fiber optics, and I’m alone in my place, there is a Presidential Hackathon team that does the analysis to find out these people and send social workers there to ensure that they have good social solidarity.

Caroline Laurent: It was just…

Audrey Tang: No, it’s a real problem. We have a winner of the Presidential Hackathon tackling this with data from ministry of interior, ministry of health and welfare. Corroborated, they can find who are actually missing from the social safety net.

Caroline Laurent: Besides the civil IoT Taiwan project – It’s a project, right? – I read you and also again, your staff, it’s like they care a lot about social innovation. What’s social innovation?

Audrey Tang: A social innovation is something that everybody can participate to further the common good.

Caroline Laurent: To further the…

Audrey Tang: The common good.

Caroline Laurent: Here it is focused on ICT?

Audrey Tang: No, no, no. It’s on Sustainable Development Goals. We have a shared platform called…I said the CI, right. If you go to the CI website and change the C to an S, you get into the SI platform, which is social innovation. You can read all about it here.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we make a map of what each municipality, which SDGs they are focusing on. What are the social entrepreneurs they’re working on? What are the current proposals and shared cases of the social innovations?

Audrey Tang: We also do special topics around telemedicine, around plastic reduction, education innovation, and so on and so forth. We also integrate those social innovations into the supply chain by encouraging people to buy from them. Of course, we have the office hours, and also a list of government resources.

Audrey Tang: I go out and meet the people where they are in the social innovation tour forums. As you can see, each social innovator can say, “I want this regulation changed because my social innovation reconfigures the society and the old regulation no longer makes sense.

Audrey Tang: Then we work with the regulator to change those regulations to reflect the reality of social innovation, sometimes with the help of a sandbox. It’s all on this platform.

Caroline Laurent: So it’s not just only about social innovation that integrate ICT. It’s all kind of…

Audrey Tang: It’s not tech for good. Unless, of course, you include social technology into technology, but that’s not the usual interpretation, so nowadays we just say social innovation.

Caroline Laurent: Tech for good, you just said?

Audrey Tang: What you just said, nowadays we call it, instead of tech for good, we call it digital social innovation or DSI.

Caroline Laurent: What about that?

Audrey Tang: DSI is the 17th goal of the social innovation. As you can see our usual picture is that each of the sustainable goals concerns the environmental, or the social, or the economic bottom lines, but the digital is special in the sense that the digital goal holds all other goals together.

Audrey Tang: My focus for the DSI, just like the civil IoT is target 17.18, 17.17, and 17.6. These are the main DSIs that I’m personally working on.

Caroline Laurent: I got a better picture now. I wondered what are the biggest issues Taiwan is currently facing now? What are the biggest issues that Taiwan but also the Taiwanese people are facing now?

Audrey Tang: Climate change. Everybody.

Caroline Laurent: Of course. That’s why you’re so preoccupied on developing some projects.

Audrey Tang: Eco-design, upcycling, zero waste, a lot of material science is now focused on not just reducing marine debris, or improving food safety and food circularity. These are all very noble goals, but many of them, actually all of them are also declaring their carbon footprint.

Audrey Tang: If you reduce the use of rare earth materials but end up producing a ton more CO2, that defeats the purpose. By far, CO2 is the more imminent one. Everything else can actually wait a little bit until we make sure the CO2 picture is more clear.

Caroline Laurent: I think you already gave me some answers to that question, but just to be sure, how can an outdoors ICT help to solve these kind of problem? You told me about this…

Audrey Tang: This, right? Without trusting each other’s data. Like if a large company says I can reduce this amount of CO2, and the entrepreneur come and say if you invest in my technology, I’m going to integrate into your supply chain and help accelerate the conversion rate so that you can save even more CO2, this procuring agency need to verify that this is actually happening.

Audrey Tang: Mutual accountability – 17, 18 – is the key for a systemic change around everything but especially around environmental ones, and especially around their teams. This is that foundational thing. Of course, we can also use incentives.

Audrey Tang: I mentioned about procurement. Today, Carrefour is having a CSR event here showing how they work with food safety and food secularity, MPOs. There are some very unlikely partnerships. For example, they work with the animal rights and animal welfare society to ensure that cage free eggs is used in the Carrefour.

Audrey Tang: While they do that, they also share the carbon footprint, the footprint on the environment, organic farming, the whole deal. An inclusive partnership that’s not only benefitting the two sides, but also everybody in the supply chain. That is effective partnership.

Audrey Tang: Finally, all those innovations that I just mentioned, we co-develop with stakeholders. Nobody just monopolize this. For the foreign people, for example, the Presidential Hackathon team, there’s a water savior team that saves water. Worked with New Zealand for three more months after three months of Presidential Hackathon and they co-created their own local AI to do that.

Audrey Tang: We are not a off-the-shelf, buy it or leave it, charge you a lot of it, patent all of it kind of innovation. This is co-created innovation. Even if the deployment fails or anything like that, there will be no problem. We just publish the post mortem for everybody else to learn. That’s the spirit of open innovation. That is the same in the CI Hackathon, in the Presidential Hackathon.

Caroline Laurent: It’s the same spirit rules.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Caroline Laurent: I think I have everything more or less I wanted to ask. Thank you very much. It’s just so many informations, it’s quite hard to think about.

Caroline Laurent: Just a thing, you told me last year what project were developing here, projects to help people. I think it was good to add them. This project, I guess you can see what I’m talking about. It was to develop a small…I don’t know the English word, like a small car to help them. Is this the one which is just here?

Audrey Tang: Yes. They’re doing well. The people they are helping, one of them actually opened a shop here, which is just next to ours. You can visit them.

Caroline Laurent: Oh, really? Where is this?

Audrey Tang: Literally like this wall. You can take a look at not only that project. They also expanded their line to run art auctions or paintings that are painted by blind people, and all sorts of different interesting innovations. It’s all in their shop. Check it out.

Caroline Laurent: Maybe I will go. They are using it right now in the streets in Taipei?

Audrey Tang: They are trying it out. It’s still in a sandboxing stage. Also, the basement last time was not open, but now it’s converted into a real incubator space. At the moment in the basement you can see some indigenous art and so on, but starting next year, we’re going to have a lot of teams using this basement as coworking space and holding their own events.

Caroline Laurent: OK, I think I’m done.

Audrey Tang: You’re good?

Caroline Laurent: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Take a look at the shop and the basement.

Caroline Laurent: Yeah, I’m going to. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.