Francesco Gualdi: With recording, with transcript, anything is good for me. And I just had a look, that our December 2019 conversation is still online. So I just had a look at what was our call and the topic of our call then. So your transparency system is definitely stronger.

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. And nowadays we are training AIs with my previous conversations. I just had a session with John to write some brief together. And John started with some ideas. And then I just told GPT-4 to work from my previous brief and fill in the rest. It did pretty well.

Francesco Gualdi: It did well. Well, now we know.

John Scott Marchant: I mean, that’s the objective, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s the objective, right? It’s just to assist us, right? Assistive intelligence.

Francesco Gualdi: We are now having real troubles at university with students using chatGPT and these instruments to do the essay, to do the exams or whatever. And so it’s hard for us to find a solution right now. But you know, it’s something that is out there and we will find a way to live with that.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Francesco Gualdi: Okay, so very, very briefly, in these last two or three years, I’ve been doing research on adoption of technology in policy-making process. I have this political science background. Now I’m researching digital government. So I’ve specifically had the opportunity to see how the adoption of algorithms has been used in my public sector to, for instance, provide a response to the pandemic or to mediate other digital services. So I’m focusing on AI, but I’m also, but I still have this angle of the connection between the technology and the policy-making. So I’m interested to understand how policymakers understand technology. What do they, how do they use technology in the process of drafting the policies? And my angle is an angle that is not only cost efficiency or it’s something that include other values.

Francesco Gualdi: Remember we focus on, we have this angle of public values who try always to look for trade-offs. And I’ve been writing a couple of paper. One paper is about Italian policy-making  process where we are doing, where I interview Stefano and other member of parliament, other civil servants so to see how technology impacts in the policy-making process. And I’m also doing a project in the Peru context to see how they have used algorithm to provide subsidies in the post pandemic. So I’m trying always to see how these technological adoption are related with the work of policymakers. I do believe that there is a need also in academic terms to better investigate these issues. And I’m very happy to have the opportunity also to chat with you because in 2019, I went back to our notes, that was again really easy.

Francesco Gualdi: I remember we discussed the adoption, the Taiwanese adoption of this sandbox of 5G. And we were thinking of how to frame this in a sort of negotiation between the law and the technology because you have this, the need to align the technology and the law in order to make the policy happen. So my research has focused in last year specifically on artificial intelligence, but not only. And they still try to keep these public value policy-making  angle. So it’s something that interests and I want to characterize my academic research on that. We have been also working with the ITU, the International Communication Union, the agency of the UN.

Francesco Gualdi: They asked us, my colleague, Antonio, me and other to prepare a report for the G20 Indonesian meeting. So there was the digital ministers meeting in Bali early September. And we prepared for them a report on the need to equip public sector with digital skills. So it’s something that we tried to work, to look with again, this social technical angle. So not simply, okay, guys, you all go study coding or you need to be AI experts, but you need to understand technology and the impact of technology. And that there was a discussion upon this report at the ministry, unfortunately, they couldn’t approve the whole package, the whole conclusion because of other serious geopolitical issues that you can imagine. You can imagine which country wanted better the possibility of approving the whole package.

Francesco Gualdi: But that generated interest because again, it was an attempt, it is an attempt to shed light on policymakers digital skills in a social technical way. So not just you all guys go study this, it’s you guys, we do this workshop, we do. It’s always this philosophy that we’re trying to transfer in our work. That is a very, very brief account of what I’ve been doing, what I’m doing in my academic research. I’m planning to remain in academia. So again, my interest is purely academic. Having said that, I don’t know if you have any questions or if I can go forward.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, go ahead.

Francesco Gualdi: Okay, so Audrey, you are doing amazing things. And one of the reasons I wanted also to reconnect is to again explore again if there are possibilities to obtain some materials or access some cases to build academic research. Again, I know I’m aware of how important is security, transparency for you, for your culture, for the culture of your country. So please really be sure that I approach this with a lot of caution, a lot of respect. And I’m aware. So basically, as a researcher, as an academic, my main goal is to find interesting stories to build academic papers, full stop. Having said that, I’m also happy to shed light on some context in which technology is used.

Francesco Gualdi: The purposes that I’ve been talking in this call. So not simply to digitize something, not simply to cut the cost, but also to increase participation, transparency, accountability, all the issues that you guys are very careful of in your government activity. So one thing that I would be interested to listen is if you have some stories you potentially could be happy to share in terms of data.

Francesco Gualdi: Again, whenever I approach policymakers and decision makers, I’m always very respectful and very aware that there are things that cannot be shared, that are things that you legitimately don’t want to share. But if there are data sets or information that you think, or cases, the one of the sandbox was an excellent one, for me, I would have loved to have the opportunity to dive deep into it. But if you think there are any other cases in which we can get some materials or access to people, to do interviews, to collect data, but I would be happy to focus on Taiwan. That’s my story.

Francesco Gualdi: So it’s an open and frank question. I’m ready to accept no’s because I know it’s part of the game. But since I’m here and doing this job, you know my philosophy, you know my approach, I wanted to just connect because maybe there are things that can be of common interest, and why not ask? That’s it.

Audrey Tang: OK. So are you looking to come to Taiwan for interviews, or are you planning mostly video contents?

Francesco Gualdi: So it depends. In my project, I would love to come to Taiwan. Then unfortunately, it doesn’t depend only on me. It depends on some funds that I need to raise, and also on some clearance from my university.

Audrey Tang: okay, So it’s not a done deal that you can travel abroad for the future?

Francesco Gualdi: No, but I can build a case. I can build a case, and I can ask for funds. In this time of the year, I’m literally buried under teaching, so I don’t have any other time to do research. But hopefully, I’m ending my teaching time now, and I can focus on research. So it’s something that I could do over the next months, for instance. And if I’m able to make a case with my university, they would probably authorize me to travel and to spend some time in Taiwan, which would be the best case for me.

Francesco Gualdi: Because I mean, I’ve been studying the whole situation in all the cases in Peru, for instance, by Zoom calls. I got access to ministers. I got access to director generals, to very top policymakers only on Zoom. I was super happy, but it’s not like going in the field and studying. And unfortunately, now Peru is in a very troubling situation. So it’s not doable again. But I would love. Maybe we can think of different phases approach if you have something that could be of interest. Yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK. And the topics you’re going to explore, as long as it is social, technical in some way, that is good. It doesn’t have to be AI. Did I hear that correctly?

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, it doesn’t need to be AI. Yeah, it can be any adoption of technology in a public sector context.

Audrey Tang: OK. So this year, we’re focusing on three things in our ministry. And that is, first, communication resilience, making sure that even when our submarine cables are cut, we still have, like Ukraine does, plenty of connection options to the outside world. So this is one focus. The other focus is hardening our cybersecurity with this idea called Zero Trust, because we predict that AI will lead to interactive deep fakes very quickly. That can actually be very convincing. And my current approach is just to switch to Zero Trust, which means the authentication need to be a triple authentication.

Audrey Tang: The device, the biometric, and also the behavior need to all be signed somehow before one can actually trust a person on the other end of the screen. It’s not a scripted deepfake GPT port. So this is the second thing called Zero Trust. And the third thing is the digital co-prosperity of journalism with the major platforms, because in Taiwan, as in other places of the world, social media is sometimes prosocial and sometimes antisocial. And journalism is the only thing that keeps it prosocial. So we want civic journalists and professional journalists to prosper together with those largest platforms. That’s the journalism part.

Audrey Tang: So of the satellite Zero Trust and the journalism, there are plenty of stories. And in fact, are the focus of our narratives of our ministry this year. But I don’t know which one is more interesting to you or whether you have other ideas.

Francesco Gualdi: No, look, they’re all very interesting to me. And again, I’ve been trying to focus on now in academic research, as in many other areas, AI is clearly the buzzword. And everybody’s thinking is trying to focusing on AI. And not always this is good, because I have the impression that in some academic works, if you simply substitute AI with Microsoft Outlook, the paper would be the same. The result would be the same. So I think that many academics are now really blackboxing AI themselves.

Francesco Gualdi: So while we try as much as we can, me, Antonio, our colleagues to open the black box, or at least if this is not possible, which we are aware of, put it up front. So this is the technology. And we want to discuss the implication, the problems, the biases, whatever. But putting the technology up front. Otherwise, everything is a bit blended and not clear. The sandbox project has been completed. It’s still working.

Audrey Tang: So yes, I think you’re referring to the 5G test pilots. So we are now in the process very soon to migrate those proof of concept cases into actual working deployments. So I would say it’s a success. A lot of the work we did back then was to ensure that this using 5G-like Wi-Fi more like extending a existing corporate or social group in a specific place to extend, for example, as outdoor reach and so on, or for self-driving vehicles and so on, do not interfere with the public telecommunication use of 5G.

Audrey Tang: So essentially, there are two 5Gs, one the public 5G and a private use 5G. And the private 5G sandbox was deemed a success. And so starting this year, we have a private 5G office in my ministry, the Administration for Digital Industries, that take those sandbox and proof sets and converts that into actual working daily cases with very reasonable spectrum usage fees. So if you want to follow on that story, I can also introduce you to our Administration for Digital Industries.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, that would be great because I went back to the notes. And I mean, you had an issue of aligning the legislation with the 5G. And also, this pilot project that you mentioned is something that is still there in my PhD dissertation because I’m trying to advocate for an approach of a pilot-projecting approach in the public sector. It is not only we do something little and if it works, we scale up.

Francesco Gualdi: But in the pilot project, it’s also something that allows to test and control the technology and can reveal other things. So a different idea of pilot projects rather than the simple. We do something very small. If it works, we scale up. This is something I put in my PhD dissertation and I’m still trying to find some data to make a case that could be relevant and tell a story. So that would be also super, super amazing for me.

Audrey Tang: And the good thing is that it’s all public now because the part that needed experimentation changes right. So we’re no longer experimenting with private 5G legislation. We’re now experimenting instead, as I mentioned, a non-geostationary satellite receiver in one of our outlying islands just this week and so on, which is more cutting edge, but it reuses the same idea as those private 5G sandboxes.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, that would be amazing. And yeah, because that will allow me to rely on some materials that I have already thought about in my PhD years and try to go ahead. But also, I mean, basically everything you are doing is amazing for my potential research and I would be happy to explore. So maybe, yeah, for my own research, if I could start and looking at the data for the 5G for sandbox, that would be a good starting point. And then I would also start all the discussion within my department and my administration to see if it’s doable for me to come to Taiwan and not only to have online interviews, which is superb, but I would be very happy to come. That’s..

Audrey Tang: Okay, are you comfortable if we just send you the links to Mandarin materials? I trust that you have pretty good machine translation now.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, I am. And okay, so I can look at the materials and then you tell me what’s the best way forward. I know you’re super busy, I don’t want to abuse of your time, so please, I’ll dive into the material and then you tell me what’s the way to move forward.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I mean, at the moment, there’s already, as I mentioned, a dedicated 5G, private 5G office. So what I will do is that after this call, I’m going to send a transcript after your review, of course, to that private 5G office and then ask them if there’s already existing published materials, Mandarin is fine to send your way and then in their ongoing research, of course, they’re, as I mentioned, also continuously evaluating even more pro-social uses of private 5G and maybe if you visit Taiwan, you can sit in in one of those deliberative workshops about potential 5G uses and so on, for real study that probably cannot be done over video conference and then the office will just take care of the communication with you.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, yeah, that would be great, absolutely. I have the last point. So one of my students in the Master on Information Systems and Digital Innovation, she is a brilliant student and she, has a passion for what are you doing in Taiwan, actually she was also trying to send you a message on LinkedIn and I said, look, since we are planning to have this conversation, maybe wait a second because that could be, I could be also introduced.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Francesco Gualdi: So basically she was interested in shedding light on how you have successfully handled the pandemic in Taiwan and looking specifically at these, at the trade-off between data privacy and national safety, so the nation and the public value.

Audrey Tang: That is a very well-studied topic with at least a dozen publications that I’m aware of and all the raw interviews with me are online on that. So on SayIt, the same website you referred to. So I’m no longer taking new interviews on that topic because we’re done, we’re post-pandemic now, but I’m happy to, for example, if they have specific research questions that they cannot find on SayIt, maybe we can help locate some of the published publication that answers her research questions. But at the moment we’ve all moved on from pandemic control.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, okay. So because she was thinking of maybe trying to contact someone in the Ministry for Health, but do you think they’re also aligned with this let’s move on approach that there would not be, you wouldn’t advise her to go on this specific topic?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because it’s very, very well studied. A lot of the hard decisions and so on were already meticulously chronicled by researchers in law, in human rights, in privacy and things like that. And I think by now they all published. So this is not a new topic now. Well, fingers crossed, right? Because if the next Greek letter comes tomorrow, who knows, right? But at the moment there’s no new materials on this particular front.

Francesco Gualdi: No, yeah, I think she doesn’t need a huge amount of material because it’s a dissertation, it’s not a big project. But I would tell her that maybe she can think of something else or… Yeah, maybe she can just do a full text search on SayIt, which will have the names of the researchers who interviewed me and also on the PDIS YouTube channel. And if that still doesn’t answer her research question, then maybe John or other colleagues can help referring her to the local researchers who are even more well-connected than we are.

John Scott Marchant: Francesco, are you thinking of a different topic for her? Is that what you’re thinking?

Francesco Gualdi: No, look, she had this very broad idea of looking at the trade-off between data privacy and security and safety. In the handling of the pandemic, she mentioned some technologies such as digital fan system for case monitoring, mobile geo-positioning for contact tracing, chatbots for mobile apps. But I haven’t studied this specific case, honestly. So she came to me with this idea and said, look, since I have this opportunity, I’m gonna directly ask her because she has not started yet. So if you have other topics that in which you think she could study what are you doing in Taiwan, not necessarily related with the COVID pandemic. Again, this is a small project, but I’m happy to listen from any of your advice.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, as I mentioned, the three things on my plate are communication resilience, zero trust and journalism. But maybe John has other suggestions.

John Scott Marchant: Hm, I’d like to think about it, but I think it’s a good opportunity to definitely go deeper on this issue because so much was accomplished here. But I think we’ve got to give something a little more tailored. What do you think, Audrey?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and also because there’s a lot of new materials nowadays, not necessarily on pandemic control, but on privacy, part of the zero trust, new architecture is so that you can authenticate yourself without giving up a lot of your personal data just for authentication, for IDing yourself. So it can also be seen as a kind of reaction from the Taiwanese society to the privacy conversations during the pandemic that raise everybody’s awareness about privacy and limiting personal data connection. So it’s a kind of broader trend from not caring at all about privacy to actually caring quite a bit about privacy.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, that could be very interesting. We have a very good point. And I could say this to them that maybe pandemic is not that, it’s an old topic. If she’s still interested in looking at this, privacy and security issue, she can look at this initiative that you are now on your plate, that you are now working on. Can I say this to her?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. And you can give my email, it’s public anyway, to that person and then maybe also the SayIt website and so on, and then we’ll just communicate through email.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, yeah, I will. I think she, for her dissertation, but I can also work with her. It’s not just I’m leaving, abandoning her. I’m her supervisor. So I will be there in any case. I could say if she wants to pursue this, maybe she needs to find some primary data, a couple of dozen of interviews or access some publishing materials, as long as they are primary data that are available. So she might look at this.

Francesco Gualdi: And if the topic interests her, I can say, look, I got this advice. If this is interesting, it is also very interesting also to me, honestly. So I can follow her in this project. So she won’t be alone doing… I will also because she is a master’s student. So she’s brilliant, but still very inexperienced. I can, can I say to her, there is this possibility, if you are happy with that, I will put you in contact or we can stay in contact.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, just email me. I cannot guarantee interviews for research purposes, but at least the least I can do is to refer the local researchers and the existing materials to her.

Francesco Gualdi: OK, OK. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, and I mean, when I say interviews, it’s not only with you, but if there are other public civil servants or any other people that you think might be relevant and for academic purpose, that would be great as well. You know, it’s it’s I don’t want to ask you an indelible effort. I’m aware of how busy you are. So if there are other people that have work on same projects or whatever, that could be also great.

Audrey Tang: OK, what I can do, as I mentioned, because they’ve all moved on to other positions, is to connect her to the local researchers who may have suggestions to where to take the topics.

Francesco Gualdi: OK, yeah, that’s great. I have no further questions, so I’m really happy we had this conversation and we reconnected.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah, that’s it for me.

Audrey Tang: All right. So the actions that we will do is to send you the recording for review. And then next Monday, I’ll just ask my colleague to connect the private 5G office to you. OK.

Francesco Gualdi: OK. Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Cheers.

John Scott Marchant: Very nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you. Yes.

Audrey Tang: Have a good local time.

Francesco Gualdi: Yeah. Bye bye.