Audrey Tang: Hi, very nice meeting you.

Linien Yen: Nice to meet you.

Audrey Tang: Our conversation will be English, right?

Bruce Bateman: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Or will it be in Mandarin?

Bruce Bateman: I was a mentor for the women in AI, also in Mosaic Lab, we do an accelerator for automotive.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Bruce Bateman: Very happy to meet you.

Audrey Tang: Very happy to meet you.

Bruce Bateman: Also the Egyptian French. She’s actually Egyptian. I’ll start real quick, and then get the overview.

Audrey Tang: Because I think in English, so it’s actually easier if you do all English.

Bruce Bateman: Man, I’ve been practicing all night.

Audrey Tang: Or maybe you do all in Mandarin. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: The real issue, as you know, I’ve been programming since ‘81 and all this. I did 9, 10 startups and worked in…

Audrey Tang: I can’t quite say that I was born in ‘81, but yes. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: [laughs] I’ve got a slip for you later. I actually was there when you were. It really, the problem has been in diversity. In Silicon Valley, all the companies I started, we had diversity in language.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, and a lot of diversity in…

Bruce Bateman: In cultures.

Audrey Tang: …cultures. That’s exactly what I’m…

Bruce Bateman: We just didn’t have…

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Bruce Bateman: We only had a couple of women programmers, all the companies I started and I’m involved with. It’s just really…OK, smile. We’ve got to do this. In Taiwan, if you don’t take a picture, the event never happened.

Linien Yen: Yes.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Bruce Bateman: When Woji came to me, when she was here last time in Taiwan, she said, “Can we fix this problem?” She started, with two friends, this Women in AI. Worldwide, they just got going. They just launched the last big program, but I think you know the problem that we’re trying to solve.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course, yes.

Bruce Bateman: The problem we’re trying to get to is in Taiwan we feel there’s a huge…The gender gap in Taiwan is social and educational. It’s something that needs to be worked on, and we really want to fix…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, like faculty composition and things like that.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Interestingly, if we call it “design,” then you don’t have that much of a gender gap. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Which may be actually the same courses taught. If you call it 程式設計, program design, then it’s very equal. If you call it software engineering… [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: If you look at machine learning and AI, the different jobs, if you look at someone who knows algorithms, the mathematics of it, but someone who knows the data…In Taiwan, one of our partners here, Emma, I’ll introduce her in a minute. She has her own data analytics company here.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Bruce Bateman: I don’t know if you know her, but she does Taipower. She’s done a lot of really good work.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s Dataa, with the extra A, right?

Bruce Bateman: What’s the name of her company?

Audrey Tang: Dataa.

Linien Yen: Yes.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, Dataa.

Audrey Tang: I didn’t how to pronounce it, but I’ve heard of it. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: She spoke at the last couple conferences. For us, she’s an example of what we’re trying to get to. We believe that the best position right now for women in Taiwan is understanding data, understanding use cases, and getting involved. We’ve launched a couple events. Let’s go back to the top. Let’s do this the way we planned.

Linien Yen: OK.

Bruce Bateman: Otherwise, we screw up. She started in France, has gone worldwide. There are 28 ambassadors. We have one here with us today. [inaudible 4:25] has 4,000 events.

Audrey Tang: Wow.

Bruce Bateman: Sorry, 4,000 members. They just finished their…

Linien Yen: Big event.

Bruce Bateman: …big event.

Linien Yen: Globally, we did education program because Women in AI really focus on this part. I know that in Malaysia, they had a really big event, co-op with the world, robots on…

Bruce Bateman: We had just come back from Italy.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Linien Yen: My husband also says hi. He’s here, but he’s in quarantine for two weeks.

Bruce Bateman: He’s a programmer, too.

Linien Yen: He says hi to you. Especially in Pakistan, in 2020, this year we had a coding camp, and in Sydney, in France, in Paris. This is very important part of our educational program. Also we talk about the social issue like health, like AI career transitions, and talk about how to…

Bruce Bateman: She’s actually very famous in the AI for…

Linien Yen: Oh, really? I don’t know.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, I know her. I know her.

Linien Yen: That must be, then she also had a speech. AI in health and finance, we also talk about the auto-driving vehicles from female perspective. I think this is very important, because usually, men, guys talk about it, but actually, we have our opinion, too.

Linien Yen: We just finished on one very big global event on September 18th. We have 40 countries participating. Taiwan is one of them. We have more than 160 speakers, but 90 percent of them are women. Online together, we have over 4,000 participants.

Linien Yen: What Women in AI Taiwan really wants to do, the first of all, just like I had a discussion with Bruce, we need to demystify AI. I’m not an AI person. I’m not a…

Audrey Tang: I believe you are a human being — I believe you are not an AI person.

Linien Yen: Yes. [laughs] Oh, no, no, no.

Bruce Bateman: What? I am AI.

Audrey Tang: Oh, you are AI?

Bruce Bateman: That’s what [Mandarin].

Audrey Tang: Ah, that’s right.

Bruce Bateman: [Mandarin], I am AI.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. You have this flawless accent. Too perfect.

Bruce Bateman: I am AI.

Linien Yen: I am a human being, but I’m at a mess, the other, all coding stuff. I really think that’s because of, when we were young, especially girls – and we are – we were educated that we are not good at math, so, “Don’t even think about it.”

Linien Yen: I want to break this, and I want to encourage more young girls or more professional female to participate in the AI program, especially in the educational program. We just had our first lunch on July 18th. Bruce, it was…

Bruce Bateman: There’s a very handsome speaker right in the middle.

Linien Yen: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I see that. I see that. Yes, looking very human-like.

Bruce Bateman: I’m very handsome. It’s a humanoid. It’s a perfect humanoid.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s an ideal humanoid. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: No, somebody asked me the other day when I speak. I said, “I come from the past. I come from the future, back to…” That’s why.

Audrey Tang: Right, [inaudible 7:38] style.

Bruce Bateman: Well, if you look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he came back, why did he speak English? How did he get from…That’s because space lingo.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I see. I see.

Bruce Bateman: [whispers] It’s real.

Linien Yen: We have Emma and Bruce as our speaker and Sophia Yama as well. We co-op with Women in IoT together.

Bruce Bateman: Mandy Chang, who’s another partner of mine on some video broadcasts, Mandy’s with Women in IoT. She’s also focused on similar kind of objectives for hardware makers.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s awesome.

Linien Yen: That’s why we had an event together. Emma was one of the main speaker. Then on September 8th, I invited the, Joe Yeh, CEO. I think you…

Audrey Tang: AetherAI, the medical image team.

Linien Yen: Yes. He made a really fantastic speech. After the speech, we did tons of messaging, saying, “I really love your stuff,” because what he shows was a real case that he had from the hospital.

Audrey Tang: I think he worked with NTUH too?

Linien Yen: Yes, exactly. In October 18th, we are going to have finally the first, a little bit coding, but not that hard coding concept stuff. We’re going to have it in Tainan and Kaohsiung…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in the place where the mask map originated.

Linien Yen: Yes. I think you know this place very well.

Bruce Bateman: There’s been a lot, our accelerators and a lot of other stuff. I’m also a mentor, a TTA. I’m the chief mentor, TTA. A lot of it’s going south. They’ve been down south quite a bit now. I’m really excited, because last year, we had a few contests with the MOE, NOST, and the Tainan universities won the top two prizes last year. I think there’s a lot more going on south.

Audrey Tang: There’s a very strong, vibrant community in Tainan. I think because, nowadays, it’s all about inspiration and creativity. The food there is better, so they have a real advantage.

Bruce Bateman: It is better.

Audrey Tang: The food is better, much better. To get Tainan-quality food in Taipei, you have to pay 10 times.

Linien Yen: When we were planning this event, Emma asked me, “Should we prepare the lunch for them?” Like the bindung. I said, “No, Emma, you’re in Tainan. That means that you’ve got really good food here. You don’t eat bindung.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I know, I know, yeah.

Bruce Bateman: There’s, in Tainan?

Linien Yen: In Tainan.

Audrey Tang: Even the rain and wind are sweet.

Linien Yen: Yes.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Linien Yen: Then, and actually, this afternoon, I’m going to have a talk with the Google marketing person. They are actually launching and promoting the very entry level of machine learning program. We think that we can do something together.

Linien Yen: I plan that at the end of this year, I’m going to work with Google for this kind of educational program. All these talk, this is what I plan to have. Really, by the end of next year, we really hope that we can work together with Women in AI in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Japan.

Linien Yen: We have all ambassador and work really closely together in APAC. We really would like to have an international event, like hopefully in Taiwan.

Bruce Bateman: We’ll see.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Linien Yen: What we really need…

Bruce Bateman: The Women in AI Australia, I’m also mentoring the team there. They have an event coming up on the 28th, and they’re really looking…I spoke to them about how to do the ethics, what kind of questions and stuff to do around ethics. They’re looking for a keynote speaker from Taiwan on ethics.

Audrey Tang: Absolutely. It’s like 20 minutes?

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, 20 minutes.

Audrey Tang: Can I pre-record?

Bruce Bateman: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because it’s rather early in the day.

Linien Yen: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Of course. If I can pre-record…

Bruce Bateman: A real programmer doesn’t get up at that time. No, this is 8:00 AM Australia time.

Audrey Tang: Ah, so it’s even earlier for Taiwan.

Linien Yen: No, I think 8:00 AM, it’s Taiwan time. Taiwan time already.

Bruce Bateman: Oh, Taiwan time? OK.

Audrey Tang: OK, right. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: I think you pre, definitely. We’ll send you that. Miss Angela is the one taking care of that. For us in Taiwan, what we really came to see you about was how do we break the ice to get the word out there to get people to come?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I know. What my thought is, just to engage more with the MOE, because the MOE has, by far, the strongest link.

Bruce Bateman: All due respect, just saying that doesn’t get us anywhere. We need to know who at the MOE.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Bruce Bateman: We need to know. We need to get that detail level.

Audrey Tang: This lady there is from the MOE.

Bruce Bateman: Oh.

Selina Wang: Hi.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] And in charge of youth engagement, too. There’s a dedicated administration within the MOE.

Bruce Bateman: See how quick that was? That’s called efficiency.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, right. You want a personal link? Well, she has a name card.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, because there’s a special administration within the MOE called the Youth Development Administration, which used to be their own cabinet member. Then it got folded into the MOE.

Audrey Tang: Basically, in MOE, there’s existing agencies and department that do what’s required by law. They tend to be less flexible when it comes to emerging technologies, as I understand. Anyway, but there are also more creative agencies within the MOE which used to be Ching Fu-wei and its own council, basically, the youth council.

Audrey Tang: Now, although it’s technically part of the MOE, they don’t work on anything that’s required by law, which means that everything that they do is creative and could be…There’s more than 100 different missions that they encourage young people to explore in order to further their landscape.

Audrey Tang: That includes, for example, international collaborations such as this one. I think the YDA, the Youth Development Agency, is your partner within the MOE. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that, also, Google in particular, I think, is already going to work with us to work with freshly graduated people this year.

Audrey Tang: We all expected that there will be a drop, like in the employment opportunities, although we were wrong. Actually, we’re a historic low in the unemployment rate. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: My daughter-in-law lost her job at her company. Less than two weeks later, people were looking. She got a new job.

Audrey Tang: Right, exactly.

Bruce Bateman: She thought she was going to be out for a long time.

Audrey Tang: There’s something to be said about the counter-COVID situation we’re in, which is a definite outlier globally. Anyway, we do have what we call a, that’s Training × Transformation, a talent program for digital transformation.

Linien Yen: T 大使?

Audrey Tang: Right. That’s going to be rolled out soon. The main point is that the people who are freshly graduated goes to the industry and learn with Google, Microsoft, and so on on the AI toolkits with the aim to transform existing industries.

Audrey Tang: They’re both a kind of ambassador for digital transformation, but because they are freshly graduated, they are also basically more willing to look at things in a more fresh perspective than more seasoned, graduate-level people who are already well-versed in the existing models, the business as usual.

Audrey Tang: It’s an opportunity for young people to offer fresh perspective and also got a non-internship, but rather a digital transformer project. One of the KPIs within our discussion on that program is we need to get the percentage of women undergrads, not the usual, I think, 22 or 23 percent involvement in that sort of programs.

Audrey Tang: You really need to increase that. I think that’s a program that you can also help to craft an outreach strategy that will reach more undergraduate or freshly graduated women.

Bruce Bateman: I think we need to start in the undergraduate world, people selecting their major, and in the high school area. We’ve got to go down to the grassroots and build up the desire. It’s not the fear. I speak on this every week.

Bruce Bateman: When I speak on this, it’s like, “Oh, it’s really, really complicated.” No, it’s not.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not.

Bruce Bateman: It’s actually not. When I show them the math, it’s like, “Do you know linear algebra?” Every kid here studied linear algebra and then calculus. It’s something that was already done. Every EE here can be converted.

Bruce Bateman: It’s very surprising that people think this is a such a…The thing is, you know what I believe, is that Taiwan is a contract manufacturer for AI. Just like Bomba, we make that keyboard, but it’s not our spec. That is the Microsoft spec. Yeah, that’s a Microsoft.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s an iPad, but anyway. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Oh, it’s an iPad? No, we make that one.

Audrey Tang: It’s an ASUS.

Bruce Bateman: Well, this one, you not only make. We make a lot. The spec are not us. Just like Foxconn, they don’t make the iPhone. They get the spec, and they do…Same thing, if we can find people who know algorithms, who know data science, who know networking for optimization, who know…

Bruce Bateman: Then the content expert is the one we import. You show up at the airport with a hard drive, and your knowledge of what results you want. It’s the same problem that we’ve been dealing with for 40 years. If we just can convert this model over to that and say, “We are a factory, just like,” because we have the engineers. We’re paying them [Mandarin]. [coughs]

Audrey Tang: I know. I know what you’re talking about, yes. We have our central bank to thank for that.

Bruce Bateman: Sorry. You’re not going to get me down that pass.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: You’re not. I wrote about this, that the problem here is that the tax laws are from 1980, ‘70s and ‘80s. That it’s easy to write off hardware, so capital investment. We didn’t want to invest. They didn’t want to invest in software.

Bruce Bateman: Just five years ago, I said, “Hey, let’s do AI.” They said, “Oh, no, no.” They said, “What’s the ROI?” I said, “Well, I can’t calculate it.” They said, “Well, I’m going to spend the same amount of money on [Mandarin] , and that, I have an ROI on. Not only that, the government gives me a write-off.”

Bruce Bateman: I can’t. When I do capital investment, I can write it off, but I can’t do capital…Only your PC, I can write off.

Audrey Tang: I know. It’s the same in the procurement rules. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Bruce Bateman: What the? This is from the ‘80s.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Bruce Bateman: That, I think, definitely has go to…You’ve got to have incentives for people, similar that you do to, how do you write off your software, amortize your software over three to five years?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the Ministry of Culture did a really compelling case when they asked for the special budget to fund The World Between Us, which is, of course, a famous 4K film. They argued that the Taiwan Digital Assets Library, which is part of the work where they 3D-mapped, and through all sorts of partnership of the Ministry of Science and Technology…

Bruce Bateman: I have a camera that…

Audrey Tang: Right. That’s the, I think the technical term is, videogrammetry that made all those models. Of course, it’s all Current Account. None of this is Capital Account, but they want the special budget, anyway, which is usually reserved only to infrastructure projects in the capital investment.

Audrey Tang: They said, because this is open innovation, all the Hollywood directors in the future, when they need a model of Taipei 101, they’re going to use the Taiwan Digital Asset Library. They say that, if you have a lot of people using it, it’s for the public good, and the process server’s open, I think…

Audrey Tang: So says Minister Jen Li-chung, that, “I think it qualifies as public infrastructure.” That worked. [laughs] They got a budget. I think, yeah, there’s a definitely a case of saying that, if it’s open innovation, then it qualifies as infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The mask map actually showed a lot of people that the civic technologists, if tens of millions of people use their work, then they are civil engineers, just like builders of bridges and highways.

Bruce Bateman: I think that’s a mental shift. The problem is no legislator wants to make changes to tax laws, unless that’s…Those are the hard things to do.

Audrey Tang: There may be a dedicated digital administration, like ministry-level agency, for that. Previously, there was no 主管機關, competent authority, for the digital part of the world.

Audrey Tang: We think the MOEA, of course, it’s under the IDB, the Industry Development Bureau, which, of course, know a lot more about the manufacturing part of the industry than the software part, although they, through the partnership, for example, with the AI Academy and so, they are also learning.

Bruce Bateman: That’s the other place where you need to get into, is the AI Academy. I know one or two people there, but we really need to get them. We need to get them not only for speakers, but also for people who are coming out of the industry, who can go back to schools.

Bruce Bateman: I had a coding company here for a while. It was for robotics. We had two women teachers, two lady teachers. That was very effective, because the teachers accepted it much more than…When they came into the classroom, they were much more welcome than some college guy coming in. The teachers felt more comfortable.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.

Bruce Bateman: That was really interesting when I got to observe that. I think we need to have this paradigm shift here, because if we don’t, I don’t think salaries will go up. I mean it.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I hear you.

Bruce Bateman: I’ll ask you one last important question. Who’s a better programmer, you or your brother?

Audrey Tang: I think I am…

Bruce Bateman: Oh, you hesitated. You hesitated.

Audrey Tang: …I practiced more.

Bruce Bateman: You hesitated. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I don’t code that much nowadays, but I think I still have more years of practice.

Bruce Bateman: OK, so no rivalry?

Audrey Tang: I was around in ‘81, you know?

Audrey Tang: I have literally four years more of practice.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, my point here, though, is that, like AI Academy, I think they, especially on the medical area, I think they really established themselves as a lifelong learning center for people who want to get into the medical arm of AI application and so on.

Audrey Tang: They are, of course, your natural ally. I think that there’s a team of people. I think previously Minister Jaclyn Tsai, Tsai Yu-ling, and also clkao, Chia-liang Kao, both of g0v, they’re also working on something like AI Academy but for fintech.

Audrey Tang: If you are interested in the financial application of AI, which is the other major time-saving, like already will…

Bruce Bateman: You mean so that the banks can actually stay open beyond 3:30pm?

Audrey Tang: I know. [laughs] Or even purely Internet banks. Fancy that.

Bruce Bateman: You mean I don’t have to go in and put my stamp?

Audrey Tang: [laughs] We did keep actually three certificates for pure online banks. It’s not like we’re in the backwater. [laughs]

Linien Yen: Someone specific that I can contact within AI…

Bruce Bateman: Academy?

Linien Yen: Yeah, Academy.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that maybe you can just write to their general contact, because my previous contact was Chen Shen-wei himself, and then he is no longer around. He logged out.

Bruce Bateman: We’ll try to work on someone there. What is your advice to us? What would you, if you’re in her shoes, what would you be doing?

Audrey Tang: First of all, I think this collaborative branding, Women in AIoT, that really sounds cool. It’s really a Taiwan-specific thing.

Bruce Bateman: Oh, sorry. AIoT is a Taiwan word.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Bruce Bateman: I don’t like it.

Audrey Tang: You don’t like it? I know, but it works.

Bruce Bateman: Is it AI²oT? I’m fine.

Linien Yen: But why?

Bruce Bateman: Because you’re double-using the I.

Linien Yen: Yeah.

Bruce Bateman: It’s AI plus IoT.

Linien Yen: Yeah.

Bruce Bateman: You can’t use the same word twice. Go ahead, sorry, apologies.

Audrey Tang: I² is -1, and that doesn’t look that good… [laughs] Anyway, talking real numbers, not imaginary ones, the AIoT branding works in Taiwan specifically because that gives people who are more versed in the IoT, which is the hardware and manufacturing community, something to think about that they don’t feel threatened.

Audrey Tang: Like, “Oh, someone from the software side, which I don’t know anything about, is going to take over my job Terminator-style.” They will think, “No, actually, this is about, instead of writing code to produce data, this is about collecting data to produce code.”

Audrey Tang: This, they understand. I think that’s a good angle to…

Linien Yen: To start with.

Audrey Tang: …to start with. Also, it also jives very well with this idea of focusing on data science. If you call it data science, if you call it design instead of engineering and so on, or architect, or whatever, then, of course, it’s by its nature more gender-balanced. Just the use of language in this way…

Bruce Bateman: I think you’re right. Engineering and architecture are hard words.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Bruce Bateman: Go to the softwares, design.

Audrey Tang: Right, with soft drive, not a hard drive, I think. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: We’re going to SSDs.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, exactly, a solid drive. [laughs] That’s my main advice in terms of narratives. Also, the other thing is to make sure that there’s also a social good part in it. In Taiwan, if you make a really compelling case, and it’s purely from their selfish incentive, they may understand your case, but they would not spread your case for you.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, everything has to connect with the common good for the message to spread. AIoT for Good, or something like that – still show AIoT, whatever – that also increase the R-value of your message.

Bruce Bateman: Adding the social word, I think, is going to be…IoT, you can say sustainable, but AI, you can’t say sustainable. IoT, you can.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Bruce Bateman: I notice you’re onto sustainability. I work quite a bit in sustainability. It’s very, well, I’ll come talk to you later on that one one day. Because we’re such a cost-efficient model here, getting companies to do it, it’s really hard.

Bruce Bateman: I’d land on, we sent people. We did a little thing, picnic on the beach. People realized there was a lot of trash. To pay them a huge company thing, where everybody went out every weekend, and they…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s common good there, yes.

Bruce Bateman: That was actually a home-grown, based upon people’s views, not because the company pushed it. From the company-wise, we only did that because realized that it was a social. We had to backtrack and like, “Oh, yes, yes, yes.”

Audrey Tang: “Yes, why not? That was our idea all along.”

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, “It was our idea all along. We paid for the original picnic, so it’s our idea.” [laughs] The first question is how do we change in Taiwan to accept AI women interns? Taiwan internship business, the market term is just non-existent.

Audrey Tang: Actually, their administration also in charge of the RICH 職場體驗網, which is the main internship portal. You two really need to talk. We actually recruit, I think, 30 interns through the YDA program in our own office.

Audrey Tang: I think the gender ratio is quite unbalanced. I think it’s 60, 70 percent women. We need to work on recruiting the boys. [laughs] That’s because, while the idea is about digital transformation, but we call them designers.

Audrey Tang: Just by calling them designers, there’s by nature more women applying. That’s exactly what I said. I think the SMEA is your natural ally as well. You want to get more internships posted there. The T ambassador thing is going to be our flagship project, because it’s going to be new.

Audrey Tang: It’s going to focus on digital transformation as well. The interns will have a period working with the mentors. Then they work to the SMEs, preferably in their region, and digitally transform that, and share their success stories and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think there really is a culture shift that’s just happening of the younger people, the younger generation offering their digital natives perspective, but we have to actually deliver that in order for the large corporation to see it as a genuine HR thing, and not just a CSR thing.

Bruce Bateman: There’s got to be incentives in HR.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Bruce Bateman: I think they have the lack of everything. I’m working with another group here to promote Taiwan’s…When I go to Shenzhen, I give the Shenzhen map for hardware, where they’ve got a PCB board. There is no Taipei map, Taiwan map.

Audrey Tang: The community, yes.

Bruce Bateman: There is no. It turns out they’re all here. We just don’t have the map. We don’t have this community. I asked SMEA for it, and they were like, “Yeah, we have a database,” and they do. They don’t actually publish it and everything.

Bruce Bateman: When I go talk to [Mandarin], their problem is that their English is bad. They don’t understand social media. Maybe [Mandarin] will come in and do something.

Audrey Tang: That’s what internship can do for them, AI for marketing.

Bruce Bateman: Right, but there’s got to be a government incentive for HR to get some funds, so that they’re not paying for all this. They work on three percent margins.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and the T ambassadorship is fully subsidized. That’s what I’m talking about. We need to make the pilot program at least convincing to some part of the MSME community for them to also want to pool in with some of their resource.

Bruce Bateman: I think the problem is you need to do a pre-training class. If you ask the [Mandarin] what to do, they’re going to go, [Mandarin]. The kids have to go in and say, “This is my skill set,” and we have to prepare the [Mandarin], saying, “Do you have LinkedIn? Do you have a website?”

Bruce Bateman: Whenever I look at a Taiwan website, I always look at the copyright date. Go do that. Go look at copyright dates. When I joined Liteon, and it was 2004…I joined Liteon five years ago. The copyright date was 2004. [laughs] That tells you, they don’t…

Audrey Tang: Look, our official website says Creative Commons. It doesn’t have a year.

Audrey Tang: We relinquished our copyright, you see? [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, we relinquish all our copyrights. There you go, so you don’t care. You got me there.

Bruce Bateman: If you go look at that, that means they’re not paying attention to it. The second problem is, when I bring startups into the [Mandarin] , they can’t really work with them.

Bruce Bateman: I bring ABCs to them, because they can try, or we bring…One of the things we’ve been talking about at the MOST is about bringing internships in, and who can bridge the language gap. It’s great for the Taiwan students, because they’re forced to speak with a foreigner.

Bruce Bateman: Then they’ve got to speak with the, they’ve got to do that bridging. I think it’s great. You learn what they’re doing.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, but what we want to specifically avoid is the interns end up doing the chores, that they were there to write the bots to do, but they end up doing it themselves. That’s what happened to many of the alternative military service people, the 替代役.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, I had one.

Audrey Tang: Oh, you had one?

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, I brought him in, because he was great at…He did an NLP for me.

Audrey Tang: OK. That’s the proper job.

Bruce Bateman: I left the kid alone and came back a couple weeks later. I said, “What’d you do?” He’s like, “Uh…” I said, “Well, it’s up to you. Your job is to get it done. How you do it, where you go…” I said, “Here’s GitHub. Here’s…”

Bruce Bateman: You don’t know what GitHub, because they didn’t teach this stuff in the school. It’s sad that…I lecture at [Mandarin] about, on the future of living in 2030. It’s surprising that, how many people have never seen Sophia.

Bruce Bateman: I show the videos, like, “How many have seen Sophia…How many have seen Boston Dynamics robots?” The number of kids who haven’t seen that was surprisingly scary, but I went to Fuxing [Mandarin] , and I asked probably third or fourth-graders. They’d all seen it. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: That’s Fuxing. It wasn’t in [Mandarin]. If you go back to [Mandarin], they would all have known about it. We’ve got this problem. The good…

Audrey Tang: Maybe you should have asked for Doraemon instead?

Bruce Bateman: See? Yeah. If I had to, and asked about Pokémon, they would have.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think everybody here have heard of Pokémon.

Bruce Bateman: I always ask people, “Have you ever played AR?” They don’t know. “I’ve never played AR.” It’s like, “Did you play Pokémon Go?” “Yeah.” “OK, that’s AR.”

Audrey Tang: “Do you know that’s AR?” That’s right, exactly.

Bruce Bateman: [laughs] “You already played AR, and you’ve been using it for,” on his bicycle for 18 phones. That’s a phone, grandpa. It’s like, world’s number one AR user. That’s the caption I wanted to put on. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I really like that. If you have a pair of AirPods and have spoken to Siri, that’s AR, too. AR doesn’t have to be visual.

Bruce Bateman: Cool. I know you’re a busy guy.

Audrey Tang: Feel free to just reach out with the messages you want me to send in the opening the remarks.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, really appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: I will just record it. Either myself, or synthesized through an AI that you can’t tell. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: If you want, I can you show my…I have my own avatar.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, me, too.

Bruce Bateman: I have a 3D scan of me.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, me, too.

Bruce Bateman: Full, sub-millimeter accurate.

Audrey Tang: Me, too.

Audrey Tang: I have…

Bruce Bateman: I’ll have my avatar call your avatar.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Audrey Tang: My avatar is in XRSpace. We’re going to have a…

Bruce Bateman: I coached there last week.

Audrey Tang: Ah, you did? OK.

Bruce Bateman: XRSpace, we were Kaohsiung two weeks ago.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, for that opening.

Bruce Bateman: I did the coaching for them, XRSpace came in and did two days of coaching.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, Peter’s team just deploying my avatar today.

Bruce Bateman: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so that…

Bruce Bateman: Just for that, I’m going to call him after this. I’m going to have him take mine. Whenever I speak, I wear the same shirt. I have this in three colors. I have this in three colors. When you see that, you go, “Oh, he’s wearing that same thing today.”

Audrey Tang: Ah, that’s right.

Bruce Bateman: When I’m on the stage, I wear the blue.

Linien Yen: Part of branding image, too.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There has to be continuity.

Bruce Bateman: This is an NFC payment ring.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of that. We fixed the NCC rules for the distance of the NFC for that.

Bruce Bateman: The problem is he doesn’t know marketing, so that’s really sad.

Audrey Tang: I know. Maybe I should be wearing that more. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Then this is the OR ring.

Linien Yen: I have one last question. How about the mentorship for someone like Audrey?

Audrey Tang: We hire 30 internists. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: No, we need people to come in and help, occasionally speak, occasionally record something for the kids. Maybe if we could get, I think, something later on, when we start going out to the kids, is to have a pre-recorded from you.

Audrey Tang: Of course, there is plenty of material from my side.

Bruce Bateman: Really trying to help the kids understand the fear, get past. When I talked to her originally, she said, “Oh, my parents said if you’re [Mandarin] , it’s OK.” It’s like, you’ve got to respect the parents and say, “No, that is not correct.”

Bruce Bateman: It’s OK if you’re [Mandarin]. You’ve got to go into something else, but you can’t just say that, because you’ve got to…The logic is the future of the world. If you don’t understand emoji, then even if you’re an artist…

Bruce Bateman: I have a great friend in Berlin who is a great fine art artist. He’s going into abstracts. The only way to do that was through an AI muse, because he was trained as a pure artist, so he can’t break into that field. Even though he’s a pure artist, he needed math from somebody else to become what he really wanted to be.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I think, for many parents, their ideas of math is like calculations, which of course, it’s OK to not understand at all, because there is calculators and computers.

Bruce Bateman: I don’t need it.

Audrey Tang: Right, that’s right. Mathematics, which is really the ideas of isomorphism, of looking at very different thing and see the same structure and things like that, of course, that’s very important. It’s fundamentally important.

Bruce Bateman: Right. I did a talk a year ago on Taiwan’s education system. People are saying that, in Taiwan, [Mandarin] gives you a certain kind of…

Audrey Tang: Rote memorization.

Bruce Bateman: …gives a certain kid, and they work very well in factories, because they’re used to [Mandarin]. Being in a factory, they do very well, but we don’t have innovation, because they were never taught that.

Audrey Tang: We changed the curriculum last year. You might have heard of it.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, I heard you’re trying to do. The problem is the teachers and the curriculum, not the students. I believe that, between…If you look at Barcelona football, they recruit at nine years old.

Bruce Bateman: The reason they recruit at 9 is, by the time you’re 18, you already know you can write a Perl script to do your high school homework. You don’t have to. You can write the…You don’t need to do a…The other class they don’t teach here is how to google.

Bruce Bateman: I asked the [Mandarin]. I said, “The number one thing you should teach here,” I mean at any school. American schools, they teach it. At Kaohsiung and [Mandarin], they teach a class on…

Audrey Tang: I think that’s part of our media competence curriculum now.

Bruce Bateman: If-then-else. You can do all this stuff in Google, but people don’t realize it. I think that’s really…I don’t think we should change our education system that much, because there is a market for this. I think we should work within the system and create this economy of coding machiners.

Bruce Bateman: Not just coding, but I mean everybody around the AI field. Women do better, I think, at medical. They’re going to do much better at education AI. They’re going to do much better at…Actually, I’m working on a fashion AI thing right now.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s fashion. It’s design. You just whatever field and call it design, right? [laughs] Magically, more women.

Bruce Bateman: What we’re trying to do, honestly – I have to kill all of you now – what we’re trying to do is take a Lego approach, because the fabric fits a certain way. We know how the fabric fits, I’m sorry, how a pattern fits.

Bruce Bateman: We tell the designer, “This is what you can do.” We give them building blocks. We give them building blocks to build, and then most of the costs, all that stuff that a real professional knows we’re hiding from them. We’re actually, our first person is a 10-year-old.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yay.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, he’s a really smart kid.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Bruce Bateman: He knows fashion. He knows the industry. He’s got his own Instagram, and I mean a good Instagram, not just…He knows social media really well. His father’s my high school classmate. I talk to the kid all the time, because he has this natural ability to understand fashion. For a young boy to really understand fashion is not easy. For a young boy to care about fashion is not, so he’s breaking all these norms.

Bruce Bateman: His parents are really supporting him. We’re supporting him, trying to develop a way for him to become a designer without him going to…I teach at Beijing [Mandarin], so I don’t want him to take my 25-year class. How can he actually design stuff that he likes?

Bruce Bateman: It’s not about the economy. We’re not trying to sell stuff. If he sells something that’s great, but it’s about building up…

Audrey Tang: A taste.

Bruce Bateman: …the taste, and his ability to get his ideas promoted.

Audrey Tang: Maybe your next project will be called Boys in Fashion or something. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Well, I wanted, yeah. I think young men today are becoming much more aware of fashion, and so it’s good. I think we’re getting this blend now that’s something that, unfortunately, I’ve spent my life doing. It’s not something that the social norms, and especially you.

Audrey Tang: I think the middle schools and – well, in your 10-years-old example, primary school – nowadays are required by the new curriculum to develop their school-based curriculum. That’s when, in our era, it was like the ace class, [Mandarin], or the clubs, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, they are all moving in into the school-defined curriculum. There’s a lot of room in there for, as you said, to work within the institution, not to break the institution.

Bruce Bateman: When I did my coding company, we wanted to sell these programs to the teachers, but they didn’t have the experience. It wasn’t that, we could only go school-to-school. We couldn’t actually leave it at the school.

Audrey Tang: That was probably before last year.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: The situation all changed last year.

Bruce Bateman: Now, we need people coming out of college who are not Google-qualified coders, but understand coding, to teach the young ones.

Audrey Tang: I know. That’s the ambassadorship. Also, the 數位學伴, the Digital Companion Project. That’s another MOE project.

Bruce Bateman: We’re forcing kids from college to go teach in a junior high or elementary school.

Audrey Tang: In a rural or indigenous area, and so on, and both face-to-face, but also digitally.

Bruce Bateman: The only way to learn is to teach.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, yes, exactly. Precisely.

Bruce Bateman: Excellent. We know who to now give that.

Linien Yen: Audrey, just to make a topic for the event…

Audrey Tang: Right, the opening remark. You can…

Bruce Bateman: I got the card from you already. I got one from you already. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Bruce Bateman: Save the Earth.

Audrey Tang: OK. Save the trees.

Bruce Bateman: You’ve got to save the tree. You’ve got to do it this way.

Audrey Tang: Ah, that’s really good.

Bruce Bateman: Line, Facebook, all that. By the way, OK, I will trade with you. No, Visa, Mastercard.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Government credit card. Aw, man. You don’t have government credit cards?

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: Erase that part.

Audrey Tang: It’s called 國民旅遊卡, the National Traveler’s Card.

Bruce Bateman: Ah, OK. Well, it was a pleasure, man. I’ve always heard it was really fun talking to you, and it really is. I added you on LinkedIn and Facebook. You didn’t accept me yet, but…

Audrey Tang: I could now.

Bruce Bateman: Ah, thank you. Now, I won’t go home crying.

Audrey Tang: So, so sorry. Would you like to just find ourselves here?

Bruce Bateman: Yeah, sure.

Audrey Tang: Yeah?

Bruce Bateman: Yeah. Done.

Audrey Tang: There you go.

Bruce Bateman: Great. I was 20 years, Silicon Valley, and then I came back. I was around the world. I lived in India. I lived in Malaysia. I built a lot of the wireless telecom and worked a lot in machine learning for a while. Andrew Wu.

Bruce Bateman: Before, when we used to come to Taiwan, we used to hang out. He actually likes it. He’s got to figure out how to get past all of his investments in China. He’s a great guy. We’re part of TTA. TTA, we’ve got a lot. He’s been there too.

Bruce Bateman: There’s a lot of, the mafia’s back. We’re trying to see. The funny thing about the mafia is they all want to coach. None of them want to do a startup, because we all know…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, their relationship with startups before this.

Bruce Bateman: Yeah. I’ve done nine successful and about eight unsuccessfully. I still, I mentor about six, seven startups here in Taiwan today. Then Women in IoT and then Women…You’ve got to give back, right? My point to that is not me.

Bruce Bateman: In Taiwan, you have [Mandarin] executives [Mandarin] , going fishing and doing stupid stuff.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. They’re in their golden age.

Bruce Bateman: I have a research company here doing…The next time, we’ll talk.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Robots, of course.

Bruce Bateman: What is the robot thing? You can’t say that simply. Go home and think about what that. Is it two fingers, is it five fingers, is it six fingers?

Audrey Tang: It’s five fingers.

Bruce Bateman: Why?

Audrey Tang: Because it’s more familiar.

Bruce Bateman: OK. That means you need a humanoid. You won’t accept a seal or a puppy.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but it could be a virtual avatar, of course, as long as it looks like five fingers to my eyes.

Bruce Bateman: Right. You won’t want much, in order for trust…My topic on Monday, I spoke on Monday at a university. Then Sunday, well, this week, I spoke about machine learning, trust in NLP. It’s not about understanding the word structure.

Bruce Bateman: It’s understanding the paucity, which is the tonation and all that. The only one problem we have, when you are old, you revert back to your native tongue. [Mandarin], that’s Taiwanese. There is no…

Audrey Tang: It’s me, too. It is for me, too.

Bruce Bateman: When you get old, you’re going to revert to…

Audrey Tang: To Tâigí, yeah.

Bruce Bateman: The problem is there is no Siri for Tâigí.

Audrey Tang: There is, actually. I know a couple teams working on that.

Bruce Bateman: I know they’re working on it.

Audrey Tang: It actually already work at ithuan.tw.

Bruce Bateman: Oh, really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Bruce Bateman: I know at Chinghwa, they were talking about…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, ithuan.tw.

Bruce Bateman: OK, I got it.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, yeah, there’s a startup working on it.

Bruce Bateman: I went to Nuance. Nuance’s CEO is Taiwanese, Charles Kwan. I went to Charles, because [Mandarin] , when I was at [Mandarin], I did smart cities. I went around the world doing smart city design. We went to Kaohsiung and asked him, “What’s the number one problem?”

Bruce Bateman: This was probably three years ago. The only person who [Mandarin] was the social. She said, “I have a problem with…”

Audrey Tang: That’s the team that I referred to.

Bruce Bateman: Remember that.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they do both text-to-speech, speech recognition, and all that.

Bruce Bateman: The problem with Kaohsiung we have is they said, [Mandarin]. I said, “Well, I can solve that. I can put a device in. I can listen for it, and I can…” Then said, “Well, it’s all Tâigí.” Sorry, I said, “Oh, well, I can’t do it, because Tâigí.” If we had Tâigí, then we could solve that problem.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so work with this team. I knew them for years now.

Bruce Bateman: I learned this, by the way, doing a project in Bangkok for building a robot for the Bangkok Hospital. That did [Mandarin]. The Germans come from a medical, and they speak English before the surgery.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah. I did…

Bruce Bateman: After surgery, they don’t speak English.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Bruce Bateman: All the Thai girls, it’s number two, they decided they wanted to go to the bathroom. You’ve got this big German woman who says, “I’m going to the bathroom,” in German. Thai girl doesn’t understand. Then she gets out of the bed, she starts to fall.

Bruce Bateman: This little, bitty Thai girl has to grab her. Now, you’ve got to think about how does a robot do that?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Bruce Bateman: How does a robot shift its weight? That’s a huge science.

Audrey Tang: It is.

Bruce Bateman: That’s a huge science. I’m only worrying about trust. Trust is built through communication, so I need to know your story. I need to know your background. I need all your photos.

Audrey Tang: Empathy, yes.

Bruce Bateman: Empathy. I show you a photo of yourself. As your brain starts to go bad, I show you a photo. I try to fire the neurons off. I keep the neurons going so you don’t get dementia. Alzheimer’s you can’t stop, but dementia I can, so when you are old you’ll remember me.

Bruce Bateman: Not until then.

Audrey Tang: Or your avatar.

Bruce Bateman: My avatar’s…

Audrey Tang: And we will meet in XRSpace learning tai chi together.

Bruce Bateman: [Mandarin]

Audrey Tang: Ah, wow. Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Bruce Bateman: He teaches. He has his own school for kids. He’s at the UFC gym, but he also teaches at the…He came back. He’s not from Taiwan. His [Mandarin]. He came here because all the girls were bigger than him, [laughs] so he came back here.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think they do jiu-jitsu in XRSpace Manova yet, but there’s real tai chi going on. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: I know there’s tai chi going on.

Bruce Bateman: I can break dance in mine. Once you get it, there’s a thing called Mixamo, M-I-X-A-M-O.

Audrey Tang: I had my Mixamo done back in 2016. [laughs]

Bruce Bateman: I have me break dancing. I’ll have to send you my break dancing. I’m really good. The samba, too.

Audrey Tang: Wow.

Bruce Bateman: On the dating website, all the women want to know if you know how to dance.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Wow.

Bruce Bateman: Then when I did this…

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Linien Yen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Your avatar do that now?

Bruce Bateman: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I see.