Also, the chatbots. For example, the Center of Disease Control has a chatbot on the LINE platform, which is like WhatsApp. That is popular here. You can also, using interactive chatbots, interface, understand where your nearby pharmacies are.
Not only the Google developers in Tainan built a map that shows you where the nearby pharmacies are that still have mask in stock. It can help you to navigate there.
In Taiwan the pharmacists publish their stock levels at that time every 30 seconds, which brings to a very different way of governance, because if it’s updated every 30 seconds it’s almost like a distributed ledger. It’s like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Everybody can add third-party developments on top of this ...
If you ask for a copy of the pharmacy’s stock levels you eventually get one. You maybe get a weekly update or a daily update. That’s what is the norm in other countries.
We do it by radical transparency. That is to say, we make sure not only we publish the information as in other freedom of information jurisdictions.
The people in there did not have adequate mental or physical preparation. They were barred from leaving for a indefinite period of time, and so it was very traumatic for everybody involved.
The persons within the hospital was not notified that they’re going to be quarantined. A emergency measure.
Measures are also designed on the post-SARS days. When we noticed Dr. Li Wenliang’s whistleblowing last December we immediately assumed it’s the SARS coming over again. We started health inspections for people flying from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day. That’s the first day of this year.
It goes out after the 14 days of quarantine. That’s narrow, deep, but we can prove it’s necessary and, also, always better than barricading entire hospital.
For example, the digital fence, which is the idea of using the cell phone tower triangulation to make sure that people who are within the 50-meter radius of home isolation or home quarantine, they can notify the local household manager or police when that phone breaks out of that radius, ...
They tell the legislators to make much more clear the Act on Communicable Diseases, the CDA, which spells out exactly what needs to be done. Also, authorizing the administration to seek alternative to barricading and isolating people.
Also, the Constitutional Court debate of whether it was constitutional to barricade the entire hospital in the first place. The Constitutional Court said it was constitutional, but it was very ill advised to do it in such a way, without preannouncement, without people understanding what it’s about, and so on.
Instead of asking the CECC people to come to them, this ideas of almost science-based single command chain that makes sure the municipal and the central government is on the same page, almost by design.
The Central Epidemic Command Center, which was not there during SARS, was designed into existence. The daily press briefings. The ideas that all the ministries, regardless of their position and their ministerial, work in the Central Epidemic Command Center.
Definitely, because we spent the post-SARS days designing what we will do when SARS happens again so we will be more prepared. This includes the medical personnel, the negative pressure wards, the annual drills, and so on, but also the regulatory adjustments that we have to make.
We remember it as a traumatic and chaotic time. 37 people died. We decided it’s 37 people too many.
How the entire hospital need to barricaded, unannounced, with no definite termination date. Basically, everybody in there was very unsure about their fate. There was massive panic buying of N95 mask, and many other things.
Yes, I remember. Everybody above 30 years old remembers. We remember the chaos. How the municipal government and the central government give different messages.
That’s right.
Cheers.
Cohack.tw. OK, thank you.
No, that’s pretty much. All right, thank you.
I think Gemini Data is US. Autonomy is Bitmark, which I think it’s based in Taiwan, but with international team. Lockboard, I think, is entirely Taiwan. Interdisciplinary Laboratory, I’m not so sure about their combination. White Advance is a Taiwanese company.
Cohack.tw.
Or even in the case of Gemini Data, this entire product that already fits the bill, and it’s crowd-approved, like this is something that our society is willing to accept. The social acceptance is even more important than the technical capability. These are the six winners.
Yeah, and developing it. This is essentially just making sure that our CECC, whenever they need something of that sort to solve that sort of issue, they now know who already have a proof of concept.
No, there’s five winners, and each one of them received the prize.
It’s done. We gave our awards. It’s about 200 innovators, 53 proposals, from seven countries, in a very short time frame, like a week.
This is still very important, because we want to emerge from this even more democratic and even more respecting of human rights.
Even the very simple thing of having those like light bulbs, it’s very important so that you can see the consensual ideas are somewhat guided by those blue, green ticks, meaning that this is validated, as there’s no legal disputes involved.
That actually is against the law here in Taiwan. Even though there may be consensus, we don’t do that topics. If things are greenlight, it means that no legal dispute. If there’s yellow light, then the authority need to step in and say that only within this strictly confined legal ...
Yeah, personal data protection laws. For example, there was a proposal that says there should be an app that enable contact tracers to walk door-to-door to identifying the highly risk people and forcibly quarantine them.
All the winning topics need to provide both why it’s solving a commonly identified issue, and also, importantly, that there is no legal violation, that it doesn’t run against the Taiwan privacy…
We only look at the various different opinion groups, but even though some may have as few as one person. Then we just make sure that we only address as common topics, as winning topics.
What I’m trying to get is that there’s different social norms at work here. What is working in the US may not work in Taiwan and vice-versa, but what works in the coastal states in US doesn’t necessarily work in other states in the US.
For example, this one about mental health recovery and logistics, and making sure that we can connect the mental health helpers with the people in quarantine or people in isolation to identify what they need from the community support. This is something that everybody agrees and so on.
Very polarizing. [laughs] The unique thing about this is that those polarizing ideas, there’s no reply button, so you can’t have a fight over it. We’d only take as our call for hackathon only things that managed to convince people across the aisle, the things that has a broad social ...
Instead of on a first-come, first-serve basis, we need to prioritize people who have more remaining contribution to the society. That, again, is very polarizing.
Something like it. Group A likes the idea. Group B doesn’t like the idea at all. There’s different social norms. In some other group, there was a proposal from, I think, Bill Gates that basically said, “We need to triage people who come to ICU and calculate through artificial intelligence ...
Incorporating historical data, to make sure that people can, at a glance, see how many people infected are nearby you, essentially.
For each and every topic, there is different social norms going. We can read this, like for example, let’s see. There’s actually many very interesting ideas here. Like this is actually a GPS, so within a city, we update in the city degree so that the individual fine-grained epidemic level ...
About the hackathon, the topics is collaboratively designed by a scalable listening device called Polis. We ask people from different jurisdictions about how to make a smooth transition post-coronavirus, how to protect vulnerable populations, and how to communicate the risk, and things like that.
The Australian one, as well as the Taiwan AI Labs one, is designed so that even the health authority has no idea, and you make your own decision.
It’s designed in this way, so that you don’t have to trust any trusted intermediary. This is unlike the Singaporean Trace Together, in which case the National Health Authority still knows something about this.
Be transmitted anywhere on the cloud. It’s going to stay in your phone. They only keep this app running for the purpose of getting notified if they have been in contact for long exposure time with already confirmed cases, and they know, but nobody else does.
Otherwise, people will have to rely on essentially goodwill of the state to keep things going. I don’t think that’s a winning proposition.
I think these more privacy-enhancing alternatives, either time-limited or only autonomously shared between friends and families, these are the kind of technology that can be more accountable over time.
In Taiwan, we’ve not ever used that data for contact tracing purposes. We use much coarse-grained, statistic level data. For the home quarantine, we use cellphone tower signal strength data that they’re already collecting, anyway, and so on.
It’s very fine-grained. It can locate you to even centimeter vicinity, like which room are you in in the house, and so on. That is not something that people are usually comfortable giving out.
People are very worried about GPS data.