Hi, very nice meeting you.
Nice to meet you.
Our conversation will be English, right?
That’s right.
Or will it be in Mandarin?
(Mandarin)
(laughter)
I was a mentor for the women in AI, also in Mosaic Lab, we do an accelerator for automotive.
Very happy to meet you.
Very happy to meet you.
(Mandarin)
Also the Egyptian French. She’s actually Egyptian. I’ll start real quick, and then get the overview.
Because I think in English, so it’s actually easier if you do all English.
Man, I’ve been practicing all night.
Or maybe you do all in Mandarin. [laughs]
The real issue, as you know, I’ve been programming since ‘81 and all this. I did 9, 10 startups and worked in…
I can’t quite say that I was born in ‘81, but yes. [laughs]
[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.
That’s right, and a lot of diversity in…
In cultures.
…cultures. That’s exactly what I’m…
We just didn’t have…
That’s right.
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.
That’s exactly right.
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.
Yeah, of course, yes.
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…
Yeah, like faculty composition and things like that.
Interestingly, if we call it “design,” then you don’t have that much of a gender gap. [laughs]
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]
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.
That’s right.
I don’t know if you know her, but she does Taipower. She’s done a lot of really good work.
Yeah, it’s Dataa, with the extra A, right?
What’s the name of her company?
Dataa.
Yeah, Dataa.
I didn’t how to pronounce it, but I’ve heard of it. [laughs]
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.
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.
Sorry, 4,000 members. They just finished their…
Big event.
…big event.
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…
We had just come back from Italy.
My husband also says hi. He’s here, but he’s in quarantine for two weeks.
(laughter)
He’s a programmer, too.
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…
She’s actually very famous in the AI for…
Oh, really? I don’t know.
Yeah, I know her. I know her.
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.
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.
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…
I believe you are a human being — I believe you are not an AI person.
Yes. [laughs] Oh, no, no, no.
What? I am AI.
Oh, you are AI?
That’s what [Mandarin].
Ah, that’s right.
[Mandarin], I am AI.
That’s right, that’s right. You have this flawless accent. Too perfect.
I am AI.
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.”
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…
There’s a very handsome speaker right in the middle.
[laughs]
I see that. I see that. Yes, looking very human-like.
(laughter)
I’m very handsome. It’s a humanoid. It’s a perfect humanoid.
That’s right. It’s an ideal humanoid. [laughs]
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.
Right, [inaudible 7:38] style.
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.
Yeah, I see. I see.
[whispers] It’s real.
We have Emma and Bruce as our speaker and Sophia Yama as well. We co-op with Women in IoT together.
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.
That’s right. It’s awesome.
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…
AetherAI, the medical image team.
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.
I think he worked with NTUH too?
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…
Yeah, in the place where the mask map originated.
Yes. I think you know this place very well.
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.
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.
It is better.
The food is better, much better. To get Tainan-quality food in Taipei, you have to pay 10 times.
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]
I know, I know, yeah.
There’s, in Tainan?
In Tainan.
Even the rain and wind are sweet.
[laughs]
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.
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.
We have all ambassador and work really closely together in APAC. We really would like to have an international event, like hopefully in Taiwan.
We’ll see.
That’s awesome.
What we really need…
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.
Absolutely. It’s like 20 minutes?
Yeah, 20 minutes.
Can I pre-record?
Yeah, because it’s rather early in the day.
Of course. If I can pre-record…
A real programmer doesn’t get up at that time. No, this is 8:00 AM Australia time.
Ah, so it’s even earlier for Taiwan.
No, I think 8:00 AM, it’s Taiwan time. Taiwan time already.
Oh, Taiwan time? OK.
OK, right. [laughs]
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?
Yeah, I know. What my thought is, just to engage more with the MOE, because the MOE has, by far, the strongest link.
All due respect, just saying that doesn’t get us anywhere. We need to know who at the MOE.
I know.
We need to know. We need to get that detail level.
This lady there is from the MOE.
[laughs] And in charge of youth engagement, too. There’s a dedicated administration within the MOE.
See how quick that was? That’s called efficiency.
Yeah, right. You want a personal link? Well, she has a name card.
(laughter)
(Mandarin)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
My daughter-in-law lost her job at her company. Less than two weeks later, people were looking. She got a new job.
Right, exactly.
She thought she was going to be out for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I speak on this, it’s like, “Oh, it’s really, really complicated.” No, it’s not.
No, it’s not.
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.
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.
No, it’s an iPad, but anyway. [laughs]
Oh, it’s an iPad? No, we make that one.
It’s an ASUS.
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…
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]
I know. I know what you’re talking about, yes. We have our central bank to thank for that.
Sorry. You’re not going to get me down that pass.
[laughs]
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.
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.”
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.
I know. It’s the same in the procurement rules. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
What the? This is from the ‘80s.
That’s right.
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?
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…
I have a camera that…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.
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.
Yes, I hear you.
I’ll ask you one last important question. Who’s a better programmer, you or your brother?
I think I am…
Oh, you hesitated. You hesitated.
…I practiced more.
You hesitated. [laughs]
I don’t code that much nowadays, but I think I still have more years of practice.
OK, so no rivalry?
I was around in ‘81, you know?
(laughter)
I have literally four years more of practice.
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.
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.
If you are interested in the financial application of AI, which is the other major time-saving, like already will…
You mean so that the banks can actually stay open beyond 3:30pm?
I know. [laughs] Or even purely Internet banks. Fancy that.
You mean I don’t have to go in and put my stamp?
[laughs] We did keep actually three certificates for pure online banks. It’s not like we’re in the backwater. [laughs]
Someone specific that I can contact within AI…
Academy?
Yeah, Academy.
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.
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?
First of all, I think this collaborative branding, Women in AIoT, that really sounds cool. It’s really a Taiwan-specific thing.
Oh, sorry. AIoT is a Taiwan word.
I know.
I don’t like it.
You don’t like it? I know, but it works.
Is it AI²oT? I’m fine.
But why?
Because you’re double-using the I.
It’s AI plus IoT.
You can’t use the same word twice. Go ahead, sorry, apologies.
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.
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.”
This, they understand. I think that’s a good angle to…
To start with.
…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…
I think you’re right. Engineering and architecture are hard words.
Exactly.
Go to the softwares, design.
Right, with soft drive, not a hard drive, I think. [laughs]
We’re going to SSDs.
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.
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.
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.
That’s right.
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.
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…
Yeah, that’s common good there, yes.
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.”
“Yes, why not? That was our idea all along.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s got to be incentives in HR.
I know.
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.
The community, yes.
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.
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.
That’s what internship can do for them, AI for marketing.
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.
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.
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?”
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…
Look, our official website says Creative Commons. It doesn’t have a year.
(laughter)
We relinquished our copyright, you see? [laughs]
Yeah, we relinquish all our copyrights. There you go, so you don’t care. You got me there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I had one.
Oh, you had one?
Yeah, I brought him in, because he was great at…He did an NLP for me.
OK. That’s the proper job.
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…”
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.
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]
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…
Maybe you should have asked for Doraemon instead?
(laughter)
See? Yeah. If I had to, and asked about Pokémon, they would have.
Yeah, I think everybody here have heard of Pokémon.
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.”
“Do you know that’s AR?” That’s right, exactly.
[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]
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.
Cool. I know you’re a busy guy.
Feel free to just reach out with the messages you want me to send in the opening the remarks.
Yeah, really appreciate it.
I will just record it. Either myself, or synthesized through an AI that you can’t tell. [laughs]
If you want, I can you show my…I have my own avatar.
Yeah, me, too.
I have a 3D scan of me.
Yeah, me, too.
Full, sub-millimeter accurate.
Me, too.
(laughter)
I have…
I’ll have my avatar call your avatar.
(laughter)
My avatar is in XRSpace. We’re going to have a…
I coached there last week.
Ah, you did? OK.
XRSpace, we were Kaohsiung two weeks ago.
Oh, yeah, for that opening.
I did the coaching for them, XRSpace came in and did two days of coaching.
Yeah, Peter’s team just deploying my avatar today.
Really?
Yeah, so that…
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.”
Ah, that’s right.
When I’m on the stage, I wear the blue.
Part of branding image, too.
That’s right. There has to be continuity.
This is an NFC payment ring.
I’m aware of that. We fixed the NCC rules for the distance of the NFC for that.
The problem is he doesn’t know marketing, so that’s really sad.
I know. Maybe I should be wearing that more. [laughs]
Then this is the OR ring.
I have one last question. How about the mentorship for someone like Audrey?
We hire 30 internists. [laughs]
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.
Of course, there is plenty of material from my side.
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.”
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…
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.
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.
I don’t need it.
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.
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…
Rote memorization.
…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.
We changed the curriculum last year. You might have heard of it.
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.
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.
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…
I think that’s part of our media competence curriculum now.
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.
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.
That’s right. That’s fashion. It’s design. You just whatever field and call it design, right? [laughs] Magically, more women.
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.
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.
Oh, yay.
Yeah, he’s a really smart kid.
Awesome.
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.
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?
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…
A taste.
…the taste, and his ability to get his ideas promoted.
Maybe your next project will be called Boys in Fashion or something. [laughs]
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was probably before last year.
The situation all changed last year.
Now, we need people coming out of college who are not Google-qualified coders, but understand coding, to teach the young ones.
I know. That’s the ambassadorship. Also, the 數位學伴, the Digital Companion Project. That’s another MOE project.
We’re forcing kids from college to go teach in a junior high or elementary school.
In a rural or indigenous area, and so on, and both face-to-face, but also digitally.
The only way to learn is to teach.
That’s right, yes, exactly. Precisely.
Excellent. We know who to now give that.
Audrey, just to make a topic for the event…
Right, the opening remark. You can…
I got the card from you already. I got one from you already. Thank you.
Save the Earth.
OK. Save the trees.
You’ve got to save the tree. You’ve got to do it this way.
Ah, that’s really good.
Line, Facebook, all that. By the way, OK, I will trade with you. No, Visa, Mastercard.
[laughs]
Government credit card. Aw, man. You don’t have government credit cards?
[laughs]
Erase that part.
(laughter)
It’s called 國民旅遊卡, the National Traveler’s Card.
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…
I could now.
Ah, thank you. Now, I won’t go home crying.
So, so sorry. Would you like to just find ourselves here?
Yeah, sure.
Yeah. Done.
There you go.
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.
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.
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…
Yeah, their relationship with startups before this.
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.
In Taiwan, you have [Mandarin] executives [Mandarin] , going fishing and doing stupid stuff.
That’s right. They’re in their golden age.
I have a research company here doing…The next time, we’ll talk.
That’s right. Robots, of course.
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?
It’s five fingers.
Because it’s more familiar.
OK. That means you need a humanoid. You won’t accept a seal or a puppy.
Yeah, but it could be a virtual avatar, of course, as long as it looks like five fingers to my eyes.
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.
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…
It’s me, too. It is for me, too.
When you get old, you’re going to revert to…
To Tâigí, yeah.
The problem is there is no Siri for Tâigí.
There is, actually. I know a couple teams working on that.
I know they’re working on it.
It actually already work at ithuan.tw.
Oh, really?
I know at Chinghwa, they were talking about…
Yeah, ithuan.tw.
OK, I got it.
Anyway, yeah, there’s a startup working on it.
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?”
This was probably three years ago. The only person who [Mandarin] was the social. She said, “I have a problem with…”
That’s the team that I referred to.
Remember that.
Yeah, they do both text-to-speech, speech recognition, and all that.
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.
Yeah, so work with this team. I knew them for years now.
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.
Oh, yeah. I did…
After surgery, they don’t speak English.
That’s right.
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.
This little, bitty Thai girl has to grab her. Now, you’ve got to think about how does a robot do that?
That’s right.
How does a robot shift its weight? That’s a huge science.
It is.
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.
Empathy, yes.
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.
(laughter)
Not until then.
Or your avatar.
My avatar’s…
And we will meet in XRSpace learning tai chi together.
(laughter)
[Mandarin]
Ah, wow. Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
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.
I don’t think they do jiu-jitsu in XRSpace Manova yet, but there’s real tai chi going on. [laughs]
I know there’s tai chi going on.
I can break dance in mine. Once you get it, there’s a thing called Mixamo, M-I-X-A-M-O.
I had my Mixamo done back in 2016. [laughs]
I have me break dancing. I’ll have to send you my break dancing. I’m really good. The samba, too.
On the dating website, all the women want to know if you know how to dance.
Awesome. Wow.
Then when I did this…
[laughs]
Your avatar do that now?
I see.