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.
Citizen perspective.
I actually, in my next “Businessweek” column will start writing about some of the winners. That’s my promised collaboration with these people.
In Taiwan, we are very fortunate we don’t have that problem, but in many jurisdictions, there is a problem of that. There’s also a team that focus on this. All of those teams receive an electric rice cooker and some rice as [laughs] award.
Also, US companies such as Gemini explore, which allows for this kind of statistic information to be turned into digital storytelling products that can be more usefully communicated to decision-makers who are not epidemiologists.
Cohack.tw has the five champions of the, that’s an AIT-Tecro joint coronavirus hackathon. It includes the one that I just told you, which is called LogBoard. There’s also Autonomy.
We understand that it’s primarily only useful for the jurisdiction currently in community spread stage who still devote a lot of time working with the international research and development community on both developing these ideas and also popularizing these ideas.
Just like mask, unless a majority of people adopt that technology, it’s not useful. Even though Taiwan is not in the stage of community spread, perhaps, not in any foreseeable future.
This is privacy-enhancing technology, or PET. I would argue this is now of essential importance, because there will be no adoption from the civil society, from the general citizens, for any contact tracing app if they think that they will invade on their personal privacy.
But rather, can just share amongst their friends and families, the people who care about their health. When the contact tracers need the information, they only share the part that’s useful for contact tracing, but not sacrificing or inadvertently reveal private, other details of other people.
We were just talking about the coronavirus hackathon, that co-hack, that we’ve done. We’ve partnered with the international community on, for example, privacy-enhancing technologies, on making sure that people who keep a diary of their whereabouts don’t have to share it with a surveillance state or surveillance capitalism.
They use it up very quickly, so they don’t have to care that much about the degradation time, expiration time. It’s optimizing for a very different use case, so I think it’s differentiated market.
That’s right. I really don’t think [laughs] that they’re in dire need of this kind of manufacturing device info, because in their part, they make more amount of mask by essentially there’s more human staff involvement.
Uh-huh. When we say we allow exporting, we’re not putting any restrictions. Considering we’re only the second-most largest mask exporter, and they’re the…
Other than the five jurisdiction that I just mentioned for the medical mask part, there’s also N95/R95 asks, but I don’t think even the MoFA have the full list. You’ll have to ask Champ Mask for that. I got my information from MoFA.
Yeah. You talk to Champ, and based on the capabilities, they will make this horizontal partnership by themselves. This is what the MSMEs in Taiwan has always been doing.
At least six or seven.
Yeah, they called the people together.
No, they came up with the idea.
Yeah, it’s a national team. The Champ Mask is just the person who you should interview. Of course, it includes Jaoyi, Sungshen, Chanyu, Chienhu, and so on, and basically, the entire national MIT mask team is in it for the export.
Which is still important for the humanitarian part of the response.
Of course, on international market, they can easily sell 5, 10 times that. Of course, they are happy that we’re now allowing exports, but they are now also seeing that it may be even more lucrative for the entire smart machinery industry if they build these kind of micro factory ...
Yeah. As of tomorrow, we’re still nationalizing, I think, eight million a day from there. The larger manufacturer, like the CSDs still see 45 percent of their manufacturing nationalized for the local economy.
I have no idea. You would have to ask Champ Mask.
In very short time, we ramped it up to 20 million. That is for the smart machinery company to now demonstrate that they can do that to pretty much any other jurisdiction.
That’s right. We banned exports, so we nationalized their entire production line. We worked with many smart machinery companies to optimize this whole manufacturing chain, because previously, we were making not even two million masks a day.
Yeah, [laughs] until tomorrow.
It is. Of course, we nationalized their entire production.
That’s a given. The point is that what we are exporting is essentially guaranteed high quality in a very short time frame. Then that is the core competence, I would say.
This is made out of PPE material, so it’s not paper. In any case, the basic supplies out of the local plastic production line, that is usually no problem, as long as you make any sort of plastic products.
And land. Yeah, a parcel of land. Of course, local police and firefighters, in case of emergencies or raids. [laughs]