 Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, and we are very privileged to have Minister Audrey Town joining us for the Spotlight Taiwan lecture hosted by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Kelowna Taiwanese Cultural Society in Canada. Before we introduce our speakers, we would like to thank the Taipei representative office in the UK, Edinburgh office, and the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan for the sponsorship, and to Dr Li Heng Shi at the University for Project Management. Due to that limit of time, our warm thanks to many friends and counsellors and general support are acknowledged in the chat box. Our keynote speaker, Audrey Town, is Taiwan's digital minister for social innovation. She is a software programmer known for revitalising the computer languages and for building the online spreadsheet system in cooperation with Dan Bricklin, and she served on Taiwan's National Development Council's Open Data Committee and K-12 Curriculum Committee and led the country's first e-rulemaking project. Previously, the minister worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press, with social texts on social interaction design. She actively contributes to G0V, a vibrant community that focuses on creating tools for the civil society with the call to folk the government. Currently, she also contributes to various apps in the pandemic as well and maybe we'll hear more from the minister later on about her view on the apps. I'll discuss and Dr Wen Lai today and completed his medical training at Seton University in New Jersey and Case Western Reserve University and University Hospital of Cleveland in the States before he returned to Canada and opened his own practice in Kelowna. He is also the clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and the neurologist and specialist practising at Kelowna General Hospital and the president for Kelowna Taiwanese Cultural Society. Followed by the minister's speech and the conversation with Dr Lai and we'll open the floor for a 30 minutes of Q&A for housekeeping so the audience microphones are muted currently and then you'll be able to open the microphone later on for the Q&A session and we are very much looking forward to learning about firstly the minister's vision of transformative technology and social innovation so please join us and to welcome minister and Audrey Tan and over to you. Hello everyone good local time can you see and hear me okay it's working well I'll try sharing my screen and we'll see if that works do you see a cute dog okay you do see a cute dog okay so this is Zhongchai a Shiba Inu Chai Quan right Zhongchai and so the Zhongchai Shiba Dog is a symbol of our not just social innovation but also the overall strategy of countering the pandemic with no lockdown so far and also countering the infodemic the disinformation crisis with no takedown so far and we intend to keep it this way and this very cute dog is a real dog lives with the participation officer of the ministry of health and welfare in each ministry we have a team of people called participation officers or PO's that engage the public on trending hashtags just like media officer addresses journalist questions or parliamentary officer address MP's questions the participation officer is in charge for example to explain the physical distancing rules saying when you're indoor please keep three shibas away wear a mask or when you're outdoors keep two shibas away explaining in multiple languages the importance of covering your mouth in those when sneezing and also spread the idea that mask are there to protect your mouth from your own unwashed hands and these innovative ways of communication is not just one direction it's truly multi-directional what I call listening at scale indeed in the very beginning of this pandemic in 2019 when Dr. Lee when learned message and I quote that there's seven new SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market gets posted on the social media worldwide in my knowledge only in Taiwan did it result in a decisive government action after a young doctor no more pipe she posted this message on PTT the Taiwan equivalent of Reddit except the PTT has no advertisers or shareholders PTT is in the social sector an open community literally a student pet project for 25 years that people are in there for social purpose not for this profit and because of that the PTT contributor triaged this message immediately so on the very next day we began health inspections for flight passengers coming in from Wuhan and so this is again a fertile ground for collective intelligence and social innovation we also have this toll-free number and now a toll-free SMS number two 1922 a one-stop shop where you can call regardless of whether you have a smartphone you can call using a landline and so on to ask about pretty much anything related to the pandemic and infodemic and there's more than 2 million calls last year alone to this number and often it results in decisive government action also literally in the next 24 hours for example last April there was a young boy that called saying hey I have the mask irration but all I got was pink masks but other boys in my class have navy blue medical grade mask I don't want to wear pink to school do something about it the very next day on the 2 p.m. daily press conference at a suggestion of the participation officer the person who lives with the Shiba dog everyone wore pink and also at his suggestion minister Chen Shizhong even said that pink panther was his childhood hero so suddenly the boy became the most hit boy in class for only he has the color that a hero's wear and a hero's hero I guess wear and so this civic participation results also in the fair distribution of PPEs such as the mask map which was contributed by the Gov zero G zero V community in Tainan initially that shows the available PPEs around each spot and I brought this idea talked to the premier and said we need to trust citizens with real-time open data so that this data is updated every 30 seconds and now one year after the mask rationing map rolled out the same team also rolled out the 192 to SMS service that allows a very easy check in in public venues it has very good adoption that the five telecoms have agreed to waive SMS fees in the per message basis so it's all toll free also and people can just use their phone to scan the QR code or even manually enter the random code of the place and provide checking for quick contact tracing and we also have a counter disinformation line bot that doubles as a QR code scanner so people can receive cute dog messages on a daily basis while providing safety check ins that allowed including the feature phones and smartphones to both work and so I would simply say that's the attention to privacy protection the attention to the cyber security is built upon the existing services that people already come to trust because the data is only stored in the telecoms I mean if you don't trust your telecoms with your SMS probably you should switch a different telecom but we still do provide the option of pen and paper or sometimes people use a lian shu Zhang a seal a ink-based way to leave their names and that's still on a parallel track with the checking service but again this is a people public private partnership in that the government didn't come up with this idea by ourself but rather the people the gov zero people came up with this idea that are widely applicable and sets the social norms so that we implement and work with the economic sector such as the telecoms to implement and I'm told that I should keep my opening remark to 10 minutes as that this is my 10 minutes looking forward to the q&a thank you so much minister and yeah I think followed by your 10 minutes the very brief quite inspiring talk and I think we'll invite the some conversation questions from our discussant and Dr. Wen Lai thank you Dr. Yang and good morning to Mr. Minister Tang and good night to Dr. Yang in UK and thank you so much for letting us co-host this very inspirational a session and discussion with Mr. Tang. I would like to first express my very sincere gratitude your story has been an inspiration for many and we are so honored to have you here with us today my very first question is about the journey that you have gone through that make you who you are now social order are often maintained by enforcing certain restriction and conformity individual who are not fitting into the box are often considered deviant or often are facing external discrimination and perhaps more frequently the internal conflict while facing many challenges being different would you mind sharing who or what influence or inspire you the most and what best help you transcend from being different to now being successful and what wisdom can you share with those who are currently struggling in finding their sense of own identity in the society that has very many different perspective from theirs. Thank you thank you for the great question my main influence came from a middle school head of school principal Du Huiping when I was 14 years old I still remember going to visit her office explaining to her with some email print out that I want to do research 16 hours a day on the internet on the wire web which is a really new thing by the way in 1996 and principal Du Huiping asked about what I mean by 16 hours of research and I simply explained that there's this archive ARXIV preprints server it's still around by Cornell University that I found that people creating knowledge did not treat me as young or different because across the email all you can see are each other's contributions anyway so I just wrote to the authors of those preprint papers and we start doing research together in no time they didn't know I was just 14 years old they didn't know that I have to look up a lot of dictionary words in order to complete an email because my English was rather rusty back then so principal Du Huiping heard my argument I prepared a lot of counter argument to her opposition in my mind but she thought about it for a minute and said simply that okay from tomorrow on you don't have to go to my school anymore and I'm like okay what about the compulsory education and she's like okay I'll cover that for you meaning probably that she'll fake the records and so what I'm and what I'm saying is that that instilled in my mind this feeling that a career public service is the most innovative of all people because she has the guts really and the empathy to cover for me and not just for me but later on we will develop together the alternative education act that enable up to 10 percent of Taiwanese school children to also choose homeschool or an alternative school not bound by existing curriculum and so this then paved the way of the new basic education curriculum which already prescribes autonomous learning as well as interaction across generations as well as cross-disciplinary transcultural studies and so I do think that on the internet nobody is strange even if your interest is so niche that only one person in 1000 is interested in that still in Taiwan that means something like 20k people and so if you join the internet's group then you will feel that there's nothing abnormal about caring about swift trust about coding about things like that as a 14 years out so that's my main answer to your question is that the career public service need to co-innovate across generations. Well thank you so very much um so there's a bit of extension on on that particular question and this is stemming from your discussion with Taiwan Insider on July 20th 2020 you have talked about how digital social innovation is to bring technology where people are rather than asking people to conform to the government in your opinion what can be done as a society as a government to be more inclusive including those people who are considered different those people who are not feeling into the box according to the standard that we know of through digital social innovation. I think inclusion begins with co-creation again across generations and you see here Grandma Yang when I develop new digital services such as the masquerading pre-ordering system and now the vaccine appointment system I work closely with my own grandmother who is now 88 years old and she often introduced her younger friend to me to run such focus group studies and so Grandma Yang is my grandma's young friend she's 77 years old so young only to my grandma and when we run this service past her she offer a lot of very good observations for example we originally intended to pre-order the mask and by extension the vaccines using the ATM system where they can insert their debit card into the ATM wire about two euros to the center of her disease control and receive a copy that they can then redeem for the masquerading and so on or for the vaccination but Grandma Yang very astutely observed that she is afraid of the ATM machine that is to say she was afraid that once her input gets wrong maybe she will wire not two euro but two thousand euros out and she did not quite know how to recover from such a case so there's a lot of anxiety she said instead why don't just use the national health insurance card and without entering a password she know already that by law this can only be used for public service purposes and never for financial purposes and because we have universal health coverage we are actually much more inclusive than if we use the ATM card which would exclude people who did not have a debit card or if their bank account has been terminated but everyone has a health card in Taiwan so by her suggestion we switch entirely to use the national health card for both PPE rationing and for vaccination now and all the technological underpinnings such as enabling the family ports or other convenience store machine to read the health card in a secure way that falls to to our duty so that means that we are bringing technology to where people are we're not asking people to conform to where technology are and this is I think what is the most important thing about inclusion. Thank you Mr. Tang for that wonderful sharing so and I'm I'm blessed to as I was preparing for my questioning I actually did quite a bit of research and with your conversation with many others you used the term called creation quite often and you also mentioned it today as well while we're searching on the thing that was established and accomplished in the past you being the digital minister you have started the movement and hosted the website the joint.gov.tw allowing citizens to truly involve in the government and affair would you please kindly explain towards how that works and how that can also apply to other governments such as in Canada here as well. Definitely join the GOV.tw it's a one-stop shop for participation online so as you can see the three main buttons one is that I have an idea so it's the petition system the second is the consultation system where the government has an idea and I want to ask for feedback and finally there's the accountability layer where all the public budget is shown and everyone can actually see exactly how and when did those budget go out and people can interact with the public service even after their ideas is implemented as a long-term public service and so this idea of 说到做到 right of being accountable is the most important thing in the joint platform and you can see that in each and every ministry more than two thousand different projects are being tracked there and anytime people find a omission or anything that needs to improve better they can start a petition in the same website and the website even recommends similar petitions much like how Amazon or Netflix recommend new books or movies for new petitions for people to join and once they collect 5000 signatures the minister is required to offer a point by point response and often every twice a month if it's interagency cross ministerial issues then I personally with my office hold collaboration meetings across different ministries for I mean ministry at large meaning that I work across different ministries so for each emerging issue if the different ministries have different takes then we meet face to face with the petitioner with the stakeholders and to date more than one quarter of such petitions are started by people who are not even 18 years old that is to say they could not vote but they can already set agenda for the society for example unbanning plastic straws for takeout of the national identity drink the bubble tea that is something that started by the 17 years old and when I met her in the collaboration meeting along with the ministries of economy and environmental protection I asked her why are you starting such a petition that's so popular so quickly and she's like well it's my civics class assignment so you see that it's already part of the basic education thank you so truly it's from sound of it young people are the future the generation for the future so they are the people who are contributing most of the idea to the government for discussion and it's this is a fantastic idea that the government's allowing ordinary people like you and I or like me and Dr Yang to be able to pitch in ideas for further support from other citizen and further taking that topic for a parliamentary discussion so truly the people are setting the agenda for the government that that's sort of an idea behind that movement is that correct that is correct and for the public service previously they were afraid of such participation because they think there's more noise than signal but with the help of participation officers who are you know professionals in engaging the hashtags as well as crowd moderation and by designing a space online where it's only possible to make contributions and not the more divisive conspiracy theory driven more anti-social corner of the social media we built in a sense our own pro-social media that's part of the civic infrastructure so people would not squander their calories on the more anti-social corners of social media in order to have a town hall like deliberation we can hold our deliberations using live stream technologies using AI based listening and skill technologies that enable people to find a good enough consensus rather than dividing among the people's ideologies actually well that was fantastic so by allowing people to pitch in ideas for discussion and the displayed publicly online this would truly allow the government to become more transparent so to extension of that is my question would be your concept of radical transparency the government are often seen as a very close entity citizens often have the perception that if you're not in it then you will not know the truth some will even argue that even if you're in it you still might not know the whole truth one of your policy as you mentioned is to have radical transparency myself I'm quite interested in understanding why you added the extra descriptive term radical to transparency rather just the term transparency thank you radical transparency means transparency at the root so for example after I become digital minister there's more than 1600 transcripts covering more than 6000 speakers and in 300k or so speeches and these are not the meeting records in that the usual public service produced rather this is a line by line transcript that is to say when people visit me when they lobby me when I hold internal cross-ministrial collaboration meetings and so on you can see an even conversation with foreign MPs you can actually see the entire transcript and even link to one and this is unlike the PDF based publishing you can actually link to one single utterance so you can link to call me Audrey don't call me the right honorable and so on but it's still within a context so it's radical in two senses one everything is transcribed or published as video by default but within 10 working days if people have privacy concerns if they relate an anecdote of their friend that has not clear for publishing they do get a chance to co-edit it before it goes out but editing takes effort and not editing by default everything goes out in the open so that's what radical means in radical transparency and the other thing of radical transparency is that it also extends to lobbyists and journalists and indeed the lobbyists and journalists find it quite radical and because of this arrangement all the lobbyists lobby me if you look at the record based on the common good argument on the global goals covering the future generations welfare because they know this record will exist for future generations to see in a sense the future is watching and they will look quite bad if they make a suggestion that only benefit themselves or benefit the current generation at an expense of future generations well that's just really fantastic my thought question on that particular topic on radical transparency as a digital minister advocating for radical transparency have you ever encountered any push back from government official or policymaker and how can the government truly accomplish radical transparency in your view so only the people who choose to work with me adopt this work out loud radical transparency norm so to date about 12 different ministries have sent sick comments to my office to work under radical transparency i'm not giving them orders i'm not taking orders either we're just co-creating so the people facing ministries such as the ministry of culture education interior national communication commission you know the usual suspects finance just as you name it they are happy to join on the first year the foreign service the ministry of foreign affairs did not join but after they learned about the importance of twitter diplomacy they also sent someone to learn about public diplomacy using radical transparency but for example the ministry of defense never sent anyone so i know nothing about national defense so i don't encounter pushbacks because i don't push i only work with the parts of the public service that want to work under such terms i don't actually go and knock on the ministry of defense a door and say let's publish where our submarine or the sea mines are i'm not doing that so i don't encounter pushbacks thank you very much for your answer i think i'm running out of time i just have one last question and this is one of the question that a lot of the parent have concerned about and thus are regarding the excessive use of electronic device which has been a major concern for many including health profession for many years now uh you know still california berkeley published an article titled gadget addiction which we call my eye as i was researching the articles on that particular topic in a current age of instant gratification we are interested in your thought on the following questions while technology has fostered the human race or humanity does our current consumption pattern adversely impact our analytical and creative ability leading to the loss of focus and communication and make us just an indexer of data rather than a bearer of knowledge are we addicted to our own creation the electronic gadgets well i'm not and the trick of me being free from the addiction there are two tricks the first is don't touch the screen uh and this is quite important you will see that i interact with my ipad using this that's a apple pencil and this is not a new habit i've done that since the original palm pilot so like 20 years ago and later on the sharp sorus the galaxy note the apple pencil so basically i interact with the screen using a pencil a stylus or using a keyboard the only time my fingers touch the screen is just on zooming in and zooming out and and i don't stay on the screen long enough to form the addiction because if i touch the screen uh too often then i find that it's not me swiping the screen the screen swiping me it's like uh they becoming an extension of my fingers or something and i actually feel physical pain if i don't get to touch the screen if it runs out of battery and so on but if i go through an intermediary with intention because with the stylus or keyboard or mouse you have to begin with a intention and then this addiction do not form and the other trick is that i sleep for eight hours every night with sufficient sleep uh study showed that it's less likely for people to form addiction either to gadgets or to other addictive substances and i get to sleep for eight hours because well i don't bring any connecting devices to to the place where i sleep and so i do have an ipod touch it serves as an alarm clock sometimes plays some music but it doesn't really enable anyone to find me and so that is the trick of having sufficient sleep and therefore being cured of whatever addiction that was beginning to develop on the previous night. Thank you you just convinced me to go ahead and buy a Samsung notebook uh or notepad i've been thinking about buying that for a long time if i've been pushing me to get it i currently had the Samsung that i i still use my finger to to interact with but i'm convinced i'll to buy a different one with the stylus. Good for you. Yeah so thank you very much uh minister Tae i think my time is up i'll turn the um the spotlight back to Dr Yang. And thank you so much um Dr Lai and then so much um um wonderful so many you know wonderful conversation that we can go on for hours and then i have unmuted uh i mean i'm able everyone to um open to turn on their mic and if you have any questions um for the minister please raise your hand you can see that a raise hand button on the top of your screen and please raise your hand and out and then we'll um invite you to ask question and um yeah and then while we are waiting i'll take the chance to ask the first question maybe i mean um you know i'm quite jealous and i have to say that being an art historian i'm falling behind i i seem to live in the you know 19th century and you are having the apple pencil and i'm still with my pet and pencil and so definitely that's not addiction my my question is that we are as an art historian we are concerned about the preservation of history but while the technology moves so fast it somehow that you know it feels like and the personal memory probably would die even when one person passed away or losing the password or you know losing the facebook um the page or even you know the memory is no longer in this kind of substantial or you know visible way you know touchable physical existence and then what's your view on this you know between the you know the the part that preserving the so-called you know the personal and the collective memory and the new technology and what's your solution for that thank you yeah i think this is a very important uh question and it relates to both right it relates to the history of places and the history of individuals and both are equally important for the history of places we have worked with the ministries of culture and science and technology to digitalize the important places in taiwan's history so as you can see the kikumoto uh hiakaten uh the juyuan baihu or the calcruz terminal that's the number one the taijong railroad station and many the old buildings and so on instead of asking people to physically travel to that place um which is quite difficult among the international pandemic we're bringing these buildings to you they are 3d scanned using photogrammetry and put into virtual reality so just like the free assets on flicker or on pixabay and so on these are the 3d free assets that people can then use in their movies in their video games in their interaction with the odds and things like that and that adds a lot of textures to the co-presence because like currently you're in your room with a lot of books i mean i mean my room was zero books and we were talking we're not quite in the same place but this sort of what we call taiwan digital assets library enable us with just a little bit of a rehearsal and tweaking switch to the teams together mode i believe zoom and other like skype has similar mode now and we can place ourselves in exploratory place and enjoying some sort of co-presence feelings together and our personal like family memories and so on there's also a taiwan cultural memory bank that offers free hosting i've uploaded quite a few photos by my grandma by my dad and so on into this place and it also has a facility where everybody can curate and ask for more contributions about one historical incident about one historical event from their fellow citizens so they will be motivated to interview each other and upload the old photos the videos and so on that adds not just to the individual but also to the social sectors shared memory online so i believe the technology can of course hamper but can also assist people in telling the stories as a social sector thank you that's quite reassuring and i hope that you know that there'll be more funding also available for you know when the the software needs updating as well i think that's one of the concerns for the museum curious for the for the two websites we actually did a historical reinterpretation of the word infrastructure in 2016 minister jen li jun of culture at a time we work together to convince the national budget office that infrastructure covers also intangible infrastructure such as these two websites so not just things made of concrete like literally concrete things qualify for the special act budget nowadays that budgetary equivalent of them also qualify for the budget and i think taiwan is so advanced in this in the sense and then we have the first question we will invite in Hong Chen in Hong Chen and can you unmute your microphone for questions yeah do you hear me yeah this is this is patrick actually i'm together with the in Hong Chen thank you minister it was really very interesting i have so many questions but i'm going to go with one first which is you know the holographic i'm so much looking forward to have a holographic presence i love the 3d effect you know the three possibility to go inside a gallery and and visit but when do you think this is anything in works for holographic opportunities because i think that would be the next step for technology definitely and i also do that every day i actually have the headset with me and so i have 3d modeled myself and you can interact with me in any of those 3d spaces for example one space that i frequent is the xr space and as you can see in the xr space everyone can wear such a like no wire required headset and interact with one another in in real time and have activities and so it allows for not just easy modeling of one's own avatar but also because this is actually a scanner a depth camera you can also scan your room or your place your venue and then bring other people in into that venue for co-creation and social interaction there's many places already using this for tours for interaction for education and things like that i think the main problem that we used to face in taiwan was that we did not have a teleeducation mandate at any point in time until about two weeks ago so this is that we that we have to use teleeducation we still do not have a lockdown but we've out of caution switched to teleeducation in the past couple weeks so the education facilities are just now learning the presence of such technologies so give them a little bit of time and i think by their summer vacation some of them will be able to work in virtual augmented reality and holographic reality but previously it's very hard to convince the teachers to use this because simply there was no need to i understand thank you so much now just it takes me to the next question if i may just have one more i have more but just one more it's like you know related to health like you said when we touch the screen and so on and i'm resisting the vr as much as i love it to you know the experience of it but i'm really resisting in terms of you know how we can affect my eyes my brain but is any research around new technology like to know how much it affects human being you know before we find some beautiful outlets to help us do we do testing on human see how we can be negative for sleep for anything you know yes definitely definitely there's a lot of vr safety studies and my suggestion is that only interact in vr as a shared reality that is to say use it to connect to real human beings in the presence of spaces that are real places you will note that when i show that how in digital access library i emphasize that these buildings and venues are actually there that you can't one day visit it the farthest i've traveled on vr is on the international space station of course i can't quite easily physically go there or to the mental home mountain in switzerland but still these are real places that has real people's real memory attached to it and i think this is crucially important for if we only live in our own solo realities then i do fear that we'll get addicted to such experiences that are not social and frankly speaking anti-social so i would suggest definitely read up on the vr safety studies but also use vr as a shared reality not a solo reality awesome thank you very much and thank you so much and then our next question is from in kong and and could you um a mute your microphone yes um hi minister tang my name is an kang i'm the member of legislative assembly in british columbia in canada and previously we have met before in vancouver in ubc when you were presenting with ubc i know you have a photographic memory so you probably remember me so right now my position is um now the minister of advanced education so now oversight of ubc my my question is is related to technology because i i used to be the minister of technology as well just a few months ago um so ubc has not been as fortunate um as canada we had a lot of covid transmissions and so therefore uh you know our post-secondary system was um pivoted to online and and so there was a lot of mental health issues but as well um faculty staff and students had to learn how to pivot themselves online i was wondering if you could share some of the experience um if if that happened in in taiwan because i know there was no transmission so perhaps there was no reason to if not can you share um what is transformative right now in taiwan in terms of digital technology uh areas of research and development engineering and and as well what steps is taiwan taking to encourage women uh to go into the technology computer science sector where you know we see it's more of our men dominated sector yeah i i have this recruitment uh short clip uh where i uh recruited people um into the girls in cyber security uh usually like um high school or uh young undergrad level to work in cyber security and study cyber security uh and there's this interaction uh in that clip where this girl asked and i quote isn't cyber security mostly for boys and i responded computer never asked about my gender which is literally true right when you study cyber security the computer do not ask which gender you're in and taiwan we do have a pretty good um um gender equality in for example our minister's um parliamentary um that is to say 40 percent or more actually more than 40 percent people in the parliament uh are women uh in the ministry or um cabinets we're currently lower than we probably should but we are also working on improving it thanks to the gender equality committee uh one place where we are seeing a lot of growth but still falls short is exactly as you point out is in the graduates in science technology engineering and math at a moment i think we just reached the one quarter percentage of women who graduate in stem and so we work with uh not just educators but with the students themselves to find out what's blocking them to work on the stem issues and not just of course the pink mask sometimes help for gender mainstreaming but we also find that people are looking to their careers with a mind on shortening the gap between the genders on the so-called equal pay issue and that is actually the main concern so we're now doing a lot of uh efforts to uh narrow the gender pay gap at the moment still at 14 percent but as you can see it's going very quickly downward so that we can anticipate in 10 years time um we will see a kind of negligible gender pay gap that will then encourage more people to work in stem into graduate in stem uh regardless of their gender and the kind of rallying cry is that biology should not determine destiny of course having our president being 100 women also helps here and thank you so much and thank you and for the great question and our next question uh this is from um how wind uh sundew i'm sorry about the pronunciation um yeah could you unmute your microphone thank you yes absolutely thank you pronounced really well uh hi minister tang i am harvinder sundew i am the member of legislative assembly uh with my sister and kang and i'm so thrilled to finally get the opportunity to meet you i've heard so many great things about you from n and also i've been following time on how they've been leading the covid guidelines and today when dr live i i thank him for inviting me i was so looking forward to this uh uh in order to get to meet you uh before becoming an mla minister tang i was working in health care for the last 17 years in bc and my last role was in a nurse like a care coordinator role on a covet unit um so being in the leadership role when first covet rolled in and then lack of ppe and all the like we didn't know enough about covet and what effect it will have it was highly stressful for all my staff and for my colleagues uh so over the time now that numbers have spiked even more it came and go in the waves uh in health care workers as you know around the world doctors and nurses already work shift work nights and days and that already take toll on their mental health so here in bc as we know the covet had effect on mental health all around the world here in bc what we're hearing from uh health care front lines that they're at the breaking point and i wonder what uh initiatives what can you share that how taiwan what how taiwan is handling that mental stress whether it's uh in health care or the seniors or you know uh public health and how did the technology play that crucial role as i said i've been diligently following and that was quite impressed so i would really like to know your thoughts thank you yeah our technological measures observe the ideas of calm technology meaning that the more people interact with the technology the more assured people feel and that is only possible because we co-design such technologies with the people who are the most vulnerable uh for example the very senior people as i mentioned the people in the medical front lines and so on so we design for example the sms check-in system not because it's cutting edge technology sms is not cutting edge technology but because everybody know how to send a sms we develop uh the technology based on the health care card not because it's most advanced it's not it's introduced in 2004 right after science but because everyone has at least 16 years of um a short interaction with how the health card works for everyone above 16 years out of course but what what i'm trying to say is that uh use the part of the touch points that people already are familiar with before the pandemic that enable people to anchor their familiarity with such technologies in a way that assure them that this will continue to work counter pandemic in some jurisdictions they enforce the quarantine using new technology such as wearable bluetooth dongles bracelets or other technologies but because these are new uh we didn't have those before the pandemic it creates extra anxiety when this begins to more function but what we've done instead in our digital quarantine is that we send a sms message deliberately shaped very much in their text like the earthquake warnings and people have had a lot of experience with location based earthquake warnings and advanced flood warnings way before the pandemic so people understand for example the location based quarantine sms will not be able to read uh their emails or their whatsapp messages because people understand it's on different layer of things and therefore feel much more familiar and therefore they feel assured when they receive the quarantine based sms but messages all right thank you so much thank you and i reassuring too because otherwise we'll feel that in under big data and it seems like we live in a world with all the civilian cameras and tracing track you know the all the apps and then if we live in the big brother world as well yeah thank you that's right so put data only where you already trust that's our design principle and our next question comes from xinchi from bergman yeah xinchi could you unmute your microphone please hi i'm minister tan i'm nice meeting you i'm a ubc professor so living in vancouver and you my i have two questions for you so first of all is that i joined yebin chunjiao so you have a facebook group and currently there are 80 roughly 80 000 teachers on this particular group and you know about it so i'm trying to think and this might be a very easy task for you to see if there's a way to streamline some of these contributions from teachers from parents so that it can be much easier for teachers who are trying to cope with these online teaching and learning the reason i'm talking about this is because in the past 16 months i have been trying to teach my colleagues how to teach online and in many ways i know the struggle people have encountered in the first month and probably continue to struggle right now and so it will be easy for if it's possible to try to figure it out in a way that we can actually streamline some of these really wonderful contributions secondly um taiwan in the past three weeks from my observations has shared a lot of data which is wonderful because these kind of data in terms of outbreaks help the public and help the government to communicate with the public so in many ways i wonder if this is something um i have been trying to push the collaboration between canada and taiwan in terms of trying to have a transparency in terms of the data communications because only transparent can enhance the trust so um just those two questions probably really big but really great questions um probably more suited for five-hour seminars but i have five minutes so i will be brief so yeah the great social sector communities in taiwan that includes yabin chen professor's group as well as i think dream to the power of n uh mongda and sifang many other groups they are instrumental in creating the guidelines for tele education as well as for competence-based education i think the streaming lining uh you're referring to aligns very well with the basic education curriculum previously we had difficulties partly because uh in the third year of the middle school uh that's to say uh the ninth grade as well as the twelfth grade uh they were still using the old curriculum that more uh emphasize on the literacy that is to say the teacher holding the right answers rather than competence uh whereas the student creates the answers with the teachers um and so having the teachers work across two curriculum paradigm is really difficult because online education only shines if you give the students the individual freedom to work with the material on their own on their capstone projects and so on it's almost impossible to synchronize across the screen the the progress of all your students so but fortunately beginning next semester all the high school education will be using the new curriculum and so that imparts a lot of more room for individual schools to incorporate the kind of co-creation spaces that is now being developed by the dreamer power of n or by professor yebin chung and so on so i will help the ministry of education to look into incorporating them into the guidelines the not just pandemic prevention but also tele education in general guidelines especially on the middle school level so thank you for bringing this this up your second question um i think data is um is a very abstract term so we talk about you know data governance uh data norms but really in every field there's a very different norm so just like uh when you look at publications text the journalists have their uh norm about text in the journalism sector uh fact-checking balancing the sources and so on the academic publishers have their own norms uh preprint open access of course being the newer norms but about citation about the rigor and things like that but nobody would say let's train all the journalists and all the academic professors into the text norms that doesn't even make sense because journalism and uh academic publishing follows different norms so rather than uh saying that we need to develop data collisions or data trusts or data relationships nowadays uh i usually say let's work on for example uh building interoperable health record systems let's make sure that my vaccination records uh is recognized by the canadian vaccination uh inspectors uh let's make sure that this health norms are carried out through the digital realm that connects people to people rather than just machines to machines they still observe exactly the same health sector norms uh and uh i think for the state-to-state relationships um the canada and taiwan both have the state assured health care state assured education state assured communication and transportation as well as indigenous rights on these particular regards is the state duty to observe the social norms and build infrastructure on the digital realm that realize those norms so my suggestion will be start uh bilateral conversations based on these specific sectors and that will enable the data norms to converge much more easily than if we begin talking about data norms on international trade e-commerce and so on which are less of the state's duty and frankly speaking the state may not have the most capacity to assess such norms thank you and thank you so much and to uh from uh professor from um berthman for the questions and then speaking of the open access you know that would really create a lot of issues as well we love the open access but then thinking about the image copyright yeah that's so great um so i think um the time is up and then it then we would like to um thank our speaker the keynote speaker minister odry town again and also you know dr wenni it's wonderful discussion between you both and it is really you know wonderful to um to you know listen to both of you are you know the very insightful views and then quite so both thought-provoking as well leaving us a lot to think about and wonderful thank you so much and then so we would like to thank the audience again who contribute to this and the live q&a that is lovely to have you and we hope to see you again in our next lecture that will be in july and then artist yu cheng da will be talking about the performance in the expand field of liquefied queerness and which will be you know quite visually stunning and a bit um anyway but um so we are looking forward to seeing you again and also in october we have artist li mingwei and talking about the six stories about the beauty so we'll hope to welcome you back and but thanks again to minister and thank you so much for your time we know this is maybe the most busy time for you in the pandemic and while in an outbreak just you know i reached taiwan and then you are so amazing you know creating the the very um sufficiently with all the new apps and then in the uk we are very jealous about this as well yeah um thank you and so um wish everyone and take care and stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you again uh in the thank you so much and prosper bye thank you thank you thank you mister tang bye