 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the AI for Good webinar. My name is Reinhard Schall. I'm with the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Specialized Agency for Information and Communication Technologies, and I'm going to be the facilitator of this webinar. We hope that all of you and your families and friends and colleagues are healthy and safe. Thank you very much for joining today. The ITU does three things. We do firstly allocate frequencies to the services that make use of the radio communication spectrum such as mobile telephony or GPS. Then we do standards, a lot of the bits and bytes that are running across optical networks right now are being standardized by ITU, and we also assist developing countries in setting up their information and communication infrastructure. Before we go into the matter, let's look at a couple of housekeeping rules. On the bottom panel, you'll find these two icons, chat and Q&A. If you have questions that you would like to ask our speakers, please use the Q&A icon, and for anything else, please use the chat window. We have the microphone for attendees disabled. We will also make the presentations, the PowerPoint presentations, available after the end of the webinar. Okay. The topic of today is COVID-19 case study using ICT and AI to flatten the curve in the Republic of Korea. Up until a few weeks ago, unless you were an epidemiologist, you probably haven't heard and didn't know what flattening the curve means, but now I think that everyone who is on this webinar today knows what it is or has at least heard this term. The curve is a graph which is plotting the number of infected people versus time. If no measures are taken, measures like social distancing, then this curve is going to be a steeply rising bell-shaped curve. That's skyrocketing. When the curve is reached, it's also exponentially faster decreasing. The problem with this scenario is that it is overloading the health system of countries. That's something which we're seeing more and more in all countries of the world today. The idea is to flatten the curve. You would like to spread the number of infections over a long period of time, but even flattening the curve is not enough. You may actually want to push down the curve. You would like to decrease the number of infections. There is one country that's standing out and that's the Republic of Korea. It's the only large country which has been able to so far successfully combat COVID-19 without locking down its entire economy. We are very grateful that we have colleagues from Korea on the line today. We are grateful for three reasons. One is the battle against COVID-19 has not been won yet and not in Korea as well. All the experts keep working around the clock and making sure that COVID-19 doesn't cause additional anxiety. The second reason is a lot of countries and companies from all around the world are contacting you because they would like to know what's the secret of Korea? How did Korea manage to do so? The third reason why we are really grateful that you're joining tonight is it's nine o'clock in the evening, Friday, so we're really, really, very happy to have you on board. Let me introduce our speakers. We have Dr. Sanculi. Dr. Lee is the Director of the Division of Risk Assessment and International Cooperation of the KCDC, which is the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And then we have Dr. Taemyeong Jung. He is professor. He is Dean of the College of Software and is also the Director of Information Management Technology Laboratory of Seongjongkwang University. So, let's see that we have everyone connected. So, Dr. Lee, are you there? Yes. Okay, great. How are you doing tonight? I'm fine, thank you. Good. Are you getting the day off tomorrow? No. Okay, all right. So, we have the presentation up and we are very excited to listen to your presentation, Dr. Lee. So, the floor is yours. Please go ahead. Thank you very much for giving me the floor. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. It's my great honor to share our knowledge and experience on responding to COVID-19 in Korea with all the countries around the world. Let me begin the presentation. Next slide, please. Yes. This slide shows the timeline, how the situation has gone, and how our government responded to COVID-19. As you can see in the timeline here, we issued alert level one blue after the cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown origin in Wuhan was first reported in China so that we could be prepared for possible importation of COVID-19. We gradually raised our national alert level as the outbreak progresses. The alert level increases to level two when the first case was confirmed, and then to level three after more imported cases were confirmed. The secondary and tertiary infections were reported after them. Finally, we raised the level to the level four, which is the highest level in response to the big clusters Shincheonji and Daenam Hospital occurred. Next slide, please. Let's move on to the next slide. This graph shows the total number of confirmed cases and the confirmed cases in each day since the first case was confirmed on January 20th in early this year. As of March 25th, there have been 91,137 cases in total. The peak of the transmission so far was on February 29th with a record of 909 confirmed cases in a single day. After then though the newly added cases have been slowly decreased. Since March 12th, the number of newly confirmed cases have been around 100 until today. We are trying our best to maintain the number of new confirmed cases not exceeding 100 right now and hoping that it can decrease as many and as fast as possible. Next slide, yes. Next couple of slides are the basic epidemiological information of the confirmed cases in Korea. The one on the left is in this slide is the age distribution of confirmed cases. The distinctive feature is that we have the largest number of confirmed cases in females in their 20s. The reason we have more patients in age group 20 to 29 is because the big cluster Shincheonji religious group is mainly targeting women in 20s for their missionary works. So there are many many members the female members in 20s. On the right hand side you can see the number of fatal cases and the fertility rate on each age group. The highest fertility rate is 13.5% in age group 80 and above and the overall case fertility rate is 1.38% as of March 27th. Therefore, as a mitigation strategy we established a new system to put more resources on severe cases. First we categorized the confirmed cases into four categories mild, moderate, severe, and very severe. Each category receives the different treatment and get admitted to different facilities accordingly because we actually experienced the much more cases occurred than the capacity that we have already prepared. So we had to expand our treatment facilities and then the hospitals to accommodate all kinds of needs of these cases. So we've actually prioritized our resources and also by the cases severity. Next slide. This slide indicated the distribution of the confirmed cases by reasons and clusters. The graph on the left shows that Daegu and Gyeongbuk provinces where the Shincheonji cluster was mainly found and these areas have the highest number of cases. Other reasons such as Seoul, Gyeonggi, and Chungnam are also experiencing relatively small sporadic clusters bringing the current total number of the cases to around 300 more in the reasons. Furthermore, the number of cases found in airport screening is 101 right now. It's very, very recent data. It's I think just within a week we had this large number of cases at the airport screening, which means that there are the increase of the imported cases from the foreign countries and then it's really we see that it's relatively very fast. Taking into account the outbreak situation all over the world, it is so tough expected. Therefore, we are more keen to strengthen our screening system at the point of entry and actively monitor and test all the incoming travelers. The pie chart on the right portion of the clusters in Korea is about the the clusters in Korea. As you may already know, Shincheonji is the biggest cluster as indicated in blue. O&Z represents other clusters, so you can see the majority of the clusters. Next slide please. This slide actually summarizes the response measures taken along with the progress of outbreaks, especially after we found out local transmission, including Shincheonji cluster during in the middle of February. Right after we recognized the case number 31, which was confirmed on February 18th, was related to Shincheonji religious group. We started to identify and test for all the members of Shincheonji-Degu group. As the cases increased and evolved to the big cluster, our government escalated escalated the national alert level to level 4 and designated Degu and Cheongdo as a special management reason on February 9th. When we had a peak on our epic curve, we started a social distancing campaign as well. This was at this time it was just a national campaign that we just boomed up and the school opening has postponed on March 2nd until March 23rd and then further postponed until April 6th currently. While responding to this peak cluster, we have taken various measures including the update of case definition and the vision of our response guidelines and the designation of national safe hospitals and establishment of living treatment supporting centers for accommodating all these big numbers of cases and the deployment of public doctors and so on. As the number of imported cases increased again, we expanded the special entry procedure including testing and screening for travelers now. Next slide please. This slide is about our testing capacity. It is well known that Korea has conducted extensive lab testing and found cases at the very early stage. We have extended the testing capacity step by step. In the beginning of the outbreak, only KCCC was available for lab testing because we established this pan-corona testing methodology from the beginning of this COVID outbreak. But later on it was expanded to the research institutes of public health environment in the local governments and also we expanded it to further to the private medical laboratories and hospitals. Therefore currently we have a total of 118 testing institutions available nationwide and the capacity is 15,000 testing per day on average and maximum 20,000 per day. Next slide please. Okay this slide is about the pictures of the drive-through sample collection and screening clinics. As you might already know, these drive-through clinics have contributed as well to our testing capacity because we could collect and screen, collect the samples and screen the people for testing. So it was really the best way to screen all the people suspect, subject for testing. We have received many inquiries about how to operate them and shared the SOP about this. Next slide please. Another aspect I would like to touch is our contact tracing strategy. Before the MRSA outbreak in 2015, we learned that traditional investigative methods depending on the patient or proxy interview has the limitation of omissions and errors of previous activities for these cases. Actually based on the experience of the MRSA outbreak in 2015, rules were revised to supplement the areas that were lacking at that time. In the current epidemiological investigation, contact investigation techniques that were used on a limited basis for the MRSA outbreak in 2000 are being used in all confirmed cases of COVID-19. So there are many four steps which are investigation, risk assessment, contact classification and contact management. At the investigations tab, we obtained preliminary information through interviewing the patient, primary physicians and family, and then to compensate the missing information or confirm the interview outcomes, we collect additional information at the stage of risk assessment. The information such as medical records, mobile phone location using GPS, card transaction log, and video footage are collected and investigated in this stage. Based on this information, we classify the clothes and casual contacts and provide the guidelines accordingly from the, from move restriction to symptom monitoring. Movement restriction refers to a legal public case order for quarantine and controlled travel. Symptom monitoring can be either active or passive depending on the exposure exposure risk. Next slide, please. This slide is about the smart quarantine information system after MRSA outbreak in 2015. Actually, even before this COVID-19 outbreak, every inbound traveler entering Korea is required to be checked for fever and also to fill out a questionnaire about their health condition when they visited in these areas in general. In particular, people who have traveled or lived in the areas with outbreaks of certain categories of infectious diseases, such as Mars or Ebola, are subject to quarantine investigations, including individual temperature checks and the health condition questionnaire, as I mentioned before. In order to enhance our quarantine system after the MRSA outbreak in 2015, we introduced the smart quarantine information system. This flow chart shows the overall workings of the smart quarantine information system. The information about the inbound traveler from the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, airline companies, and major telecommunication companies are collected by KCDC's quarantine information system. Actually, if some people who come from the, who takes the direct flight from these risk areas, we can easily recognize these people have some of the risks of the importation of certain infectious diseases. But if somebody takes the indirect flights with some connecting flights, then we cannot sometimes trace their travel history. So for the Korean citizens, they usually use this roaming service from the Korean telephone companies. So we just collected this roaming data from the major telephone companies so that we can actually see the more detailed travel history of our Korean citizens so that we can just ask them more, we can have some more close interview with them about their health condition, and we can also check about their test status and then so on. So these kinds of information about travelers from a country or region with an infectious disease outbreak is accessible by frontline health care providers during the incubation period. Since the frontline health care providers can check the international travel history of a suspected case at the registration treatment or prescription stage at the clinics, they are able to quickly identify and isolate or treat the suspected cases in a timely manner. Based on the information collected from the inbound travelers at entry, if a person returns to Korea after traveling for a reason affected by infectious diseases, we send text messages to that person during the incubation period of the disease about how to report if they develop symptoms of an infectious disease. Since we send text messages through local communications companies, they need to have a domestic cell phone number to receive these text messages, which covers most Koreans as well as most foreigners who are living in Korea. Actually, this system plays a very important role in responding to COVID-19 for early detection of imported cases, either at the entry screening, at the point of entry, and also at the frontline, the health care providers at the clinics. Actually, we use this system actively now as well. Currently, I checked with my the relevant team and they are currently uploading all the inbound travelers information into this system. Currently, the doctors at the clinic can just find out whether this person has some recent travel history to any countries around the world. Next slide, please. Then we further adopted IT technology for efficient and creative measures such as the self-health check mobile app, as well as self-quarantine safety and protection app. This slide shows how the self-health check mobile app works. All inbound travelers are required to install this app on their smartphones and submit their health condition every day on the app for 14 days. You can see the views of the first page of this app. You can start the mobile app from the front page, and then you can also proceed with a special quarantine form, and then you can also proceed with a daily self-health check. You can put all your status on the app, and also you can check the location of screening clinics so that we can just contact them if you have any symptoms or so. Next slide, please. Last strategy we emphasize is the social distancing campaign. After the peak of the transmission from February 29th, we have recommended the public to practice social distancing. Although it was a recommendation back then, now we practice enhanced social distancing from this week. We advise the public to cancel non-essential travel, event, and social gatherings, and so stay home as much as possible. High-risk facilities such as religious facilities, indoor fitness facilities, and nightlife venues are strongly recommended to suspend operations. Venues that remain in operation must strictly comply with the infection prevention guidelines. All these recommendations are subject to administrative order now. To conclude my presentation, I will make a short comment. COVID-19 is a novel virus. We still need to learn more about its characteristics. Till now, we have known that COVID-19 is highly infectious from its early age as IT is required to enhance our traditional control measures and response measures as well as to develop innovative measures as well. Currently, the world is experiencing the pandemic that we have not ever experienced in recent years. We really needed to share information and work together to resolve all the challenges and overcome this crisis. I really hope our experience can help other countries to take effective measures against COVID-19 and some much more detailed information in technology will be maybe provided by Dr. Zhang in the next presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. Lee. For your presentation, so we go to a question and answer session. Then we have the talk by Professor Zhang, which will also be followed by a Q&A session. And perhaps you may still be around for that talk as well, Dr. Lee. So we got a lot of questions. And actually just before I go into the Q&A session, I just got the news that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, has tested positive for COVID-19. Okay, Dr. Lee, you showed one, at the beginning you showed a graph where you explained, where you showed data, how many of the women and how many of the men got infected. And it looked like it's not just the age distribution between 20 and 29, where there are more female infections than male infections. It looks like it's, I don't have the data right in front of me, but the average seems to be more female than male. I mean, usually what I have in, what I've read is more male and female. So can you comment on that? Sorry, maybe I will just correctively say that, of course, we have a very large group of the confirmed cases in the age group of 20 to 29. And also, of course, all these targeted people, because the reason for that we just gave the reason for these religious groups target or their strategy. But we saw a lot of the number of these female members, but the confirmed cases, as you mentioned, it's a little bit similar, but a bit higher than males. Actually, compared to other countries' data, most of the countries have actually the very similar percentage between male and female. But in Korea, we have some more cases in female that's kind of, but unique from other countries, I think. Okay, did you test patients without clear COVID symptoms? Could you repeat again? Did you test patients without clear COVID-19 symptoms? Yes, actually, at the beginning of our response, because we had very little information about this COVID-19. And then we only had limited information. And also, at the beginning, the Chinese report, the Chinese report is that there was not certain evidence for this human transmission. So at the time, our case division was very strict. And then we were more focused on these symptoms, pneumonia, and also respiratory symptoms and things like that. But later, we found out we cannot depend on only these symptoms. So we also found out some of the travel, I'm sorry, the epidemiological link where history is also important. And also, if there are possibility of context, we had to have this testing. So for example, we had this huge Shinshanji cluster. And this cluster actually had a very large risk group, which are the many Shinshanji religious group members in Daegu, and largely all the nationwide. Actually, we've done all the testing for this Daegu area, the Shinshanji members in Daegu. And then we've screened all the members in the nationwide Shinshanji groups. So we've done this kind of risk group testing at the time. And at the beginning, we also had this number was about 9,300 people we tested. And also at the beginning, we had some large risk groups who had the travel history to Wuhan in China. And then we also screened all these people. And then if necessary, we also had the testing some symptomatic people in priority. And then later, we also asymptomatic people as well. So this is the, we don't currently, we don't do only these symptomatic people, but also we do the testing for the asymptomatic people for screening. Recently, at the airport screening, we've, I think one or two days, we've tested all the inbound travelers for testing because we had, we thought we had a very high risk from the, I mean, all the inbound travelers from Europe, because we thought this is very high risk group. Currently, we now doing just only the the inbound travelers has symptoms at the airport. And then we all, for the people with no symptoms, we just call for the monitoring screening, monitoring under the monitoring. So we now doing that, we are now doing that. But before when we had this high risk group of the people from Europe, we did also the testing for the old numbers. So is it depending on our risk assessment for the people, then we decided to call for the testing, the people, for the people with our symptoms as well. Thank you very much, Dr. Lee. A big problem in all the countries is there are not enough testing kits available. So the health authorities, the governments, they don't really know how widespread COVID-19 is in their country. Couldn't the following be done? The same that you do for an election poll, when you try to find out which party is going to win, couldn't you take a representative sample of the population? Yeah, I don't know how that big would be for in the case of Korea, maybe see a thousand people. So you take a representative sample of the population, whether they have symptoms or not, yeah, just a representative sample. And then you do testing. And then you should have a pretty good idea how widespread COVID-19 is. Isn't that a strategy that could be or should be followed? It can be considered, but from our perspective, actually, this testing should be kind of prioritized based on the risk assessment, as I mentioned. If I am in that position, I will go for the risk groups, high risk groups, maybe for some people at the long-term health facilities, because these high risk groups are the elderly and also with underlying diseases. And the settings are those people who are sharing the homes and then they are just clouded areas and things like that. So not general population, but if I'm in the position, I think I will just go for the screening for the high risk groups, rather than going for the general population. Okay, thank you. Do you have statistics available on the severe and very severe cases according to age? So is it mostly the older people who have severe and very severe cases, or do you see this also in the younger population? Actually, we have the same trend. We have much more severe cases in the elderly and elderly with underlying diseases. I don't have the exact statistics right now, but actually, next week, the article on the analysis of these severity and some in-depth analysis results will be published, I think, in our KCDC, the journal, which is called the Osong Journal. So I think it will be published and it will be also posted in our webpage as well. So you will have more in-depth and detailed information about our epidemiological information analysis. Thank you. You had a slide where you showed the smart quarantine information system during the MRSA outbreak. Is that same diagram also applicable to COVID-19? Yes, it is. Actually, we actively use this information system and then this is very important for us because, as I mentioned, all the case-finding and context tracing is very, very active because we don't want to lose anyone of the suspect because this one can be a huge or large big cluster. So it's our strategy and measure for that. For doing that, it is really, really necessary for having all these kinds of information. And then we actually use this information for also for for X band on the context because some people, the world of context, they are ordered for the self-quarantine. So we don't want them to go out of our country to have some more risk in other countries. So we also use this kind of the system not only for our quarantine purpose, but we it's connected with the the Ministry of Justice. So we also can use this information system to inform the Ministry of Justice as well. So this is very important system that we really use actually during this outbreak as well. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. How do you get all the GPS data and the data from the telco providers? I think you have a special law in Korea that allows you to access the data so you get pretty much all the data from the telco providers. Actually, we don't, we don't ask all the, the, the, the, this data for all cases if, if necessary, we ask the, this kind of information. So this is quite a different question. As I mentioned in our case, I mean context tracing strategy, there is a kind of risk evaluation. So we go for the risk evaluation and then case evaluation, then if we think of these cases, memory, and then all these data, the information that we got from the, these cases interview, then we don't go for the further information inquiry. But if he has a bad memory and he is not sure about, about the locations, maybe in some certain cases that they, maybe the onset of the data onset is far from now, then people has a little memory about their, what they did and what they, where they were. And for only those cases, we ask for the, for the information for additional use to make this information accurate. Okay, thanks very much. I think we go into the privacy topic also in the, in the next talk a bit deeper. I mean, ideally you would like to have a test that could be done by every citizen, like a self test, a self test for COVID-19. So I take a swap, I do a self swap, I put it in my nose and then I take it out and I put it in a test kit and then within a couple of minutes, I know whether I'm pregnant or whether, whether I have a COVID-19 or not. So when, what are you, your projections, when would we have that? Actually, this is depending on the accuracy of the testing method and actually swapping is very difficult to do by, by yourself, I think. It's really kind of hard work for our EIS officers also do this one, but these are sometimes very hard. And then when we do this, you have a lot of coughs and then all these kind, we eat also, you are exposed to the, the risk, high risk of transmission to others if, if there are somebody besides you and so on. So from the current, the procedure, we are not sure about whether it can be possible, but if it's possible for better testing, not using this, this current swapping method and all those sample collection methods, it would be okay. But we believe that currently the most accurate method is the RGPCR. And then the technology issue, we also encourage the, the, the, the, the, the manufacturers or these R&D people to develop a more rapid and the more easy test kits. But we need to see its accuracy. That's the most important factor. Okay. Let me ask you the last question. And then we go to the, to the next speaker. What, what are your predictions? What will the situation look like in say the fall of this year or towards the end of this year? Suppose Korea has been able to manage the outbreak that it has been done so far successfully. Other countries will not have been able probably by that time. Other, and some countries may, may, may follow you perhaps hopefully. So what will life look like at the end of the year or in 2021? A lot of the people are not immune against it. We still have to wait quite a bit if, if there is a vaccine. So what's, what's your outlook? Okay. This might be my personal opinion, I guess. Actually, we've seen other coronavirus like Ebola and or smores, but we could see this coronavirus doesn't disappear, disappear. Actually, it will occur reoccur, I think, or it will just continue just, we just some sporadic cases and for a year long. We do not actually, the Korean government actually has always, always set the worst scenario to do, to respond to, to this kind of outbreak. We will continue to see, to consider the worst scenario from now on as well. And considering the worst scenario is for the preparation. We have to be really prepared for the reoccurrence of this virus and things like that. And then actually the, this is about the MRSA outbreak, because after the MRSA outbreak in 2015, we are always prepared. And then actually last year, we had like more than 400 subjects suspected cases in Korea. Actually, we had no confirmed case. So we can see all these kinds of, we have to be really alert on the outbreak, another outbreak of these coronavirus. So we will be, we will go back to our, maybe, we hope to go back to our normal life. But our government think that the people's lifestyle should be changed. Because Korean people's lifestyle has some, some vulnerable parts, vulnerable parts and to the, to the coronavirus. Because we really like gatherings and then we like, you know, having the, the, the mirrors together and they share the mirrors together. And all these kinds of our everyday life, the stars. I think we needed to be adjusted to the, the infectious disease control style. So we just prefer to have this normal life back, but with some lifestyle changes. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. And a big, big thank you again. You work seven days and nights throughout the week and it's very late at night. Perhaps you're still available to listen to the other presentation. And maybe for this Q&A period, we have over 70 questions and all the questions are super interesting. And we just don't have time to do that now. We'll have to figure out how we could maybe get answers to all those questions. Let's think about it. Okay. So let's move to our second speaker. So, Dr. Jong, let us switch the presentation. So you will be sharing from your screen. Excellent. Great. And the floor is yours. Please go ahead, Dr. Jong. That's my screen. Then I'm going to share my screen. Okay. All right. Good. If you go to presentation mode. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me to this very important talk. Maybe now. Then I'm Tai Chung. I'm working as a professor teaching computer science at Sunggyongwan University. Then I'm going to introduce some cases of how we flatten the curve using ICT technologies in Korea. Then I ask your understanding that nobody knows what's going to be happening tomorrow. So I'm going to talk about the things and efforts that we did so far. Then let's briefly talk about the damage we got by the COVID-19 in Korea. Then so far, it's a little less than 10,000 patients we've got and 10 fatalities by the outbreak of COVID-19 in Korea. It's a huge number. Then we are suffering from the panic and fear from many people's deaths, about 100, then without being cared due to lack of medical services and facilities. But actually, let me say that this is not true. So far, we can manage it with many volunteers, medical volunteers, medical doctors and nurses and volunteers now. But honestly, we don't know about tomorrow and also the volunteers are kind of tired for a long month of long time work. And also we experience the economic crisis because of the separation of people, companies and even nations. Consequently, many factories, restaurants, stores, they all have shut down and our economy is falling down into the endless pit. This is quite a big problem at this point. But we try to overcome this kind of situation by applying the ICT technologies. Actually, as you heard from Dr. Lee, we're doing a lot of different efforts, but I'm going to focus on the ICT services today. And also, we have many different services and the solutions, but I'm going to introduce a few of them. And actually, we are starting to realize that the value of ICT services, how it's important to overcome this kind of disaster, then also we realize that the owner of collaborative services is very important. So let me talk about the few aspects of the different services and efforts. And first of all, we like to maintain this society with a minimal damage by applying the social distance campaign. And so our schools are supposed to open the semester at the beginning of March, but we couldn't open it. But since we don't know how long this kind of disaster goes on, so we open these schools, particularly universities with remote education. For example, my university has 4,300 different classes open for semesters. Then we have the remote lectures, online lectures in different styles, like giving the recorded lecture or giving the real-time online lecture. And sometimes they give the homework online and have some kind of projects done. But actually, the problem is that we didn't have enough infrastructure. So we construct the additional, we need to add on the communication infrastructure and also we didn't, many people didn't have experience teaching online. So we kind of educating those people too. But month, we have been doing this for month, then it's kind of okay. We found, find those few problems here and there, but we can manage. But still our high schools and junior high and primary schools are not opening yet. So the government is kind of for wondering how we can do this school business. And also we are applying the remote medical care because the hospital became one of the dangerous place. So we allow the chronic disease patients don't go to the hospitals just to get the prescription by phone and also remote work. Many companies and organizations participate in the remote work. But this is kind of innovative and new things. So we need to have, we need to make this remote work effective and efficient. But still, many companies don't know how to do the, how to do this remote work. So this kind of homework. And Korean government financially supports the deployment of solutions and the R&D project for remote services using virtual reality, augmented virtual reality, hologram, AI, big data, and any other IC technologies based on the 5G and IoT environment. Fortunately, we started to use deploy the 5G last week, last year. And we have a good infrastructure of IoT. But still, in order to use this for many people or older people, we still have a lack of the infrastructure. Then we like to maintain the society with the minimal damage in the beginning of coronavirus last month. Then a couple of the high school students developed to show the routes of a patient. That was kind of amazing. Right after the coronavirus exposed to the people, then they developed it and open to the public. While we are using this kind of application, we realize that then the individual's private information, the privacy could be exposed to the people. People can guess who he is. So we thought about the privacy issues. Even though we are facing the emergencies, we still need to keep the privacy information so that they don't suffer afterwards. So we change it to show the various places instead of showing the route of the individuals to protect the patient's privacy. In fact, Korea is one of the countries that follow the strict privacy policies. Maybe as strong as the GDPR, but because of this kind of emergency situation, we could lose those kinds of privacy information protection. So we are very cautious about it. And also, the government developed the self-diagonist application. Self monitoring doesn't mean that it's monitoring the body or health. It's just the individual check his condition or her condition and type in the data, particularly the traveling people coming into the career, supposed to use the self-diagonist app. And also, in Korea, we produce about 10 million masks a day. But the population is 50 million, so it's lack of masks. So we have some kind of rule that people can only buy two masks a week. But we could see a long line at the store to buy your masks because they don't know where to go. After a long time on the line, they found that there is no mask. It's kind of panic. So we developed the government and private sector together, developed some kind of app application to find out where to go to buy your masks. Then let me, this is quite important for us because we try to open the public data to the people, but it's quite slow. But at this event, we found the solution to do that. This is showing that how we develop these mask app services. Then mask sales and inventory data at the store are collected in higher, higher-rise health insurance review and assessment services. That's government subsidiary. So after they collect this data, that NIA, this National Information and Society Agency, they modify the data to make it complete, like putting the store name, address, amount in stock, then date, then make the data complete for the services, and ask Naval Kakaoka data, the private portal companies, ask them to make API for developed to access the data. So actually the data for privacies in the government sector, but the portals can make API to access the data. Then they provide this API and also they provide the cloud for development and operations because the developers need a huge resources. So in that case, in that many developers developed mask app services and publish it to the public. So amazingly, more than 30 apps were released within two weeks. So this is kind of a strategy to open the public data. We found that this kind of strategy to open the public data to the private sector and use it. And also we have some ICT solutions to provide the information of current status and ask people how to respond on it. Then Korea Spatial Information and Community This company developed a map service to show the current situation, route of the patients, and place for diagnosis, and place for attention based on GIS data. So this information widely provides lots of information to the people. Then another company was not developed a public chatting robot using AI techniques, the natural language processing technique to inform the way of preventing and correctly responding to coronaviruses. So it's open to the public. Also, one of the portal companies in Naver developed the AI based voice robot. That robot, AI robot automatically calls the people who need suspicious people and ask body health condition, then informs the public health center. As I said, the volunteers are limited. So if we ask volunteers to call every people in such time, then we could not manage it. But since they developed this kind of robot based on AI, they automatically call at a certain time and collect the information and put in the database for the public health center. And also the DABLE, that's the company that cross the data from the articles of 1800 media companies and analyze using AI, then provide the trend, corona trend to the public. So this is how we provide the information of current status and how to respond to this situation. And also we have some, we are having some ICT technologies used to speed up the kit development and examination processes. CJEN is one of the companies who developed the diagnosis kits. They're using AI techniques, then it only took two weeks to develop the diagnosis kits. Even though we prepare to develop some kind of kit for this kind of disease, then from December, then without this AI technologies, we couldn't develop the diagnosis kit in such a short time that the kit is certified by Korea and Europe in February. And BUNO is the AI-based digital therapeutics company. They classify intensive patients by examining X-ray image of lung within three seconds with AI techniques. They use the vision technology, then that's used in public health centers already. And JAK inspection, they examine the lung disease within seconds using AI techniques also. They, I'm not sure the details, but they probably looking at the image and find out the pneumonia or those kinds of symptoms from the lung. Then this is another thing very interesting. Daegu city was building the smart city. The smart city has data hop. Then we need to trace the the patient's routes. Then epidemiological investigation was needed. Then we use this data hop to find out the routes. Then since we were developing the smart city for a long time, we could utilize the power of the solutions on it. Then this is quite critical to develop the new medicine quickly, as quickly as possible. Because we don't know, we, since we don't see the coronavirus, then we don't know where it is and we don't know when it's ended. So we are anxiously waiting for the medicine and vaccines. Then the urgent, they use the AI deep learning algorithms to predict interaction of drug and protein. And they proposed the candidate to machine such as medicine for HTIV and coronaviruses. Then around here is another company is a platform development company. They developed a platform to find out candidate substances to treat coronavirus more efficiently. So one company is the developing, the finding out the medicine using the AI deep learning techniques. Another one is develop the platform to accommodate those solutions and find out the substances. So those kind of efforts are collectively working to fight against the coronaviruses and settle down the COVID-19. I believe that this is the part of the effort we are giving and these contributions from the ISD solutions is great so far we found out. Then this is my conclusion. I think we are paying a lot of tuition to learn from COVID-19, but we should together make a best effort to turn the crisis into opportunity. In Korea, the people say this is a crisis. If we overcome this crisis, we have lots of opportunity to be grown. And also, we believe that this strategy will be ended sooner or later, hopefully soon. And to rising up from the bottom, I propose to build a new society using the cutting at the ICT technologies. We experience that the ICT technologies can contribute in many ways to the society. We thought that it is true, but we didn't know. We are finding out ICT technologies, particularly AI techniques, are helping to develop the solutions and helping for the people to communicate. And also, we need to alleviate the relationship among people and society and nations. Before we having this social distance campaign, we didn't know that my neighbor and my friends are really important by finding out the importance of the people. So from the lesson, I think we need to elevate our relationship much better, particularly between the nations. Then this is my last word. We cannot escape from the past. We already experience, but can build a future by managing the present. Actually, in Korea, this is a small country, but we actually together to cope with this disaster. Thank you much. Thank you very much, Dr. Jang. That was excellent. Thank you. Thank you for that. We still have Dr. Lee also on the line. So Dr. Jang, the most often question asked, everyone wants to have these applications. Are they available as open source? Some are available on open source. Some are not. But I believe actually, we encourage people to open their sources to the public using any kind of, in any kind of environment. So I have to check, but I think many of them are in open source community. Okay. So if people wanted to find out, they could get in contact with maybe these companies and see whether that would be available. Let me say this. The Corona web and those kind of things might be in the open source, but I don't know about the company's applications. Okay. With respect to privacy, let's dig a little bit deeper into the topic of privacy. That's one of the big questions in today's society. In order to make a better prediction, AI needs good data, needs a lot of data. So data would have to come from the users. So there is this difficult trade-off. How much do you share the data? So can you give a bit of a few details? So from what I know in Korea, a lot of information, private information has been made available. Not the name of the person, but I think quite often you could figure out who the person was. If the person was infected and then there was also discussion within Korea that maybe you have been releasing a bit too much information. Can we go a little bit into detail on how these discussions are going in Korea? I have been a bureau member of OECD, the party of privacy and security, but I think that's not a correct understanding because we have applied very strong regulations and policies on privacy. But we had a lot of hacking incidents. They exposed some data, but we're not opening the personal data to everywhere. We have a very strict regulation and privacy regulations. So it might be, as I said, more stronger than the GDPR. We apply this privacy rule and regulation since 2002. And people complain that they cannot run the business because of the regulation. So we try to find out the balance between the use of data and keeping the personal information. So we just passed the privacy law last year. So we tried to classify the personal data and hidden data and not personal data. So we tried to use the data, but it's not true that we just release any data to the public. Okay. Dr Lee, you already talked about it a bit earlier. Is something you would like to add on this topic or have we covered that sufficiently? Yes, I agree with Professor Jong. We have a very strong privacy policy in Korea. Actually, we use this personal information only for protecting the public. It's only for the epidemic investigation. That's the main principle. And we are also having the also protection measures as well for these kinds of all these information. And about this viscous communication, we actually open the locations that come from the cases visited. But previously, actually, the local governments had much more information to disclose. But we have set some guidelines to follow all the other local governments as well as the KCDC. We only give some information of these locations that come from the cases visited, which might be helpful to others to prevent their exposure to this possibility of infection. So, we have certain rules and also protection measures for the privacy. That's the main principle of our measures. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Let me say the civilians. We are monitoring the government activities and government rules so that they don't make a mistake to expose the personal data to the public by mistake. So, we actually worried, too, because government may ignore it or not to pay much attention to the private data because it is an emergency. But even though we have an emergency, the society is going on. So, we should keep the minimum rule that the civilians are also monitoring that too. Okay. Good. Both sides are monitoring each other. Next question. Are you using AI technologies to predict the evolution of COVID-19? And are you then based on these models? Are you then making decisions on whether to increase testing, decrease testing, test other parts or change your policies? So, you're trying to predict or how are you trying to predict the evolution of COVID-19? That's to the Dr. Lee, right? Whoever can say something to that. Actually, my division is also in charge of this disease surveillance internationally. Before even the COVID-19 outbreak, we've always did the surveillance mostly about Ebola and or Morrison and all these kinds of very important diseases or some diseases that might be imported to Korea, which would make some kind of viscous to the population. That was our activities. Actually, we now are having the R&D projects in using this AI technology by machine learning for better event-based surveillance. We are currently doing that, but to do this and for the prediction, actually, the AI should learn more about the diseases and then about the characteristics of diseases and then it needs a lot of information. But this COVID-19, I think we are currently learning about these characteristics. So, I think for using this AI, I think we need to gather more information to make AI to learn about these diseases as well. So, we are thinking the middle-level process to see how we can use AI in the response to the COVID-19. Actually, not only Korea, but worldwide, the people are predicting so many things using AI, like when is it going to be ended, what kind of virus is going to be occurring and those kind of things. The thing is that people don't trust 100% on the predictions. They are only looking at the facts. So, even though the people make up some predictions from the previous event and their characteristics, still then we are not following the predictions yet. Then maybe afterward we were saying, oh, AI is good at this point, but still this academia, we are trying to figure out what's going to be happening, what to be prepared to using these predictions. And also, you said that we could test the normal people to see if they are infected by the coronaviruses, but you should understand that we don't have room to do that, room to satisfy the curiosity yet. We are all 100% focused on saving the people and get rid of these coronaviruses. Then later on, probably afterward, we could leave you all the predictions by AI and see how AI was good. One question is, how long did it take to put this ICT strategy into place? I think that has been a long ongoing process in Korea. It's like one of the top nations with respect to information and communication technologies. That's not something that you'll learn overnight or within a few months. I think that takes a long time. Could you comment on that? What advice could you give to countries? It depends. There are lots of different level of ICT technologies. Unfortunately, since 1998, we tried to build the high spin networks. Then also, we tried to educate the people to be good software engineers. At these days, if we say that we develop some kind of apps, it probably takes a couple of days, like the mask apps and the Corona app apps. That's quite simple. But for those solutions for examining the lung cancer and things, we're still working on two years and didn't find a good solution yet. Also, we need to resolve the regulation problems. We are not allowing the remote medical services yet. Two things. One is technology. I think we are up to developing any kind of things in such a short time for trivial ones. But we need to resolve the problems. We need to change the regulations and registrations at this point. If you say that how long it takes, it depends. But the complicated ones take years. But most simple applications could develop in a week. Okay. When you said last year, Korea started 5G. Different people have different opinions what 5G means. But aside from that, what you call 5G and what you launched last year, was that helpful in fighting COVID-19 in Korea? I believe so. Since we don't have many applications on 5G, but at least we deployed 5G and established 5G and deployed a lot of smartphones. As you know, 5G is like 20 times faster than LTE if we use 28 GHz. But actually, in Korea, we are using 3.5 GHz. Now it's not that fast. For example, let me say this. If we don't have fast networks, we cannot have the remote online education at all. But since in my school, we deployed 5G and used the solutions. So without big problems, we can have 20,000 people, more than 20,000 people take the online classes at the same time. So there are lots of applications we are developing. But so far, we found a few applications which were only working on 5G. Okay. Thanks a lot. Maybe last question, because it's 10.30 in Korea, 10.30 at night. What advice would you give to other countries? What would be your top advice, your number one advice to other countries? Learn from the experience. Then the good thing in Korea is that we had the confirmed cases earlier than other people, other than Chinese. So we have developed a lot of things. We have developed a lot of ISD solutions. So I hope that the other countries, like America and other countries, we are now following us better to learn from us. And I think in my government, we are willing to teach those kinds of experiences and share the know-how. And also, I think we need like collaborative work among the nations because we are traveling. So one of our ideas is that issue the certificate of vaccinated people or issue to guarantee the health. Then no matter what kind of the method we take, we should cooperate and we should communicate. Otherwise, the economy will be falling down so quickly. Dr. Lee, your closing words. What's your top advice to other countries? Actually, as Dr. Jung mentioned, I really agree with about the preparedness. Actually, in the publicist field, we always emphasized on the publicist emergency preparedness and response. As I mentioned before, when you are in the middle of this kind of outbreak, you should think of consider all kinds of the scenarios. And then you have to actually have some plans for those scenarios to be prepared. Our government has actually followed those steps. And then I'm sure that other countries are not that late to follow these kinds of steps as well. We always assess the risks, current risks. And then we actually consider how we can do in the limited resources and also limited capacity. And then also, we had a very active information sharing with other countries. We will do that. We will continue to do that with other countries. And then I hope we can all together, can just overcome all these risks in the future. Thank you. Okay. Thanks a lot, both of you. That was great. Very much appreciate it. And I guess your advice is countries somehow have to try to survive the current COVID-19 crisis and then get ready to battle the COVID-20 crisis. We'll be better prepared for that one. Okay, so thanks a lot. You're working seven days a week and seven days doesn't mean just days. It also means nights. So a huge thank you to both of you for having made yourself available. We will make the presentations available, the PowerPoint presentations when we also present, we'll make the video available so people can listen to that. And just for the colleagues still online, we do a just a poll now to see whether you liked it or whether you didn't like it. I'm not sure whether we have that ready. If you could launch the poll to see whether you were happy with the webinar or not. Then let me also mention two items that might be of interest to you. One is we have a technical working group that's done in collaboration with ITU and the World Health Organization, WHO. It's called the AI for Health and the idea is to come up with a benchmarking framework to check the quality of AI models. The group is open to anyone. So you're happy to participate if you're interested. And then we would also like to point out our AI for Good Global Summit, which will take place 21 to 25 September. If COVID-19 allows, it will be physically in Geneva. If not, it will be an online event. So thanks a lot again for our speakers in Korea and also for you to have participated to the attendees of this webinar. Thank you very much and we're going to end the meeting. Thank you.