 Welcome ladies and gentlemen and welcome to today's online seminar Taiwan, the ideal hub for German startups in blockchain and AI technologies. This project was founded by the foreign market and the program called Small and Medium Enterprises by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. Before we start with a few things, a few notices. Please note that as regular attendees, your microphones and cameras are further up. If you have any questions, you can post them via chat function in the photo webinar user interface and we'll get to them at the end of the seminar in a Q&A session. But you can download today's webinar agenda in the same user interface and you can look at it anytime you need it. Make sure that for a stable connection you have all background applications turned on. You will be able to find all presentations from today as well as a recording on our website to the webinar on taiwan.hk.de. So without further ado, it's my great pleasure to welcome our first opening remarks speaker. Please welcome the chief representative and executive director of the German trade office Taipei, Mr. Axel Limburg. Welcome. Here Mrs. Nieland, here Minister Tanu, here Professor Tai, here Mr. Weigatz, here speakers, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure for me to welcome you to today's online seminar here at our German trade office Taipei. Technological change is what has pushed mankind forward within the last 200 years. One of the first major milestones was the introduction of the railway, the telegraph network, the automobile, connecting people like never seen before. At the end of last century, we experienced a digital revolution which not only revolutionized the transfer of data but also drastically changed our work practice. When thinking about which technologies will fundamentally change our industries now, we immediately think of automation, artificial intelligence or blockchain technologies. And actually, we already see an increasing influence of these technologies on our societies and our daily lives. Autonomous driving as well as cryptocurrency currencies are only two of the more prominent examples. Technologies that are pursued by the mixed industrial players but also by startups. Just yesterday, a renowned German business newspaper published an article about German AI startups. According to the latest statistics of the German EDMA of the 825 AI startups in the machinery engineering sector worldwide, 42% of these companies are located in Europe. Among them, Germany plays a leading role. Many of them are technology leaders. They are seeking to expand their businesses. And Taiwan is just the ideal place for those companies that are interested in taking their first steps into Asia. The recent past has shown that Germany and Taiwan have already started to develop joint research collaboration in various fields of technologies and activities such as mobility and battery technology. The joint development of artificial intelligence as well as joint projects related to AI or blockchain technologies are other fields that provide numerous collaboration opportunities for all involved companies and stakeholders. Furthermore, the Taiwanese government has initiated several policies to implement AI technology within the industry of the past three years. Among them are Digital Nation and Innovative Economic Development Program, BG Plus, as well as the AI Action Plan. But aside from these government initiatives, Taiwan has also a very foreign-friendly administration and authorities and offers to prospect for long-term partnerships. Together with well-educated and trained specialists, legal certainty to protection of intellectual property and the market that is not as aggressively competitive as the counterparts in other parts of the world, Taiwan offers excellent conditions for German startups. We, the German trade office Taipei, are delighted to contribute to building up such partnerships with today's terminal. Furthermore, supporting companies with their efforts to find suitable business partners has been one of our core activities for the last 40 years here in Taipei and Taiwan. Therefore, we will be more than happy to support and assist any German startups and we are looking forward to welcoming you all of you here in Taiwan. Now, I wish all of us a very informative and fruitful seminar. Many thanks for your attention. Thank you very much, Mr. Limbebe. Next up, it's my great pleasure to welcome our next opening remarks. Speaker from Germany, please welcome the Deputy Head of the Division for Artificial Intelligence at the Federal Ministry of Technology. Please welcome Mr. Dürte Nieland. Thank you. Can you hear me well? Thank you. Good morning from Berlin and good afternoon in Taiwan. Dear Mr. Tang, Mr. Limbeck, Mr. Weigert, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for being here today. On behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, it is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to this webinar. My name is Dürte Nieland and I am the Deputy Head of Division for Artificial Intelligence. And this division is also responsible for the topics data economy and blockchain. In Germany, digitization is a process of very high importance for the government. If we want to successfully cope with crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to ensure and strengthen the innovative potential to lay the foundations for our competitiveness during and after the pandemic. Key initiatives of artificial intelligence and also blockchain play an important role in this. AI is a key technology for the entire economy. So the German government released its national AI strategy in November 2018 and updated just recently in December 2020. In total, the German government plans to invest up to 5 billion Euro until 2025 on AI and seeks to leverage these investments by corresponding investments of the lender and the private sector. It is designed as a horizontal strategy with a total of 12 fields of action starting from posturing research and development to support SMEs, better conditions for startups, managing structural changes in the labor market and deeper international cooperation. As part of our AI strategy, we want to expand international cooperation on AI and improve the visibility of German providers of AI solutions. We also want to make foreign companies aware of the opportunities for investment and cooperation that exist in Germany. So the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs designed a number of support programs for startups and SMEs in order to remove obstacles to the transfer and use of AI and companies and to support international cooperation. The International Startup Funding Program, German Accelerator, for example, serves to increase the share of AI-related high-tech startups and support AI-based business models and growing faster internationally. It will also make a significant contribution to competitiveness in the startup sector, thanks to its existing networks that it has in Germany and its present at important AI hubs worldwide. When it comes to blockchain, we believe that its success on the market will depend on whether blockchain technology will be accepted as a substitute for existing databases, offering efficiency and productivity advantages while providing more security and trust. Globally, there is a relatively small but incredibly fast-growing market for blockchain applications since the patterns and venture capital investments have increased tremendously. Germany has a strong developer community in the field of blockchain technology. And in September 2019, the German government adopted a blockchain strategy with a number of measures to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the technology. Also, our blockchain strategy supports international cooperation. So I'm looking forward to hearing more about the opportunities that Taiwan is offering for startups and I'm wishing you all an interesting and successful webinar today. Thank you very much. And thank you very much. Next, it is my great pleasure to welcome Mr. Christian Weigert, manager of the foreign market entry program at Germany Trade and Investment Fund. And he's going to share with us some details on the foreign market entry program that made today's event possible. Welcome, Mr. Weigert. Thank you, Mr. Goller. I'm just going to share my screen. Let me know if you can see the presentation fine. Yeah, we see it. Perfect. Yes. Okay. So warm welcome from my side to Germany and to Taiwan. My name is Christian Weigert. I work as manager in the foreign market entry program office here in Bonn at Germany Trade and Investment. And I just want to give you a brief overview on the foreign market entry program and what we do and what might be possible opportunities for you also to join projects of the program in the future. So here you see some impressions of your physical travels from foreign market entry programs which were possible before the pandemic right now everything is basically everything is happening in a digital way as today as a webinar on the on the start up sector in Taiwan. But there you see we hope that of course physical travels will come back as soon as pandemic is under control and that we can have also regular business trips again to foreign countries. The market entry program in brief you see the world map there that were activities first marked in the blue where foreign market entry projects were done by the market entry program in 2020. So if you have a look at Asia you can see that a lot of countries were covered in Asia as well. And we have a focus of the SME related issues and there's a high quality and sustainability in the program. And that is achieved that every year new projects are brought by the economy by the by the chambers of commerce for example, and by other leading organization into the program to mirror the interest of the SMEs. And also we work together with experienced organizers as the HK in Taiwan which have done many projects for the foreign market entry program, and we hope will continue to do so as well in the future. Let me give you a brief overview on the foreign trade and investment promotion, you have the like the roof, you have certain export initiatives which run separately or in the market entry program and you have like a whole variety of different sectors. So first, this webinar focusing on startups in their artificial artificial intelligence and blockchain but also a whole lot of different other sectors, which might be interesting for you. We have five standard standardized modules. Yeah, this if you have a look at the bottom of the slide would be an information event which is done now in the form of a webinar. So here is for you to gain first insights first information on the foreign market, then we have fact finding missions where you go as a business delegation to the foreign markets and have this hands on exploration on the ground. And then finding visits where foreign companies for multi players and foreign purchases come to Germany, often connected with the leading trade fairs, and find and get to know the German technology in Germany. We have trips where the focus is really on B2B meetings and that the German companies can present themselves to a foreign audience, which is done in this initiatives business opportunities trips and showcase events. If you want to have more information on the project on the program, what is going on in 2021. I would like you to go to xbox it's the center portal for the foreign market entry program, and also other information on the investment pro promotion. There will be a business trip for startups, a digital business trip for startups coming up to India, which will happen in the second half of 2021. If you want to have more information on that, please go to the xbox portal. There you have it in the internet. Again, xbox.tee slash Marcus Schlesung. And with that, I would like to give back the word to you, Mr Gola and I'm very happy and looking forward to the webinar. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr Bayer. Now, next up, it's my pleasure to welcome our keynote speaker today. Please welcome Mr Alisson, virtually he's the director at Germany Trade and Invest in Taiwan. And he will share with you some current economic status of Taiwan business outlooks as well as opportunities for German startups here. So welcome, Mr Wiesbel. I have to share my screen. Oh, please let me know if you can see the screen. Everything all right? Yeah, we see it. Wonderful. So good morning, ladies and gentlemen, especially in Germany. A very warm welcome from Taipei also from my side. My name is Alexander Herschler. I'm working here as market analyst for Germany Trade and Invest in Taiwan. I'm now working here since two years in Taipei before I've been working the same function many other countries worldwide the last 12 years in Asia, for example, in Southeast Asia, Thailand and also in South Korea. But the purpose of this briefing today is to give you some background information about the Taiwanese economy. So to set the frame for the sector analysis to come so that you can get a feeling for the current situation here, the economic situation. And this situation is especially now very interesting because Taiwan has shown one of the most successful economic development during the corona crisis worldwide. One remark in advance presentation is around 40 slides. Don't worry, I will rush through, skip some slides, but it's important for me that you have all the important numbers and facts that can be downloaded afterwards. As I'm not sure how many of you already have been in contact with Taiwan with this market. I just want to share some basic facts at the beginning about this country. It's a relatively small market with nearly 24 million inhabitants. And it's a small market by size. It's more or less the size of Bahn-Württemberg with a high population density, because just one third of the country is habitable. Two thirds are full of mountains. We have 300 mountains higher than 3,000 meters. So it's the Swiss of Asia. There's a good democracy here and a special political situation. You might be aware of that. I don't want to go too deep into this, but the consequences that we have limited diplomatic relations here, just with 15 countries worldwide. And therefore, economic bias also a lack of free trade agreements. That's an advantage of the market, a disadvantage. The GDP per capita is 28th worldwide and the 13th worldwide by power purchasing parities, high in Germany. It's a wealthy country. It has assets per capita. It's the second highest in Asia, after Singapore and the first highest worldwide. So it's a rich market that's important to know. It's the 21st biggest economy in the world. Just to set this into a dimension, it is more or less between Turkey and Poland from the GDP size. And a very important fact, I jump back, is it's a very export-orientated economy. Like Germany, more than 50% of the GDP are determined by exports. And for the presentation, this is very important to know. If we look here at the right side of the cake, you can see that more than 50% of the time is exports consist of majorly two product groups. That's electronic components as well as ICT and communication products. That's, as I mentioned, very important to know. Let's come to the current situation. And to explain it, I always use a past-present-future approach. Because looking back, sometimes it's important to understand the current situation and to maybe be able to predict even the future. And so the first slide I will show is the GDP growth until 2020. And what you can see here is nothing. There is no crisis in the last years. We had 2019 here. The trade conflict was a major topic. Because there was the fear that Taiwan could be sandwiched between the two superpowers, China and the US. And this had no effect. And also the corona crisis that struck the world last year had no effect. We saw GDP-wise an even slightly accelerating growth. This is an absolute incredible success. Especially if you compare it to the situation worldwide. These are the GDP growth rates in 2020. And you can see, well, from these selected countries, Taiwan has shown the highest growth of GDP of 3.1%. But why, the reasons behind that, excuse me, why had been Taiwan so successfully sailing through this crisis? 2019, these are the determinants of growth. The most important factors, investment, private consumption and exports. And you can see here in 2019, we had a huge investment boom of 10% growth. And this happened because Taiwan, the government here, has a reaction to the trade conflict set up a program for Taiwanese companies based in China to come back here to the island to invest here to relocate their supply chains. And this was a huge success. More than 24 billion US dollar investments could be attracted in 2019. And this lifted the investment to 10% and also lifted the GDP growth. So this was the major reason the investment side, this investment boom in 2019 of local companies coming back from China to, well, to resist the crisis. When you come back to the explanation, why did Taiwan survive the reason corona crisis until now? So, well, we can see again here, we have the determinants of growth 2019 and 2020. 2020 is the blue columns. And we can see here the investment side lost a little bit dynamic 5%. And that's still okay in the midst of this pandemic crisis. The private consumption went a little bit down 2.4%, but that's still acceptable if you compare it with other consumption losses worldwide. And you might have read about Taiwan here in the market, the medical handling of the COVID crisis was exceptional. We had here in total just 1,000 cases, most of them important. So that means we had a slight dip last in the second quarter of 2020, where people were very cautious, but we never had a lockdown or anything here. And since the second half of 2020, all the restaurants, bars, the shops is open, the expositions are going, the conferences, everything is like normally. Actually, you're not feeling here the COVID crisis inside the country, but the country closed itself down. So it's very difficult to come inside. But this was the reason basically that the private consumption, the fear of the people going out that the private consumption lost last year. But the reason why Taiwan succeeded in 2020 was the export side. The exports have been growing last year 5%. And also here, comparison with the export development of other countries, all the major industrial countries you might know have been suffering double-digit implosions of their exports. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, we saw this growth. And why did this happen? And this is still explained by, well, you can see it by this chart. The point is that during the Corona crisis, we see now in this very number, there was a huge trend worldwide towards digitalization and a worldwide massively increasing demand for cameras, laptops, thermometers, etc. And this led to a strong double-digit increase in these components, like in electronic components and ICT products. And these are majorly the products that Taiwan basically has in its product portfolio. At the time, it had a little bit of a fortune of the brave. That's because they produce exactly these things that are now needed in this crisis worldwide. We also see that we have kind of a case-shaped recovery because there are other sectors that really suffered. The traditional sectors like food, beverages, machinery, chemicals, etc. They, for sure, they suffered with a losing demand, with a declining demand worldwide. So what will bring the near future for the Taiwanese economy? The forecasts for this year are even more optimistic where the forecasts are around 5% GDP growth for 2021. And why is this? It will basically be determined because you can see again the determinants of growth. The private consumption will celebrate a comeback this year because, as mentioned, here's everything quite normal and the people are consuming like normally or even they consume more. And the exports will grow further because of the comeback of the traditional sectors like steel, machinery, etc. and an ongoing trend towards digitalization that will lift further the demand for electronics and ICT products. So the short-term perspectives for the Taiwanese economies are quite bright. Let's look, what can you expect from Taiwan in the next years? And this is, for me, one of the most important charts is the so-called potential growth of the Taiwanese economy. The growth since 1990, and you can see a clear downward trend. And normally the potential growth without these special boom effects like we have now during the corona crisis tends to go down in Taiwan until 1.5 around until 2030. That's a catastrophe that's absolutely normal for a major economy with a demographic situation like Taiwan. Taiwan has a second lowest fertility rate worldwide after Korea. We will still see high growth rates in some sectors and niches but it will be even more important in the future to analyze and identify them properly. And this is what we do, Germany trade and invest together with the colleagues of our cast, the GTO, to help you to detect these growth niches. So what are the major two trends in the next year to come? As I mentioned, we had this investment boom of Taiwanese companies in 2019. And what is now the goal of the Taiwanese government for the next years is to attract more international companies that now diversify their supply chains after the corona crisis and to make them more stable. And Taiwan tries and hopes to position itself as a safe haven for these kinds of investments, for this restructuring of supply chains. And there's a kind of good opportunity that this will happen because also Taiwan is offering a very good package, investment package, business package for foreign companies. Axel Limberg mentioned it already. We have quite moderate salaries if you compare it, for example, with Japan or Korea. We have very well-trained employees with a high level of know-how. We have generally low costs, office rent, electricity, etc. compared to Shanghai. But a very modern and efficient infrastructure you will find in Taiwan, all the trends are on time. It's really fantastic to live here. You have a broad industry base in many sectors, highly uncertainty in comparison to other countries and a high quality of life and high level of security. That's one trend what we will probably see in the next year, rising foreign dive investment and the positioning of Taiwan as a digital hub for the rest of the world. That's the goal of the government. The second thing, the second big trend what we will see in Taiwan is, as I mentioned already, we have here some society trends. This is like the decline in birth rates. You see a clear downward trend. You also see a growing rate of single households. For example, these are the major trends. And this will lead on the midterm. I call it also always the so-called OHA effect. The OHA effect means old, home and alone. Everything what has to do with these three attributes has potentially high growth potential. Old is clear, it's a silver market. An aging population leads to high demand for medical products, building furniture for elderly people's services, tourism for elderly people, et cetera. Home means more single households lead to smaller living spaces and that pushes the demand for compact and multifunctional products for food delivery services for pets. Pets is growing market or service around the house. And the low means, a growing individualism leads to a high demand for high quality luxury products. Last but not least, I want to show the reason trend with the trade with Germany. And there are no surprises what Taiwan buys basically from Germany. This is machinery, that's the right cake, chemicals, cars and electronic components. But what we have seen last year, it was fascinating that the German imports from Germany, from Taiwan they grew 8% in the myth of the crisis and some sectors like medical devices like cars, machinery they had double digit growth. So Taiwan was last year for Germany a very attractive market and also a little bit like it was benefiting from corona because here we had the phenomenon that in Taiwan because we had so harsh travel restrictions that people could not travel outside anymore, could not go to shopping trips in Hong Kong or go to the US. So there was a lot of money to spend inside the market and this money was spent in expensive cars or in modernizing furniture, the house, electronic households etc. And these are all sectors for German companies could do good business here. And the bottom line that led to the fact that after years of decline, Germany last year has been winning market share in the Taiwanese import market first time in years. The very last slide I want to show is the German exports to Asia in 2020. You can see a brutal dominance of China. This is the top 10 and you can see Taiwan is the fifth most important market for German exporters. But it's a little bit unfair to compare Taiwan with 23 million inhabitants, for example in India with 1.3 billion. So I calculated how many exports go to these countries per capita. So that means how many German goods buys one Taiwanese in comparison to one South Korean. And then you see this chart. So per person, Taiwan buys most of the products from Germany in comparison to other countries in Asia. And this shows the attractiveness in the market made in Germany as a very high market value here. And the Taiwanese people, as mentioned, have a high purchasing power. And so this shows the attractiveness of this market for you. And with this, I want to conclude. I wish you lots of success. I'm open for any kind of questions later in the session or if you want to buy email or telephone or other means. Thanks a lot for your attention and lots of success. Bye. Thank you very much, Alex. Our next keynote speech will be delivered by Professor Dr. Ian Tai. He is the director of the Science Division and the entirely representative office in Federal Republic of Germany. And Professor Dr. Tai will share with us some cooperation potential, especially in terms of research between Taiwanese and German stars. Welcome, Professor Dr. Tai. Mr. Tai, we cannot hear you yet. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, I need to share my screen. Could you see the PowerPoint now? Yeah, we see it. Okay. Thank you. So good morning to Germany and good afternoon to Taiwan. My name is Ian Tai and I'm the representative of the Ministry of Science and Technology in Germany and also I'm the science and technology division director of the entirely representative office in Germany. So today I would like to give a brief introduction of the scientific collaboration between Taiwan and Germany. So for the past 20, more than 20 years since this office built in Taiwan, actually, Taiwan and Germany has vigorous scientific activities. Up to now, we already have a full program for students, for researchers and also for distinguished professors. For example, for students, we have the exchange program for summer internship for research training group. For the researchers, we have the Bilateral Research Project, Mobility Project, Bilateral Workshop and also we offer this so-called Young Researcher Scholarship. And for the distinguished scientists, we have a Tongming Du Award, which is a reciprocal award to the Homebook Research Award. And these are the partner organizations in Germany which we have the MOU or collaborate with with the most, the Ministry of Science and Technology. These are BNBF Federal Ministry of Education Research, DFK German Research Foundation, Apo Ha Alexander von Homebook Foundation and the DRD German Academic Exchange Service. So with BNBF, we have this Bilateral Research Project, which DFK will also have Bilateral Research Program. And there we have the project-based Personnel Exchange Program and also we have some other mobility projects. I will just give a very brief introduction. The first one is we have, probably this is the biggest research cooperation in terms of academic research cooperation between Taiwan and Germany. This is the project, collaboration project on advanced lithium battery research. The goal of this cooperation was to develop the high-performance lithium battery for energy storage and, of course, electrical vehicles by improving the performance and the safety of the battery. So this project started at 2018 and each phase are three years. So we just passed the first phase, the first phase ended last November and now we already start the second phases. You could see that there are more than 10 research institutes over 50 members, I mean, 50 PIs joined this project. From Taiwan side, we have the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, National Taiwan University, National Tsinghua University, Jiao Tong University, Chenggong University, Tainan University, Fengjia University and the Song Soul Force. From German side, we have the University of Minster, we have from Hofer IPT, we have a Tewu Bronze Vite, we have a Tewu Mansion and the Fosheng Tiantoum Yulish and the Song Soul Force. So you could see this is a quite large cooperation. And for the first phase, the first three years, each year, both sides, the BMBF and the most individually invest around 1.5 million Euro per year. And for the first phase, we focus on the application-oriented fundamental research. And because it was quite successful that staff from the second phase would think about to introduce the industry in because eventually for the battery research, this has to move to the practical application, not only the fundamental research. Therefore, staff from last year at the kickoff meeting for the second phase, we built up a so-called advisory board. In this advisory board, we invite the industry from both, there are around 10 companies total from both sides join this research. And we hope with the advice and the support of the industry, we could really make this research into the practical application. And you could see there are a few pictures here. For example, in the middle, it was taken in 2019 and it was in Brunsweig in their city hall. And the reason we were there is because this joint project was so successful that the mayor of the Brunsweig city actually invites the whole team to the town hall to have a banquet. Second is that we have the joint research program with DFG. This started 2017, so it's quite new. And we call for proposal annually. This is a button-up project. So it's eligible for all the researchers from all the fields from both sides. And as you can see, a staff from 2017 to last year, 2020, we totally granted 21 projects. And about this 21, there are eight projects are related to nature science and seven projects related to engineering and four related to biology, medicine, and two related to social science and the immunity science. And third one is that staff from 1998, we have this PPP project-based personnel exchange program, they are there. And every year we grant around eight to 10 projects. That means the PI is the principal investigator and also the young scientists such as post-doctor or PhD students could visit with each other. And for the past more than 20 years we founded more than 200 projects. That means there are more than 400 personnel has visited either to Taiwan or to Germany. And finally, we have this mobility project with BMBF. This is a unique research project. This project started in 2009 and it was a three years project. However, due to the COVID situation, so we extended this project to 2022. And the goal of this project is to be a say initiative to identify the mutual research interest for both Taiwan and the German scientists for the further cooperation. So these are the thematic projects including six fields. First is the material science. Second is smart machinery and the related technology. Third one is smart city. The fourth one is biomedical technology. Fifth one is renewable energy. And the last one is the circular economy. So as you can see, these are more focused to the so-called traditional science because these are both the strong suit of Germany and Taiwan. For example, the material science and the smart machinery and so on and so forth. So here I will give a short remark. Taiwan and Germany has vigorous bilateral activities including the thematic and non-thematic research cooperation and the researchers, young scientists and the students exchange. And then we also award for the excellent researchers and we offer the scholarships for German young scientists to come to Taiwan. And every year we also have the bilateral symposium and the workshops. And the research collaborations cover all fields including natural science, engineering, biology, medical science and social and community science. And currently most funds more than 60 different collaboration projects every year around 60. So since this, the topic of this symposium is about the AI and the blockchain. So I would also like to give a short introduction of the AI and the blockchain strategy of the Ministry of Science and Technology. So the first one is about the AI policy of Taiwan. Our executive Yuan, Xingzheng Yuan grasped the opportunities and initiated AI implementation in industry. So we launched so-called digital class. This is the digital nation and innovative economic development program in 2017. And also initiated the AI action plan in 2018. And we aim to prosper the AI development and to build solid digital infrastructure. To follow this policy our Ministry of Science and Technology also start to transform our AI program to five pillars. First one is the core technology about fundamental AI research. And the purpose is to strengthen the basic research and to cultivate the key talent. And the second part is the International AI Center. We set up four International AI Center to be an AI global connection hub with impacts on specific areas. And third part is the domain application area research. We're providing the cross-domain AI solution to industry. And the fourth one is the platform infrastructure to promoting the AI data and the model sharing. And the last one is the community and the legal infrastructure to develop AI social cognition and the ethic conscientious. And all this details could be found in our Ministry's website. So I will not go through details. And the most important thing is that we set up four AI centers to foster the development and the research of Taiwan's AI research. Well, this four AI research center including 364 experts, 28 international cooperation and the 269 industry university cooperation. However, most of these industrial university cooperation are domestic industry. So last year we started to think about the international cooperation. So we set to collaborate with Germany's AI competent centers. We chose this four ML2R in TU Dottemann and this TU TU EAI is in Tübingen University and MCML in TU Mention and also Berlin Big Data Center in TU Berlin. The reasons are because these four AI centers are also set up in the university. So we think it's a good combination of our four AI center also set up in universities. And the possible collaboration topics including design and fabrication of AI chips autonomous vehicles related AI and also explainable AI. And these are the ongoing discussion and we hope that we could start this collaboration as soon as possible. As for the blockchain research which funded by the most. Actually these are included in our FinTech research strategy. So the research fields including the blockchain and security, blockchain and the consensus algorithms, clear technology and also to improve the transaction efficiency by blockchain. So currently in the Ministry of Science and Technology we have two big research projects including flagship projects and also the academic industry alliance for blockchain technology service project. And again all these projects information could be found on our website. And finally I would like to give a suggestion of the bilateral cooperation especially for the industry. Usually in Ministry of Science and Technology there is a button-up cooperation between the researchers. Then we try to make a collective thematic research cooperation through the public fund. That means we try to collect the researchers who are interested in the same project or same fields from both Taiwan and Germany and with the public fund we try to build a bigger research project. And after that we try to build a research network involving the academia industry as well as government. The reason to do this is to try to build up the relationship and the trust between the industry of both countries. And finally when the time is right then we start to set up the business cooperation. And this is what we are doing for the battery research. And I think this model could be successfully implement also to blockchain or to AI research. And finally I would like to tell everyone that our Ministry of Science and Technology is ready for this kind of industry as well as academic cooperation. And with this I would like to finish my talk and thank you for your attention. Thank you very much Professor Dr. Tai for this contribution. Next up it's my pleasure to welcome one of our most trusted legal experts here in Taiwan. We'll share with us the legal framework that German startups of blockchain and AI have to pay attention to when coming to the Taiwan market. Please welcome Pascal Tenakun, managing partner in Takasusies Eco-based Taiwan. Thank you Andreas for sharing a few things with you today. We have to make it very short because we don't have too much time. The purpose of the presentation today would be just to give you a snapshot of the main issues that AI and startup blockchain technology companies should be facing. So let's go quickly on that. But before we start on the legal framework this is our firm. We are a German firm born in 1909 in Germany and we have a lot of offices in Germany today working with Taiwan so a lot of things. I want to just go on that point. This is very important for us to point out. Over the last few years we have seen, I'm not Taiwanese I'm from Europe, we have seen a lot of initiative from the government in Taiwan to welcome new talents new know-how a lot of welcome initiatives from the Taiwanese government and we have never seen so many good initiatives to bring talents to Taiwan. So this is something we need to point out so we have seen over the last few years the explosion of projects incubators, accelerators Taiwan also is very attractive because the operation costs are very reasonable it's not very expensive to be in the business in Taiwan there's a very important point between Taiwan and Germany the legal environment is very predictable because we are in a civil law system and the civil law system behind Taiwan is coming from Germany. It's coming from the Begebe in Germany so if you see the regulations over the last few years you see that we have seen a lot of new programs for immigration so entrepreneur visas where young entrepreneurs could come to Taiwan and get easy residence permits in Taiwan and work permits which is very new today we have a lot of programs that are very successful like the gold cards we give you 3 years of residence in Taiwan and also some tax incentives and some other programs like the special foreign professionals that give you a permanent residence here for 5 years which is very impressive because in the past we never had such programs so this is something that we have to point out the only thing the other thing we need to point out also is Taiwan may not be the main or the first player to move when something is new but we have observed from our foreigners' eyes that when Taiwan moves they move faster they move much faster than other countries so if you compare with Japan, Korea Singapore, whatever Taiwan has a very strong positioning when we need to move and develop so this is something I wanted to point out so very quickly we had heard Professor Yantai from the most earlier and we don't go into the details but the rezoning on AI is quite new we have some programs started in 2017 the only thing we may have to point out today at this stage is that we only have in Taiwan a draft of basic artificial intelligence as you can see here on the slide and this has not been approved yet so it's an initiative proposed by some legislators in Taiwan just to clarify what AI is about to put some guidelines in on future regulations and also how to organize the competent authorities, data information privacy, everything so this is still very new it's very general and so far this draft has not been approved yet so we are really at the beginning of legal developments for AI so we are waiting for sure to see what will happen next so we need also as lawyers to just point out the main issues that AI players should be aware of and what you can see on the slide is very straightforward it's all about liability who is liable when we are talking about AI intellectual property who owns the intellectual property who owns the data data protection and privacy who is liable and also of course in some cases criminal liability so I would just go quickly just to give you some snapshots of what we have in Taiwan today noted that this may change in the future because we trust the Taiwanese government will elaborate more and more in terms of legal environment for AI and also for blockchain so let me just go through everything that you will see later on the handouts that the German General Office will publish you can see the details on that but there are some issues to solve and today we have to go back to the basics of the law so in Taiwan we have a civil code as you can see here I don't go into details but imagine you have a computer or a robot creating something and that causes a damage to other people so we have to go back to the civil code of Taiwan today you can see the details on the screen we don't have time to go into that but basically we have to make a distinction between the manufacturer the importer the driver if there's a driver any vehicle with AI and the operator if we talk about the manufacturer the question is is the manufacturer liable for creating any damage with a product that has caused damage because of the I would say the AI has been running we have clear provisions in the law according to concepts the manufacturer of course is liable if the manufacturer has made something which is deficient and has caused damages we don't go into details but we can of course liable it later the driver the driver is something very interesting if you take a self autonomous vehicle coming already in Taiwan today and more in the future we may also have some self driving self flying planes we have some clear provisions in the law to govern liability so I will go quickly we don't have too much time there's something which we're not so clear yet it's about the intellectual property intellectual property is about copyright trademark or patent basically and we have no clear legal framework about intellectual property in Taiwan but the Taiwan intellectual property office has already decided in some cases that as you can see that a patent cannot be filed once the creation has been made from AI and you can see on the screen why this is really because the Taiwan intellectual property office has decided that the inventor has no nationality so basically the AI cannot be attributed to Taiwan or Germany from the Taiwanese legal point of view so whatever has been created through AI cannot give you the right to file a patent and the courts have also decided so I go quickly to the next topics copyrights again same question can you own the copyright when something has been done by artificial intelligence today based on Taiwanese legal environment you cannot own the copyright so we have to be very careful about this whatever has been newly created with the AI processes and systems does not give you the right to own it so this is very important for us and this is a source of issues we need to work in the future we have some issues data protection you have to know as a general rule that Taiwan data protection is very strong here we cannot use the data of individual private information and you have to make sure in your contracts in your terms and conditions that people give their consent to let AI use their personal data this is something very important otherwise there may be a breach of regulations in Taiwan criminal law another thing this is very important let's say some very smart people create some AI technology to create some crimes can they be liable or not this is important again who is the operator who is the driver if you have a car self autonomous car in Taiwan and it kills somebody on the road who is liable these are the questions we need to go through and so we have some rules but I think in the future the government will publish better more clear rules so where are we today about AI we are already at the beginning of legal framework in Taiwan this is really new but the good point is in the EU as you can see we are not better the EU has not published any regulations yet we expect this first quarter or second quarter in the EU to publish some regulations in the EU so as you can see Taiwan is not behind Taiwan is not ahead we are probably at the same level of legal development the good point is in Taiwan the courts have already managed about issues in AI but of course there are gaps we need to fill in very quickly on blockchain because time runs same thing we have no specific regulation on blockchain we will go through quickly but I need to point out something very quickly blockchain is about also cryptocurrencies bitcoins everything and the authorities have already taken some clear positions on this you will see in a few minutes and then that will be done as you can see on the screen some courts in Taiwan have already addressed the issues of liability on blockchain so one of the major issues for lawyers is there is a kind of fraud for blockchain can we sue in Taiwan or we cannot sue in Taiwan because blockchain by definition is not in Taiwan it's on computers everywhere in the world but the courts have already said yes we can sue in Taiwan very quickly, civility something we go through quickly we have the same problem for intellectual property if you put data in the blockchain the data is been improved through computerized systems abroad or even in Taiwan do you own the intellectual property rights on the data and the answer is probably no because we don't have a legal framework to say yes so again you don't own the data this is very important there is something that has been set up by the Taiwanese authorities called the museum project this is an answer to the issue of intellectual property I invite you to see later the link that we have put below on the slide the Taiwanese authorities are starting to think about it, about intellectual property data protection we have also the same issue, we have no regulation to clarify about protection of privacy data protection the last point, very important the central financial regulations have been more advanced than others and you know Bitcoin for instance the issue is whether Bitcoin is a currency or is a product in some countries Bitcoin has been classified as a currency and so it is under the jurisdiction of the financial institutions in Taiwan for now this has been classified as a product so the financial authorities don't have the competence or jurisdiction to govern the use of Bitcoins but we have some issues in detail here also regarding some money laundering so this will change in the future for sure we expect the financial regulations to be more developed banks will be involved more and more a lot of things are coming up so we are very happy to wait for the new regulations in terms of banking financial regulations taxation, just a few points are there any transactions on blockchain are they subject to VAT and the answer is yes are you supposed to pay taxes in Taiwan if you are making profits on blockchain, the answer is yes and there are a lot of rules to follow okay and one last point I want to mention is about money regulation on time money laundering this is something new in Taiwan and the banks have been making lives of people more and more difficult because of this regulation on blockchain so basically we are waiting for the financial institutions to clarify regulations on blockchain but a lot of things have to be considered when we are in the field of blockchain so we invite all the operators to wait for 2021 2022 for new regulations we'll be happy to share that with you in the future thank you very much thank you very much for the valuable contribution our last speaker before we take a short coffee break is Florian Plass he is the president of the large chain Bundesverband the leading industry association for German companies in the large chain industry so welcome Mr. Plass thank you very much we know from Germany I can hear myself not anymore very good I will share my screen so first of all thank you for the invitation to speak here I represent the German blockchain association which is the main association for blockchain technology in Germany we represent over 100 members which are often startups but also corporates and SMEs but also scientific institutions, think tanks and so on we also have a number of growing regional associations that represent the specific ecosystem and associated competencies of the companies in that region that could be the south of Germany with its manufacturing and automotive strength that could be the north of Germany with its logistics or Frankfurt and the main region with financial technology or Berlin in fact with decentralized technologies digital identities and the web 3.0 movement our association has many working groups and we produce a lot of political positions inside Germany the public policy around blockchain technology in a favorable way for the industry. And we are a big organization and we have an amazing political advisory board that has representatives from all the democratic parties in German parliament who are interested in promoting blockchain technology. And the policy impact we have is quite amazing. We create these position papers around all kinds of topics like finance, mobility, identity, energy, text and much more. We hold press conferences. We engage with Germans version of a ministry for digitalization, which is Dorothee Baer and the secretaries of state, of course. And yeah, it's been quite a ride for the past four years since we were founded. And the German blockchain ecosystem is quite strong and diverse. We have a vivid community and in particular Berlin is considered one of the global hotspots for blockchain technology. Among other things, the Ethereum ecosystem was mostly bootstrap, for example, from Berlin, taking advantage of the great ecosystem of developers there. Also, as you can see in the map, we're quite strong inside Europe, next to, of course, France as well, but also Switzerland and Austria. So there are many growing hubs inside Europe around all different sectors of blockchain technology. I personally had the pleasure to visit Taiwan in November 2019. I was invited to speak both at the National Stock Exchange Taipei, but also at the Blockchain Summit and visiting all kinds of different entrepreneurs, companies, and policymakers inside Taiwan. And this led me to realize how well these two countries and economies and communities really fit together. So I think there is a huge potential to be exploited for both Germany and Taiwan to work together in the realm of blockchain and in particular for German companies to look for market entry points in Taiwan to be successful in that market. And I just want to highlight a few key elements where Germany is currently innovating together also with the German government when it comes to blockchain and where I see in particular abilities to collaborate between Taiwan and Germany. And the first one I want to mention is digital identity. So digital identity is an infrastructure question for the 21st century. And every country at the moment is trying to figure out really how do you represent not only humans, citizens, but also machines, AIs, new kind of collective organizations, how do you represent them digitally and enable them to trade, to exchange value and to engage in the digital realm. And Germany has funded and is continuing to fund a showcase project for digital identities where at this point in the process all solutions use a version of decentralized identities that we call self-souverant identities. And Bundesblock has a huge impact both in the creation of this showcase project but now also in the execution of it. And in order to connect the markets in Germany and Taiwan, I think a collaboration on a digital identity use case that could be incorporating an entity in Taiwan through the blockchain, for example. Or it could be the ability to easily transact in some part of the economy using blockchain technology and reliable self-souverant identities of the parties used, ensuring compliance with AML, ensuring other kinds of compliance questions automatically on the protocol level. So this is something that we're striving for and where Germany is going to play an important role also inside the European project of a single digital market with the technological developments that are happening here right now. Also 2021 is a really important year when it comes to blockchain both in Germany and Europe. So the German government has published and is about to enact and in fact a proposal for a law around digital securities. And when I had the pleasure to visit Taiwan in 2019 this was also a major topic of conversation since this is around the time when in Germany the project started to create such a law and in Taiwan there were similar plans to look at how to digitize and energize the local equities markets, bonds markets, real estate markets and also SME funding and all these questions with the ability to tokenize ownership or a stake in an enterprise with blockchain technologies through tokenization. And Germany now has created a legal framework there that has some really good parts. There are other parts that we don't like so much as an industry association. So we're still trying to influence here in a way where it's more oriented towards startups and growth rather than protection of incumbents but overall it's a good step that Germany is taking. And since the Taiwanese legal system and the German legal system actually share such deep commonalities due to a root in the German BGB there is in fact I think a large opportunity for these two countries to establish an ability where a startup in Germany can really easily sell equity in a tokenized form or bonds in the tokenized form in the Taiwanese market and vice versa. So SME funding, startup funding maybe for AI startups or blockchain startups or other kinds of ventures could be easily possible with this initiative. The mirror to this kind of development now in Germany is what's happening on the EU level with MECA or markets and crypto assets. It is a extremely ambitious draft regulation published by the commission end of last year which tries to regulate the complete token economy inside Europe that includes cryptocurrencies that includes utility tokens that includes securities like tokenized assets and most importantly also stable coins. In some sense MECA is a reaction to the plans of Facebook to establish a stable coin as a global payment scheme. And so Europe wants to basically regulate that and Germany has been very involved in this draft regulation. We're now in the midst of actually negotiating, talking to member states and to other decision makers in Europe to ensure that the MECA draft proposal actually becomes a advantage for Europe in the global competition for being one of the leading hotspots where companies create these new global networks. And in fact, the competition has been increasing we've seen in the United States and increasing kind of a positive attention for decentralized crypto assets for settlement of transactions, for investment purposes and all other kinds of things. And so Europe and Germany really have to switch gears to stay ahead. And so I think some kind of international cooperation here also with Taiwan would be very interesting. Lastly, I also wanna mention the deep relationship really there is between the different responses we've seen by countries to the Corona challenge and their level and depth of digitalization. And we've already heard how amazing Taiwan has managed the Corona crisis so far. We cannot really say the same of Germany. We've seen that in the statistics as well as an association that represents some of the most innovative companies in Germany. We wanted to contribute our part to solve the crisis. And I just wanna mention two projects that our members have created as part of this hackathon that the German Chancellor's office hosted at the beginning of the lockdown last year. One of them is this idea of using blockchain technology to as a fiscal stimulation measure in a sense where voucher or digital vouchers for euros can be handed out to a broad segment of the population and they can be spent in local retailers that really from a market perspective the consumers believe should continue to exist throughout the crisis. And then the recipients, the retailers of those vouchers could actually convert them into real euros. This would be a very innovative and very targeted fiscal instrument and there might be actually a chance for something like this to come to market at some point. And another use of blockchain in the corona crisis that we've showcased was this ability to create recipes on the blockchain. And now in fact, we see low land administrations to adopt blockchain for storing corona test results. So some really interesting use cases for blockchain also in the corona realm. And with this, I thank you very much for your attention and I'm very excited to see the rest of this webinar. Thank you very much. And thanks a lot to you, Florian, for joining us today. And if you have any further questions to Florian or other speakers, make sure to keep them for our Q&A session later. Before we take a short break, we're gonna make a break a little bit shorter because we're a little bit over time. You don't wanna take precious time away from our Q&A. We'll take a five minutes break. Before we use up, we wanna find out a little bit more about you, our participants, our attendees today. So we're gonna do a tiny survey of two questions that you will be seeing on your go-to webinar. User interface, our first question is where are you joining us from today? From Germany, Taiwan, or perhaps a third country. Take a few seconds to reply. We'll share the results right after the break. Okay, a few more seconds and we'll move on to the next question. Okay, and next question in our poll, we want to know what's your motivation for joining today? For this particular question, you can select multiple answers as you see fit. Do you wanna learn about international cooperation potential? Do you wanna learn about support programs for starters or learn about artificial intelligence in general or perhaps you have another reason we want to know. Please let us know and we'll share the results just after the break. Okay, take a few more seconds on the second poll question. It's quite a mouthful in terms of reasons to join today. Okay, if you submitted your question, we'll be taking a short two-minute coffee break. Take the chance to refill your coffee, whatever you need to do before finding two speakers and a Q&A and we'll be back in exactly two minutes. And welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I hope the two minutes were sufficient to refill your coffee. Now, before we go on, let's have a look at our poll results. For our first question, where is everyone joining from today? We have the results coming in. Let's have a look here. So 68% of our participants are joining from Germany, 26% from Taiwan. And let's have a look at the second question, your motivation for joining today. This is really interesting. Okay, quite a distribution here. So 56% of the majority wants to learn about international cooperation potential. That is, of course, a wonderful reason and exactly the right thing to participate in today's online seminar. And then 47% want to learn about support programs for startups. So we have a lot of startups here today. Also, 41% want to learn about artificial intelligence in general. You'll be in for a treat next up. 50% want to learn about blockchain in general and 25% are the reasons. Seems like we've got the reasons pretty well covered. Then without much further ado, it makes up a great pleasure to announce one of the most authoritative speakers on artificial intelligence, not just in Taiwan, but the world, as well as the founder of the Taiwan AI Labs. Please welcome with me, Mr. Ethan Thu. Welcome, Mr. Thu. Mr. Thu, your microphone is still on. Hello, everyone, can you use the microphone? Yeah, now we can hear you. Okay, do you see my slide? Yes. Okay, so we are Taiwan AI Lab, we are in Taipei and we were founded in 2017 under the Ministry of Sensitive Technology. And we are very, when we founded it's actually a very special interest that in Taiwan, we have a long history of open data and open source activities. For example, in 1994, we have our very first search engine, yang.com, under OpenLease Foundation. And also we have our open source social media, ptt.cc, in 1995. And after a couple of years, we also have Audrey Tham, founding government needle, now he's also a government open data scientist group that promote open data and open research under government needle. And therefore I was a founder of ptt and then I joined MIIH in 2003 and joined Microsoft in 2006. And when I became the AI research, the retired AI research for Cortana and I came to Taiwan in 2017 then I met Audrey Tham and I told Audrey Tham, I said, I want to find the Open AI Research Institute. We call it AI Lab. And we have a common interest, so we founded the Taiwan AI Lab in 2017. And the very key principle in our Taiwan AI Lab, we promote open source, then open algorithm for AI researchers, which means for all our company in Taiwan because they cannot hire the best AI researchers, they cannot reach the medical data. For example, we provide a solution for the innovation established in Taiwan. Therefore, they can collaborate with us, do the AI research to accomplish their goal. And in AI Lab, we actually have three major research area. One is human computer interaction. For example, speed recognition, language understanding. Whatever people can see, people can hear, we call it human computer interaction. And we also go forward like how to understand the Munich, how to understand the environment for smart city, for example. And the second topic we focus on is medical healthcare. So in Taiwan, we also have a very long history of the best national health insurance policy. Therefore, we accumulate a lot of medical records including the medical image and the medical histories. So all the hospitals in Taiwan, almost all the hospitals in Taiwan are already digitalized with tons of the medical records for 25 years because we have national health insurance agents policy for 20 years. And the third topic we focus on is the smart cities. We work with the local government and also the central government to solve the city problem with the best city express in Taiwan. And in Taiwan, our research also compares with GDPR. So we work with a national government council in Taiwan. So because Taiwan are a regulation, we have very good policy on protecting human rights and also good policy on protecting the people's privacy. And then we also need to make sure our system have a good integrity. So we also work on the GDPR compliance. All the research we do in Taiwan, we want to compare with GDPR. For example, if the data is owned by the user, the user need to consent before we can do the research. And the user also need to have the right to be forgotten. Also need to have the right to download their own data if we collect the data. And therefore in Taiwan, we also set up the federally learning consortium. So this is a federally aligned between the industries in Taiwan. So all the data in Taiwan, instead of we collect all the data into one data center, we leverage the federally learning infrastructure. So the data will stay in their institute. Instead, we set up the federally learning protocol together with the data centers. Therefore, the model will travel around to different institute. And this picture, for example, we have several hospital medical centers in Taiwan. In Taiwan, we used to have a Taiwan clinical trial consortium. With this clinical trial consortium, if you want to do the clinical trial, you can just trial one called IRB. Then all the hospital under this clinical trial consortium, it will follow the same protocol to do the clinical trial. We use the same concept to do the federally learning between the hospital. Because inside each hospital, they also have a lot of data. We set up a protocol under the same protocol with the same IRB regression. And then we can travel the protocol around different hospitals. Then after the hospital trained the AI models, we can then aggregate the result of the AI models. In this case, we actually don't bring the data out of the institute, but we travel the AI models around different institutes in order to get the best results. And we also join GP AI. We also advocate this federally learning in GP AI. So any institute outside Taiwan, we can help them to set up the federally learning infrastructure if they want to do the federally learning together with Taiwan's institute. For example, if you want to do the federally learning for the medical records, you can contact ALF. Then we can work with you to set up the federally learning infrastructure. And this is one example in these COVID-19 cases. I think we start on last February. We start working with National Taiwan University Hospital to train the AI model. The very first AI model is within National Taiwan University Hospital. But because in Taiwan, we have limited COVID-19 cases, therefore, if we want to train the AI computer-edited diagnosis model for the COVID-19, one hospital is not sufficient. So we need to have more hospitals to do this research. Therefore, we have another four hospitals and they join this research. We set up the federally learning architecture. And in the end, we also include the National Health Insurance Agency to set up this federally learning infrastructure. In the end, between January to March last year, we can actually find 27 cases, although 109 cases of COVID-19 cases before the PCR result. And then after that, we also work with CDC. So we open this model as an API online. So every doctor around the world, if they have a standard data image, they can upload to this system and know if that is COVID-19 cases or not. And also, because we don't want to collect users' data, we also launch decentralized content-strating technology back in February. So we have our release last April. So doing this decentralized analytics technology, so each user will collect only their own content history in their own devices. And CDC have an app for the people to download. And if there's a confirmed cases out of someone, they can upload their anonymous ID to the CDC. And you can propagate to each individual devices now who have the high risk of the COVID contact. So in this case, we don't need to collect all the content history from all the users. Every user keeps their own content history. Then we can still trace the content history through the decentralized approach. And in this way, we also work with CDC to have another recording. We will also leverage the genome sequence to trace the evolution of the COVID-19. So one of five cases, confirmed cases in Taiwan, we have the virus sequencing. With this virus sequencing, we can know this user is copying virus from each country. So in Taiwan, we don't have any debate this virus is found in China or from Europe or anywhere. Because with this tool, we can know the transmission of the virus in an open source and not transparent way. And we also provide an open source COVID-19 AI model for the drug selection. Because at the very beginning last year, very, very last year, we don't know which drug is useful for COVID-19 treatment. So we provide the AI model to do the darkening analysis. And with this AI model, we actually tried all the NHI, National Health Insurance sponsor drugs and also the FDA approved drugs back in very, very last year. And we also opened this platform. So all the scientists around the world if they want to do the drug screening, they can leverage this platform to input the drug genome and then see the darkening result. So these are all very simple. We do the AI research in Taiwan. We are the human. We actually respect humans. And so we respect the privacy and the integrity. Because we respect the privacy and the integrity, so the way we do the AI model training, we actually leverage the better learning. And for the precision health is one of our main topic researching in AI lab. So for precision medicine, because each user depends on their genome sequencing, depends on their environment, depends on their medical history, the way we do the treatment, the way we do the prevention, the way we do the diagnosis will be different. And in this way, we will need to collect a lot of data. Instead of collecting a lot of data, we actually set up a protocol for the individual. If the data is belong to each individual, we provide an AI model like this and building the devices. Therefore, we don't need to download people's information. Instead, we push the AI model into the device and learn from the people. And also, we also work with the hospital medical centers in Taiwan to integrate the better learning infrastructure with the hospital IT infrastructure. Therefore, what is one of the medical records, the nursing records and the operation records, and the developing inside the hospital, we can under one standard better learning architecture to do the researches. And for the nationwide data, for example, the National Health Insurance Database, Biobank Database, and also the most database, we also have a better learning approach installed in the SD computing centers. Of course, we also encourage the collaboration with the international records. So in Taiwan, this is the first tier hospitals in Taiwan. We actually founded the Taiwan Graduate Alliance for the health records. So you can just imagine, a lot of AI stars, if they don't have medical records, actually they can come to Taiwan, just like a private clinical trial, they can apply for the AI researches. And if you got the AIRB approved, then you can do the researches in Taiwan, cause different medical institutes. And there's another very interesting topic we are doing the research in Taiwan is the misinformation, because Taiwan is also one of the top areas of the foreign government decimation of the post-information. Then a lot of people say Taiwan is at the bottom line of the disinformation world. Therefore, you can see a lot of misinformation happening in Taiwan first, then in Europe, then in China, not only happening in the United States. So Taiwan, because we have more freedom, more freedom in media. So a lot of misinformation will flow into Taiwan. And therefore in Taiwan, we also set up the mechanism. We use the AI to collect all the information. So for the news in Mandarin, we also, we work with the National Communication Council to read through this news, to understand the news and to build up the knowledge graph. And with this knowledge graph, then we can know the files of the news media. We can know the files of the KOL, or we can know the files of each reporters. So in this case, we can set up a platform to monitor, to understand how the information is travel around in Taiwan. And there's another research area, is a smart city research area, just as I mentioned. In Taiwan, we actually have one effort to build up the digital team for the cities. So we leverage the sensor devices to travel around city by city in order to build up the digital team, just like you see the sensor device goes through the street, then you will build up the street in a virtual state. And with the digital print data, we can actually apply for different applications. For example, after COVID-19, a lot of people they cannot travel to Taiwan, then they can join the activity in Taiwan, on the internet. We also have a solution to have a virtual tool with these digital team solutions. So in Taiwan, we collaborate with all the startups in Taiwan. So this is a very good example of the Taiwan AI ecosystem provided at WOS. So we have open AI research institute at Taiwan AI Lab. And we also have incubators, accelerators, and also AI schools in Taiwan to power all kinds of applications, all kinds of AI research and applications in Taiwan. And I also want to welcome everyone if you can travel to Taiwan or you can join the event virtually, you can come to 2021 Smart City Summit and Expo in Taiwan. That's what's happening next week. Okay, thank you, everyone. Thank you very much, Mr. Tu. Also, thank you for the platform for the Smart City Expo, wonderful Expo. Highly recommended, also in virtual form. If you have any additional questions for Mr. Tu, remember we have questions, and we will get to the questions during our Q&A. Now for our final speaker, it's a great honor to have with us a person who is probably one of the most experienced in terms of Taiwan's use of blockchain and AI technologies for efficient and transparent governance. Please welcome digitalminus.ofintime. Hello, greetings. Is this sound and video going through? We hear your fine, we see you well. Yes. Excellent. So let me switch to the slides. Do you see this Lego block that says digital social innovation? Digital social innovation. Yeah, you see it. Okay, you do. Okay, excellent. Yeah, Ethan has already talked all about AI, so actually my talk will focus on the CI or collective intelligence. Now collective intelligence is how we counter the pandemic with no lockdown and counter the infodemic with no takedown. To me, the digital social innovation is all about fast, fair, and fun, and a fast part pertains to, for example, in 2019 December, there was a whistleblower, Dr. Lee Wenliang from Wuhan, that shared on their social media that there were, and I quote, seven new SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market, as you can see here. Now, of course, it has been reposted by other places in the world, but only in Taiwan did it actually escalate into health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day on the January of the first. That is to say, the signal cut through the voice and the noise and reached the CEC, the Central Epidemic Command Center people. So what happens here? Well, that's because we have a collective intelligence system called the PTT and founded by Ethan Du, who just spoke, right? This is the interface of PTT. Unlike other more anti-social form of social media, PTT is a student's pet project for the past 25 years, subsidized by the Taiwan academia network in the National Taiwan University. It has no advertisements, it has no shareholders. It's a thoroughly digital public infrastructure. So unlike in other more anti-social corner of social media, where you have to shout to get noticed where the bartenders sell addictive drinks and private bouncers and things like that, we actually have something that resembles a town square, a civic infrastructure that when people post something like this, this is a very young doctor, no more pipe, people actually triaged on her message and get into the rough consensus of something is really going on in human to human transmission the very next day, which escalated into our CEC response. Now, this shows us that the importance of the completely open freedom of expression and speech. According to the Civic's Monitor, Taiwan is the only jurisdiction in Asia that has a completely open civil society space and that enables people to talk about SARS without fearing repercussions and enable the government to trust the people and trust the collective intelligence. And collective intelligence thrives on real-time feedback on a shorter iteration cycle. So during the pandemic, every 24 hours, we have this very pinkish 2PM press conference where the minister, Chen Shizhong here, the commander and the medical staff, answers each and every journalist all questions. But the real feedback mechanism is this 1922 hotline where everyone can just call, there was more than 2 million calls last year and suggest any new innovations or ideas to the call center. For example, last April, there was a young boy that called saying, hey, you're rationing out the mask and all I get is pink medical mask. But all the boys in my class have navy blue medical grade mask for school. Am I a boy? I don't want to wear a pink. Well, they're very next day. All the medical officers, including the minister wore pink medical mask, as you can see here. And minister Chen even said that pink panther was a childhood hero. So the boy become the most hit boy in the class where only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes zero wear, I guess. And this in the here and now response really amplified the best innovations from the civil society such as from Gov Zero. Gov Zero is this simple idea that for all the government web services and digital service that ends in GOV.TW, like join the GOV, the TW or national participation portal, a bunch of random civic hackers can just fork the government and change the O to a zero. And so if you go to join the GZOV.TW, get into this shadow government where thousands, tens of thousands of people are chatting all the time how to digital delivery better. And so because of this in no time, do we get more than 100 different tools to visualize? For example, the real-time mask availability in more than 6,000 pharmacies in Taiwan. Now this is a little bit like the DLT because there's more than 100 different replica of the real-time open data when it's published upon collection every 30 seconds as it started last February, it's still running. All the people queuing in the pharmacies trying to buy some medical mask, they don't have to queue in vain because they could just look at them up and avoid going to the places that has already run out. And instead they can go to some place that's green that is to say still have some mask available. And when they are queuing in light, they can check, for example, for a children's mask each time they purchased, this decreases nowadays by 10. So people would expect this go to 186, 176 just like a distributed ledger. So it refreshed every 30 seconds and people who see anything going wrong with this participatory accountability can just call 1922 to report something going wrong. And we did actually have member of the parliament doing interpolation to Minister Chen Shizhong, for example, MP Gao Hong'an from the Taiwan People's Party. And last April, did an interpolation saying you look at this population center and the pharmacy distribution and you think it's fair, it's pretty fair, it's very well aligned, but it's actually not fair because according to independent analysis from the open street map community, people can see that in the rural places people spend more time on public transportation in order to get access to the pharmacy. By the time they get to the pharmacy maybe the pharmacy has closed, right? So this, what looks like fairness is actually biased and the people in the data analytics team in Taipei maybe is unaware of this bias. But bias when caught out can be remedied quickly. Minister Chen simply say, legislator teaches, right? He didn't defend the policy, instead he just said, let's co-create. So with the help from the open street map community we changed the distribution mechanism for the mask availability. And just 24 hours later, we introduced pre-ordering and people can collect. This is our head of cabinet, Su Zhenchang smiling very happily. People can collect any pre-order medical grade mask using their national health insurance app. And so one in the nearby convenient stores, 24 hours a day. And so MPGAR was very happy and said, yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's co-creation but this is only possible because we publish every 30 seconds consider if we publish every quarter then this kind of participatory accountability would not be possible. Now, I mentioned a little bit about the infodamic. I also want to mention it because we also use collective intelligence to counter the infodamic. And we use this way called humor over a rumor. The fun part of the pillar says that whenever we detect something that's trending as it is information based on voluntary feedback like flagging things that spawn within two hours we need to roll out two pictures each 200 characters or less that are more funny than this conspiracy theory or infodamic that travels from outrage. We discovered that humor serves as a inoculation of the mind. For example, last April there was a conspiracy theory saying and I quote, the state is confiscating the tissue paper production to make medical grade mask. So run out and buy because it will run out soon. Well, it was actually started by tissue paper resellers. We will later find out but people did believe that and they panic buy. So within just a couple of hours our head of the cabinet, you just saw his front side wrote this meme out and this is his backside. And this says in very large font very clearly that each of us only have one pair of buttons and is a website because in Mandarin to stockpile twin sounds the same as Botox twin. And so this is basically saying that there's no need to stockpile can't use that many anyway. And with this factual table that says the South American materials are the tissue paper materials. Now the PPE is the mask are actually plastic products and they came from domestic materials. There's no way to confuse the two, right? So people who laugh about it by, you know the premier literally making himself the butt of the joke just joined this collective intelligence in dispelling rumors and dispelling conspiracy theories. And indeed in just a couple of days the rumors lie down and with this assisted collective intelligence we were very successful in shaping the habits of the public health and thinking to this very cute spoke stock the name is Song Chai. Now Song Chai lives with the participation office or the hashtag officer of the health and welfare ministry who suggests this pink panther thing. And so every time that we have ACCC announcement on policy they can just go home at their home is just a couple of blocks from the ministry building take fresh photos of the dog and say, you know, fiscal distance outdoor keep two shibas away indoor keep three shibas away otherwise wear a mask. Remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing and why would you wear a mask? Well, you wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand. Now I bet you can't really unsee this at people who saw this at this appeals to rational self-interest. And so this message went thoroughly viral and people all understood how important it is for the mask to protect oneself against once unwashed hands. So with this collective intelligence we were able to then counter the pandemic with no lockdown by everyone who understands the underlying principles and by people who contribute voluntarily into those real-time clarification by flagging things on the even end-to-end encrypted channels. It's called line, but it's like WhatsApp. So this is one earlier example before the COVID. There was a rumor on the end-to-end encrypted channel that says starting next week if you perm your hair many times a week you'll get fined. This is of course not true but again within just a couple hours Premier rose out this meme saying I may be bald now with his young photo but I would not punish people with hair. Well, we've introduced this labor requirement for hair products and then this is the memetic payload but if you perm your hair many times a week it will not damage your bank account but it will damage your hair and like just look at me for what will happen to your hair. Again, this humor over rumor successfully countered that particular conspiracy theory in just a couple hours. So relying on the international fact-checking network to look at the most trending this information at hunt relies on people who assist each other in reporting those rumors and so on. And we now have a really good ecosystem from Trent Micro, the leading antivirus company or from who's called another counterspun company and so on. They wrote out these bots that can analyze photos even videos for deep fakes and stumps and so on. So just by forwarding incoming disinformation to those crowd-checked things we know which disinformation have a higher than one basic reproduction value a R value of above one meaning it's about to go viral so that's the fact-checkers can concentrate their energy on correcting those. And we also work with say Facebook and apply social sanction pressure on them saying that for example, during elections they have to treat campaign donations like the advertisement for social and political issues and also ban foreign sponsored micro-targeting during the election session and that's because of zero people actually apply the same pressure to our national auditing office taking out paper copies of the campaign donation expanded to and did the otaku character recognition crowdsourcing the OCR to analyze the data and when the national auditing office finally say okay okay we'll just open data everything then people turn around and hold Facebook to account saying that you have to do the same thing and that this is what enabled us to run a remarkably disinformation free presidential election again at the beginning of 2020. So I would say that with the help of collective intelligence in the successful countering of pandemic and infodemic we have now transformed our public service so that they also think in ways of this kind of social innovation and apply to the yearly work of presidential hackathon where every year we give out five awards to those cross sectoral teams that propose for example using machine learning to detect water leakage and repair them in real time. Now because we didn't have typhoon last year this is actually a very serious and on topic thing. And so this global goal co-ordinating civic hacking end up getting a award, a trophy from our president. This is a micro projector. If you turn the micro projector on it actually projects the president's image and the president giving you the trophy this very meta promise in the clip in the trophy that whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy as if it's a presidential order within the next 12 months as a data collaborative that went national. So we have many success cases such as this again eight of zero visualization of the air boxes people measuring air quality PM 2.5 voluntarily and writing to the distributed ledger I think they began with EOTA and then allow people to teach primary schoolers this very important idea of data competence instead of literacy where they're just consumers of data on media we now teach competence where they are stewards and producers of media and they can then propose their own presidential hackathon ideas and all our best winners are either assistive intelligence or collective intelligence and sometimes both and we use something that's right from the Ethereum playbook that quadratic voting to select what are the cohorts that we need to spend state expenditure on to curate them into national policy. So people develop synergies together and after each voting of quadratic voting just like Gitcoin they feel that they have won because they deliver the synergies that people wanted instead of like the traditional way of online voting where people gets mobilized just to vote on the one thing they love and didn't even bother to check anything else. And finally, Ethan do talks a little bit about this kind of sandbox applications for AI experiences and things like that well for emerging technologies regulation after they go out from the sandbox we also use AI power conversation method this is open source and called Polis that reflects the people's ideas and feelings around each emerging technology this is again a digital public infrastructure so nowadays it's running on Polis.gov.tw and this is the original 2015 conversation UberX and UberX in 2015 of course people feel strongly about it some people call it just gig economy some people call it sharing economy and so on but this is my social media profile and this is my friends and family's feelings around the UberX situation. So instead of using Facebook which is really like a nightclub where people have to shout we build our own pro-social social media where people just see each other's feelings about the same facts and for example I say passenger liability I feel it's very important if you agree you move toward me now if you disagree you move farther away from me this is K-means clustering principle component analysis but there is no reply button so without a reply button there is no room for trolls to grow and after three weeks of online deliberation people discover very quickly that's actually we can agree to disagree on those ideological divisive statements but most people agree with most of each other on most of the things most of the time this is a shape of democracy and after reflecting on those crowdsourced agenda setting we eventually just legalized Uber but using multi-purpose taxi where their professional taxi drivers never undercut existing meters so the existing co-ops and newer ones like blind taxi and so on all enter the market with this crowdsourced measurement of progress so again everybody feel that they have won because this is crowdsourced common values out of different positions and we innovate to deliver those common values from those positions so and that's the entirety of my talk I just want to share with you my job description because I focus on these three SDGs open data, effective partnerships and participatory innovation and in 2016 when I said this is my job description the HR in the cabinet is like ministering nobody memorized those SDG numbers so you have to explain it in plain language so I translate that to plain language it goes like this when we see the internet the flames let's make it the internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that a singularity is near let's always remember the plurality is here thank you for listening thank you very much minister Tan minister you may stay with us please keep your camera on and we invite all speakers to turn to the cameras to join us through the Q&A if you're in the audience please feel free to submit questions and we'll be going through them one by one with our speakers for this time to allow us so all speakers feel free please turn on your cameras but make sure to turn off your microphones until it is your turn to answer a question and we'll dive right into it we've got a question from a German starter in AI technology as a German starter for AI in voice technology are there any opportunities to get in contact with Taiwanese companies like an online fair like online fair events Mr. Thu mentioned the Taipei Smart City Expo perhaps there's other opportunities I would perhaps pitch this question to Professor Dr. Tai first from the Ministry of Science and Technology perspective what do you think Thailand can offer German startups looking for Taiwanese partners microphone it's still the off now even we can hear you yes yes could you hear me yes could you hear me yes yeah okay so thank you for the question I thank you so much okay I think I think to this project we got actually many opportunities for example there are a couple of different fairs they also they also they also have this project to connect the start-up Germany and we do have a just a reciprocal director economic affairs economic affairs in Berlin in Taipei for travel so I think if you are interested in you could try to contact them and the other possibility is that we have this Taiwan Trade Center which there are two offices one is in Düsseldorf and the other is in Munich and they are also in charge of this business so if you are really interested in to do your start-up in Taiwan I will suggest you to contact them and of course you could also contact my office and we will also try our best to help you to connect with Taiwan's company thank you I want to add a little bit so if you are very interested in the AI start-up ideas in Taiwan actually I also welcome to contact with Taiwan AI lab so we have we actually just talked with National Development Council we have maybe I'll return it later we in Taiwan we have some program to support for example the visa you want to come to Taiwan work in Taiwan we have a special visa program so you can come here and if you need some funding support or need some special support from small business in our economic department we also have some special program but of course if you for any other question if you are AI related staff on my AI lab point of view I also very welcome to you can talk with AI lab directories any kind of opportunities thank you okay thank you very much I think there's also answers another question we have which is what are some of the things that German startups can do when looking for partnerships in Taiwan so I think that question we got covered and another question we have is how can a German startup deploy solutions across Asia utilizing Taiwan as a regional hub especially from an AI and blockchain perspective what is your opinion that how Taiwan can be a hub as a kind of launching pad for the great Asian market in general perhaps the minister okay yeah I was muted so I just first want to echo Ethan's introduction to the national development council program called the GOAT card I think that's definitely the first step if you search for a Taiwan GOAT card that should be on the first hit actually just GOAT card alone nowadays because it do pretty good search engine optimization it should also be the first hit now the Taiwan GOAT card is a open work permit it works for any company you want so you keep work for your own startup but you can stay in Taiwan for up to three years with eligibility for tax benefits and also you can bring your family your parents and grandparents can also visit and this works even during the COVID so just last year there's close to 2,000 people working from overseas and using the ministry of science and technology GOAT card which now says if you have the potential to contribute to science and technology in Taiwan then you're eligible for the GOAT card so that's pretty much all of you probably and so I think that's the first step because the Taiwanese startup system is very vibrant we have a lot of connections like from the Taiwan tech arena from the startup to race and so on but the cultural connections are mostly because we never had a lockdown so it still mostly happens on face-to-face settings so while of course this video conference can bring us on the common topics in order to start a business relationship Taiwanese people now still rely very much on face-to-face thanks to the luxury of like zero COVID cases for quite a bit and so get a GOAT card come to Taiwan and you can also visit me at Social Innovation Lab I'm always there every Wednesday okay wonderful thank you Minister Tan I think I have another follow-up question for you minister as well as Mr. Glatz in Germany how much political will do you see in Taiwan to apply blockchain solutions to government infrastructure such as Estonia which uses blockchain to ensure the integrity of its citizens health practice and Mr. Glatz you also meant identity perhaps the minister Tan and Mr. Glatz you could join at some of your observations on this topic yeah you'll notice that when I talk in my slides I always use the term distributed ledger technology or ledger technology and this is mostly a branding thing because the term blockchain in Taiwan has fortunately or unfortunately been associated with I don't know Elon Musk or something because of that that the people who are actually work on the logistics parts of ledger technology nowadays mostly from what I understand use the ledger branding even though it's the same technology I assure you now that's the first thing and the second thing is that we do use that in our health record for example there's this presidential hackathon team that work with the national health insurance agency to use zero knowledge range proofs so that an event organizer of say a marathon can say that in order to safely participate in my marathon your health records and diagnostics need to fall within this range so that you don't run into like none healthy outcomes of the marathon but of course it's not a clinic it's not a doctor so they cannot access your health records but with the invention of zero knowledge range proofs the national health insurance agency can actually attest to you falling within that range using ZKRP without divulging your private records to the marathon organizers and so on so you'll see that we mostly use it as a way to efficiently and very inexpensively enable participatory audit secure multi-party computation we also are looking into homomorphic encryption and things like that without substituting the central record entirely into the public chain because the NHI or central bank our fiat still enjoy pretty good trust and so we mostly use it in auxiliary ways to reduce the time and effort it takes to build such multi-party collaborations to add here from my experience so I think just in terms of the level of digitalization that the government runs on Germany has so much to learn from Taiwan Germany we are not there yet and we're actually pushing for this level of responsible digitalization as I want to call it where multi-party computation encryption zero knowledge proofs are used to preserve the privacy of citizens and in Germany we're like the stage before where we're just even considering digitizing things and so we kind of have to make a leapfrog into this I think more responsible form of digitalization and Taiwan serves as an amazing example here when it now comes to financial market regulation I actually don't know in how much Taiwan has pursued its initial ideas in 2019 to enact some legislation around tokenization of real-world assets, securities these kinds of things maybe there is potential for fruitful collaborations since Germany has a proper draft law now that could be enacted as such in principle yeah I very much welcome that we already have equity-based crowdfunding and equity-based closely held cooperation laws and so we did a little bit of regulatory adjustments in anticipation to the STOs and so on I think you're referring to that and we have a very robust fintech sandbox regulation so you can try anything you want as long as it's not money laundering or funding terrorism everything else is good topic and you can, as I mentioned, try that for a year or a year and co-create the regulations with the legislators and even if the legislators say okay we require one or two more years in order to make it into law you get a de facto monopoly because your sandbox can continue running while the legislators figure something out okay thank you very much we have another question I think for Mr. Tu we already mentioned AI lab as a kind of touchpoint for foreign startups coming to Taiwan the question is Taiwan AI labs aims to leverage Taiwan's strength to enable future generation of technobattists what is the kind of input you would hope to see from foreign or German startups especially coming to Taiwan? I think of course in Taiwan we have some special opportunity for example like our Medicare system we already set up a better name facilities across different hospitals in Taiwan we also want because precision medicine we also want to have a call for policies outside Taiwan for example in Germany if we can set up the same infrastructure for the better learning with the hospital in Germany I want to see if there is any good opportunity we can set up like a nationwide infrastructure just like national health insurance for the metro imaging or maybe the hospital-wise medical center medical center to medical center better learning facilities set up in Germany or maybe we can have some personal wearable device AILT opportunity if you are interested we'll have all kinds of precision medicine ideas come to Taiwan this one one area and also the smart city I just mentioned that next week we have a Taipei smart city expo maybe you can just go online and see what we have in Taiwan and if you want to reach out any AI related smart city startup opportunity in Taiwan you can let me know because I was we actually Taiwan I would have a couple of boothies in the smart city expo something like next week so you can come here and maybe talk to us or if you cannot join you can also go online and see what's happening next week and then choose the like the drone and we have a 360 drone project and we also have like a digital twin on the ministry of transportation projects any kind of project you are interested to cover with Taiwan local governments and also the ministry of transportation just feel free to talk with us and then I see the third topic I'm very interested in is because we did a lot of misinformation analysis in Taiwan for Mandarin so maybe if you are interested if you want to find an expert that is based in Mandarin and this Google people is not in China probably LL is also one of the best point of contact you can reach us so if you want to analyze any kind of information that's in Mandarin you want to have some speech recognition techniques facial recognition techniques that you can bring in calls and you don't you can do in the in the GDPR compliance approach what kind of the speech recognition approach what kind of facial recognition approach you want to to do for for the people in Asia or for speaking in Mandarin you can work with Taiwan LL and even for the like Asian Asian language like a Japanese and the other languages in Asia we also have some very good English school here in Taiwan thank you hey thank you very much for sharing then any any comment on this question from our other speakers then we could continue another attendee question which I think relates a little bit to the question we dealt with before but very with a very specific business focus the question is right now in Taiwan letter of credits are often used as a collateral for deliveries does somebody know whether banks in Taiwan are interested to change bank guarantees or letter of credits into blockchain technology please feel free to turn on your mic if you have any comment on this any of our speakers Minister Tan, any you heard any willingness no I just I was just checking our fintech sandbox applications I have not yet seen this particular application feel free to first apply for the go-kart and second apply for the fintech sandbox and we'll see what happens from there yeah but I check sandbox that you that you that you and I don't see anything like that yet wonderful and so they've already had something that German started tendering to Taiwan some new ideas for blockchain application yeah we do have the open banking APIs that would enable something like this to happen but I haven't seen a application yet for that okay thank you very much then we do have one question on the Taiwanese economy to Mr. Hirschler as you we've seen in your report it seems that the Taiwanese economy was perfectly positioned especially for the specific demand of the world economy in 2020 how do you rate Taiwan's middle-term economic outlook in the world? I don't quite get the last part so so Taiwan is making a of course a large economic growth amid 2020 and and then what the question is to Mr. Hirschler who gave us the economic report earlier and reported that in 2020 Taiwan's economy did comparatively well especially considering specific demands of the global economy how do you see this trend continuing in the middle term especially as the world hopefully returns to normalcy and the staff probably need to unmute Alexander okay now can you hear me? okay thanks well as I mentioned before while Taiwan at the moment is benefiting a kind of digitalization demand in during the corona crisis and I've been showing that the growth potential in the next years after this special boom might go down a little bit but basically when I mentioned that I've been working also in other Asian countries like for example Korea I think the huge advantage of Taiwan is that they have a very healthy economic structure and then just to mention two advantages in comparison for example with Korea it's the moderate wages here that foreign companies will find that still production is kind of attractive if you invest in production but meanwhile in Korea all the production facilities try to escape more or less and then go to Vietnam or other places here you can do this still this is a huge advantage for the Taiwanese economy and the second one is I think one of also crucial one that Taiwan is not so much focused on end products on consumer products so the Taiwanese companies worldwide are not very known but this is not a disadvantage this is an advantage because they're focused on the components in the supply chains in other words for Taiwan it doesn't matter if in five years the smartphone will still exist or another application because Taiwan is producing the components for these end products and that makes Taiwan's economy extremely flexible so I deeply believe in the stability of the Taiwanese economy and doing the next five to 10 years also on the midterm quite good perspectives here did this answer your question? Yes thank you very much if there's no comments from our other speakers perhaps one question on the legal side for Mr. Scott I think the question also relates to Minister Tang and Ethan you mentioned Pascal you mentioned the Taiwan Data Protection Act as the German startup that's familiar with data protection climates as part of the GDPR in the European Union what are the main points that a startup especially in AI and blockchain coming here would have to watch out for in terms of the GDPA? Well thank you for the question there are two sets of regulations you need to comply with the first one is the Taiwanese Regulation on Data Protection Act which is a local regulation and many many companies now know that they are also to comply with the GDPR in from Europe each time we use data from what we call a data subject from the EU so no matter whatever we do in AI or blockchain as soon as we know that we are using data from abroad the problem will come from whether we just need to comply with the Data Protection Act of Taiwan or we need also to follow some processes to guarantee that the use of data coming from the EU or maybe sometimes from the US or whatever is totally compliant with the GDPR I think the GDPR really changed a lot about the way Taiwanese companies are operating in a world with e-commerce with services provided not only to Taiwanese data subjects but online services to foreigners so in the past we have managed to advise a lot of Taiwanese companies to re-focus their processes to make sure that they comply with that so for startups in AI or blockchain coming to Taiwan they have to integrate the two sets of regulation but of course if you're coming from Germany I think the German entrepreneurs or startups already know how to comply with the GDPR so then they just need to comply with the Taiwanese regulation on the data protection you have to remember every country in the world have regulation about sending data out of the country so it's not only Taiwan it's most of the countries today you take data from Taiwan if you want to send the data out of Taiwan there are regulations you need to follow the regulations there are very strict regulations on whether you can do it or not so same thing from the EU or the US you can add a little bit of also what Pascal mentioned the importance of protecting the data of your citizens and not letting go abroad what do you think is there any cooperation potential between Germany and Taiwan between the experiences with the GDPR and the Taiwan Data Protection Act that startups can average to ensure better data security for Taiwanese and German citizens was that at me or yes okay yeah thank you I think there's two things going on the first is that our personal data protection act which is really like the pre GDPR European Privacy Act is a really strong foundation and I think we really used the part in the equivalent GDPR would be called joint data controllership or nowadays it's variously called data intermediary or data coalition data trust data union many many different words for this idea and you'll probably notice that's the air boxes or the counter infodemic or the actually PTT from Ethan they all qualify as voluntary citizens association of data producers that sets the term of control and of data feedback and auditing mechanisms by the social sector not the surveillance state or the surveillance capitalism so I think that is one particular area that we can focus on and what the ledger technology community definitely has more than any other community experiences in co-governing such data coalitions that's the first thing and actually I'm like working with Vitalik buttering as a board member of radical exchange so I'm kind of a slashy or a digital ministry slash Ethereum governance experimenter and entrepreneur on this particular record the other one is that because in Taiwan for example for the national health insurance app there's more than five million six million I think now people using the app not only to pre-order the mask or download x-ray scans or dentist visit records but actively authorizing via the SDKs and APIs third-party applications including a very popular one of people not collecting their masquerading quota and use the app to get a non-fungible token of appreciation of dedicating those masks to international humanitarian aid that's very popular like more than seven million masks have been dedicated this way and so there's a real appetite for this kind of participatory things to get people mobilized and many startups are captivating on that idea and doing for example participatory plastic bottle saving of a Pokemon Go like game where people are encouraged to go out and refill their bottles instead of buying new bottles and with this like heat damage push notification and it's all very much gamified but the thing is that this habit change for the global good or for the social good is really a thing in terms of if you're also working gamification in a privacy preserving way there's also many startups and check out the presidential hackathon winners for your natural allies thank you very inspiring so we're taking it a step further starting with the technology kind of had a grassroots movement to take it a step further to a place where perhaps the legal and government process has breached it I would also love to hear Mr. Tu's opinion your comment on what's something of data protection and first data so and another expert in the regulation per state but in Taiwan according to what I've worked with the national development council they are in charge of the privacy protection act I think Taiwan government is doing a lot of effort and GDPR compliance therefore if the if the company follow the GDPR compliance in Europe it pretty much debt to do the data operating in Taiwan but of course there are some special situations just like we just mentioned if you want to bring the data out of the country some data have some some some regulation that you need to be followed maybe file information there are some special regulations you cannot bring out of the institute for example so in Taiwan and what we did is just as I mentioned instead of bringing the data out of the facility we actually put the model inside the facility that is the better learning protocol we are setting up in Taiwan to facilitate the start-up company in Taiwan if they want to do the innovation in Taiwan if they don't have the data and if the institute they are open for the data experiment inside the institute we will help them to set up the better learning architecture so in this case that the UAM model travel inside to the institute to do the training with the data inside the institute and after training and you will reach a certain a separate result you can actually bring the model weight out of the institute instead of the data therefore in this in this case we can we can still do the machine learning however you you will not reach the data and that will not bring out of the facilities that is the very special way we are working in Taiwan so honestly like in this generally we actually announce the industrial alliance this industrial alliance is actually across different different ministries in Taiwan including the ministry of transportation ministry of science and technology ministry of the healthcare and welfare and also ministry of the culture so also if you can also also the for the also for the thing take as well so so we are we are aggressively set up the better learning infrastructure in Taiwan to help people to to help people to to have the the mechanism to do the machine to help start without the data but the view can of course if you have any data privacy issue you face in Taiwan maybe we can do this way to work around you can just contact Taiwan and see if we can solve your problem thank you thank you minister too really seems like there is a lot of infrastructure in place and we can have the grab a high one Taiwanese and German style of operation in these fields so we are already a bit over time this brings us to the end of today's seminar thank you very very much to our speakers thanks so much for joining us of course also big thank you to our attendees if you're interested in one of today's or multiple of today's presentations you will be able to find them on our website taiwan.ahe.de and there will be a whole recording of the whole event as well we look forward to seeing you next time bye bye thank you live low and prosper thank you everyone