Both countries establish science and technology innovation centres
To align with the New Southbound policy, Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has been providing funding for academic institutions in the country, as well as south and southeast Asian countries.
This will help to establish “Science and Technology Innovation Centres (STICs) — since 2017, 12 STICs have been set up in nine countries.
In 2018, MOST subsidised National Chung Cheng University (CCU) and the Institute of Technology Ropar (IIT Ropar) to establish the Taiwan-India Joint Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence in India.
After the pandemic outbreak of 2019, the two institutions began cooperating on a new proposal for frontline pandemic prevention.
CCU developed a “Smart Pandemic Prevention System” with three major features: automatic body temperature sensing, facial recognition, and contact history analysis. Jointly developed by professors and students in Taiwan and India, the system adopts the latest artificial intelligence technology, and has been implemented on campuses to effectively track footprint and ensure the safety measures.
In addition to employing the latest thermal camera technology, the system’s automatic sensing technology uses optimised software to accurately measure body temperature. This feature not only reduces the manpower required to measure people’s temperatures at each checkpoint on campus, but also reduces the risk of violating government regulations of social distancing.
The facial recognition system, which has been optimized to allow deep neural networks to recognise distinct facial features in Asia, has now effectively achieved facial recognition accuracy of over 90 per cent.
Due to the large number of users, the system performed relatively slow at first. Nonetheless, the issue was resolved by the joint effort of professors and students of CCU optimising the software’s processing method and employing parallel facial recognition based on the number of processor cores.
At present, this system being used on campus, displays a high recognition rate, and ensures a high level of privacy. To address privacy concerns, the system uses Edge AI technology rather than putting the database online.
With the combination of the database assembled using the technologies, the smart pandemic prevention system can conduct community analyses of the school personnel’s contact history.
This system could “quickly and accurately” determine the contact history of everyone who enters the university. In comparison, the advantage of university’s smart system is that even if the individuals do not carry mobile phones, it can still effectively record their locations and contact history.
Combining the above advantages, this smart pandemic prevention system has provided a good opportunity for innovative cooperation between Taiwanese and Indian academic institutions, which has benefited the faculty and students of the two universities. In the future, it is hoped that this cooperative model can be extended to other subject areas, including the prevention and control of pandemics in public areas.
