Inside Taiwan's Tech Industry - BBC Click

taijuan an island shaped like a leaf but the meeting point of four sees many around the world came to know it through the words made in Taiwan stamped on electronics toys and bikes it became a brand people recognized [Music] but the world has changed again hardware is out software is in AI is the future handsets for the past - sitting back in and I have been on a journey to find out what made in Taiwan means in the 21st century welcome to Taiwan [Music] 500 years back Taiwan was known as a pirate Kingdom a base for Chinese and Japanese entrepreneurs who traded in the South China Sea but more recently it's chased legitimate business but still we're an entrepreneurial zeal leading the world of technology manufacturing since the 1960's over 30 years Taiwan underwent massive industrialization in what has become known as the Taiwan miracle huge tech firms grew becoming household names Asus HTC Acer and the center of this was the semiconductor industry led by a company you've probably never heard of TSMC it's one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world producing the chips inside some of the best phones including the iphone 11 it is most likely if you have a smartphone you have something made by tsmc and these chips were only made possible thanks to the discovery of semiconductors way semiconductor important or interesting because it changes your life with factories or fabs as they are known across the globe the largest is here in Taiwan and we've been granted exclusive access to see just how those chips that form the heart of our electronic devices are created but before we could go into the fab there was quite a process to undergird I have to take my shoes off on the carpet Locker it seems and that was just the start I had to put on a hair net wash my hands and wear this to keep the dust out whew but it is time for an air shower [Music] the manufacturing of wafers has to be extremely precise they cannot tolerate any particles that may fall onto the wafer and damaged the chips [Music] so finally we were allowed in the factory and there was a good reason for all of that faff the speed of these chips relies on how many transistors you can cram into a tiny space and when I say tiny I'm talking nanometers some even specks of dust would matter I don't really know how to describe how fine that five nanometer or seven nanometer is but I think people very often say if you look at twenty a nanometer it was like one thousands of a the diameter of a human hair in this fully automated Factory the lights are kept yellow to protect the product and the machinery is moving all around but there are quite a few things in here we're not allowed to film because this is seriously cutting-edge technology so it needs to remain pretty secret we have to protect our customers information whichever way we we can and so basically we do not allow cameras to freely roam inside our fab is because inevitably they may pick up customer information between all the automated devices in this facility they travel 400,000 kilometers a day to put that into context that's 10 times around earth all of this is about the concept of keeping up with Moore's law as predicted by Intel engineer Gordon Moore in the 60s he refers to the doubling of transistors on a chip every 2 years whilst the cost is carved a concept increasingly hard to keep up with despite us expecting a lot more from our ever connected lives the next driver is what we call ubiquitous computing it is computation everywhere at any time all the devices are connected billions and billions of edge devices that are smart they can compute at any time and communicate and link and that would be the future enabled by semiconductors it's a future that's not too far away for Taiwan AI is making substantial progress here especially in healthcare I'm here at Taipei Veterans General Hospital where they're already experiencing the benefits of AI whilst many AI systems the hidden behind closed doors in this hospital we were given behind-the-scenes access we have as a patient actually inside the tunnel and he is scanned for his brain to see if there any parameter sources coming from the lung cancer many of the patient come here already have preliminary diagnosis as a cancer from outside Hospital so every patient come here with anxiety so our purpose is to diminish insulted the degree on society and to shorten the process in real world I have to read images one by one it's pretty heavy physical load in work and with a assistance I can as air to helping to read the images [Music] but what could take a doctor a couple of weeks can be done by the AI in seconds and you can see that how quick the images been uploaded to the system and from the AI you can see the vision already there another one here that time can make all the difference beyond the diagnosis the AI is also assisting the surgeons with surgery decisions although the patients has been Stage four lung cancer so he shouldn't be operated why though has Taiwan and this hospital managed to lead the world in AI people in Taiwan we're proud of two things one is computer science the other one is medicine our of our medical affairs was computerized the for more than twenty years it's the fact that you've been collecting data over a number of years what puts you in a really good position to be able to put into practice a lot of this AI oh yeah because we contend the machine they can learn to write make the diagnosis of physicians okay so the imaging is the same as imaging you would have used before but it's at the point of diagnosis that a computer now knows that yes instead of a doctor is a Carnell for deep learning everyone in Taiwan has a health care card which is used to access medical records so basically ones that you have car can go to the doctor everywhere because I think many by the percent of people actually use our health care insurance system - - as a mean to see doctors so that makes all the data to centralize in one place and you can imagine that if some database that has the old medical record no recommendation that's like a first step over AI but the data can only be read if a doctor also inserts their card into this device but it's also like a key or authorization by patient otherwise I cannot assess her information and without her approval so I need to put my card here so you can see a CT see the information we also upload the imagery within 24 hours after the study that's very convenient so if she visit the other hospitals all the primary care physician offices the doctors they all can access the same information like me but it's not just big hospitals using AI in health care I traveled across town to a small start-up at the cutting edge of medical science this brain tracking system is used to assess stress in the brain and in turn the likelihood of someone being susceptible to depression [Music] over the last decade many many neuroimaging studies have proved that the brain activity of patient with depression help some of no more condition but these evidence are found by am I not eg for mild equation am I cannot found anything but we can found a multi patient from EEG signal that is the brain wave signal the cap is cheaper and unlike an MRI is portable it aims to allow doctors to diagnose depression in a more scientific way and we use the AI analysis method to analyze the patterns of the data from the patients with depression and finally with some we found some biomarkers and we can detect whether the person has depression or not above eighty percent accuracy the company hopes to launch the product next year and is also looking at how it might be used to identify Alzheimer's attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to insomnia [Music] welcome to the week in tech it was the week that a device dispatched by Samsung to send selfies to space came back to earth with a thud crash landing in a back garden in Michigan USA thankfully nobody was injured on a slightly safer note the korean tech giant has teased a flip phone how very early noughties of them with a foldable screen let's hope this one's more successful than its last attempt at a folding phone Twitter has banned all political advertising worldwide on its platform saying that the reach of such messages should be earned not bought the move puts pressure on rival social media outfit Facebook which recently ruled out banning political ads in other Facebook news the social network has agreed to pay a five hundred thousand pound fine issued by the UK data protection watchdog over the Cambridge analytical scandal ending a year's worth of legal wrangling over the issue as part of the agreement Facebook has made no admission of liability Facebook subsidiary whatsapp is suing the NSO group an Israeli surveillance company alleging it created various whatsapp accounts and caused malicious code to be transmitted by its servers to roughly 1,400 mobile devices for the purposes of spying the NSA group said it disputed the allegations and would vigorously fight them and finally an American company has developed a pair of smart glasses designed to improve concentration and prevent distraction nabis claims sensors in a smart specs measure the wearer's brain activity if they decide the wearer isn't paying attention the glasses darkened preventing them from seeing the distraction the glasses will cost six hundred and ninety dollars may launch in December back in Taiwan one of the biggest causes of healthcare problems is pollution and there's a lot of it as Stephen can smell and see this is Taipei's famous or perhaps infamous scooter waterfall it's one of the main routes into central taipei for thousands of commuters every day it's mind-boggling how many mopeds there are here thousands of them is keep on coming and you know what you really get a sense of just how much pollution these guys probably causing because it stinks it's horrible and I think when you're walking around the city you don't notice but here you really get a sense of it it's really quite disgusting it's not often that you can see smell and even feel the pollution in a place this is an extreme example of a problem that's a growing issue not only in Taiwan but around the world imagine sitting at a stoplight behind a gas scooter that is puffing you know pumping just toxic gas into your face every day this is what people have to go through every day because they didn't have any other option air pollutants will affect your health especially for the respiratory system pollution and congestion is becoming a very very big problem for us as we as everybody is moving into cities and living on top of each other so I've come to Taipei's Institute of information science to find out how they're tackling air pollution here in Taiwan dr. chen is one of the founding researchers behind air box the idea is pretty simple help people better understand and tackle the pollution around them by teaching them to make their own DIY low-cost air sensors since launching in 2015 they've built a network of thousands of community-run air quality sensors across the island initially when people start to use their local sensors to sense their environment they've found a lot of interesting findings which are never reported by local governments so initially the government doesn't like the results but but finally they they realize well this the the real environment people are living today there are over 4,000 of their pollution sensors around Taiwan including one in every primary and secondary school Sal scores may change the schedule so if the air pollution is more severe then they will cancel the outdoor activities research like this has revealed that there are a few major sources of pollution in Taiwan the usual suspects like industry power generation and transports but also a few surprises things like pollution blown across from mainland China and some sources you might not expect at all in Java also in central Iowa there are sound new devices they always show you a purple color there is very very bad and the reason so someone report the reason is the temples uh I went out to investigate and they found because I sauce so what was going on in the temples well by going and taking a look the community discovered the culprit traditional incense burning you know in Taipei are the two major temples the longshan temple and the Shin King Kong there is no incense burning anymore okay yeah because they also install air box and then after some observation they decide to to cancel so it makes a real difference knowing about the impact yeah right solving a problem like pollution almost certainly means changing the way we do things as humans remember this space well this is the same spot a few weeks later and believe it or not a good chunk of those bikes aren't producing any pollution at all this is a publicity stunt for gogoro a Taiwanese startup that's pioneering the uptake of electric scooters in Taiwan Taiwan has the highest density of scooter per capita anywhere in the world as everybody's moving into cities and living on top of each other and the need for adopting electric transportation as a cleaner mode of transportation but here comes the problem chicken and egg right without the proper infrastructure nobody would ever adopt a mobile mobility solution that is electric because charging these big cities are next to impossible and this is gogoro solution to that problem riders own special electric bikes but not the batteries inside them instead when they're running low on power they just visit a station like this to swap out their flat battery and pick up a fully charged one a subscription of around ten to thirty dollars a month gives you access to any of the 1,400 swap stations around Taiwan the more you pay the further you can go so Eric here is very kindly agreed to give me a ride around the block on one of those scooters and you know what it does feel a little bit different the sound is slightly different there's kind of a high pitch high-pitched whine rather than the chug of a motor and otherwise though it feels pretty much like a normal moped I visited go Garos head office just as they were getting ready to launch their newest top-secret scooter this is our new baby right with a lighter weight colorful designs and a grab bag of accessories gogoro is trying to expand the reach of scooters beyond traditional riders but with a price tag of around $2,000 on just one battery instead of two it might not be for everyone the fact that the range is a bit smaller do you think up that matters we see people riding about 15 20 kilometres a day on average in Taiwan this vehicle can provide about 70 to 80 kilometres so you're talking about 3 or 4 days between swap we think that's plenty gogoro estimate that their customers have saved 80,000 tonnes of co2 between them that's roughly 25,000 across the world flights there's no one magic solution to society-wide problems like pollution but it's encouraging to see how Taiwan is leading the way on finding some new ideas Taiwan doesn't look like a place with a population crisis but for many too much hard slog has meant too little time for family some hope for a traditional solution in Taiwan children getting lace and nests so we worry about that so if we want to get a be a family you want to be a by your boyfriend or girlfriend and get married this is city God temple well we got a famous guy is a major making God is for love so that's why so many young people come here and a pretty father for good marriage happiness every year we got a six thousand couples they took six others have turned to tech the hugely successful Singaporean dating out back door has been going strong here in Taiwan people have no time for their personal life especially in tech company during work they are not even to bring their phone in their company either so it's really hard for them to happen no more social life as I met some of those leading the way in Taiwan startup scene it became apparent that especially in the hardware business historically expectations on staff have been high any call you receive you probably need to answer the call and go back to the fam most of time you're working six days or six days and half and the other the rest of half days you still need to be on call so it's come or like a 24 hours but times are changing the world life balance is very very important for this young generation and international influence is often at loggerheads with maintaining Taiwanese tradition Taiwanese people are humble at heart it's built into our Confucius belief system when you manage a u.s. engineering team what happens is usually your job as manager is to try to get everyone to argue and agree on something in Taiwan the issue is trying to get people to argue in the first place this is because they don't offend people they think that their boss should be smarter more intelligent than they are but that's just not the case there have been many positive steps forward though the education raid as raising especially for females so females are more getting into their job rather than family we're starting to see this very interesting cultural shift where entrepreneurship starting your own business is actually a viable pathway to actually sustain a family here but even for those who have made it innovation still comes with its challenges the shared economy when it first evolved in the Bay Area you know with Airbnb and other types of types of businesses it was more of a disruption kind of state you disrupt the the the the kind of existing economy or existing infrastructure it's much more difficult to do that in Taiwan because it's very frowned upon if there's not a law for it you don't try to disrupt the industry first [Music] that's it from clique in Taiwan it seems that exciting times could lie ahead plus hopefully a solution to this pollution problem throughout the week you can keep up with the whole of the clique team wherever they are in the world on Instagram Facebook and Twitter at BBC clique thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 312,064

Rating: 4.8999701 out of 5

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, bbc news, news, taiwan, taipei, pollution, health, science, technology, ai, vr, artificial intelligence, semiconductor, tsmc, htc, asus, acer, moores law, hospital, appler, hipposcreen, gogoro, temple, culture, computer, lara lewington

Id: UvGmhvqrTWU

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ToRedSRT]

Great video! Thanks

[u/hugewarts]

Are lungshan temple and xingtian gong the only places where incense is banned?