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2018-10-31 Elsevier visit

  • Audrey Tang

    Welcome to the Social Innovation Lab. It’s co-created by hundreds of social innovators. We’re open until 11:00 PM every day. There’s a chef. There’s a kitchen. It’s a really co-creative space.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    You don’t get hungry here.

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  • Audrey Tang

    No.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    Oh, slides.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    We didn’t know what you know about the organization we work in, so we have a quick introduction through the slides and then maybe something where we could explore about...

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  • Audrey Tang

    Is this pubic information?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah. You could share it.

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  • Audrey Tang

    You can send us the PDF. We can publish after 10 days of editing our transcript.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yes. I’ll ask Weiwei.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s good.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    She’s into it.

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  • Audrey Tang

    She’s figuring that out.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    OK. [laughs] I quickly talk and then see what resonates with you and go a little bit deeper. As a quick agenda, maybe the introduction of the group we work for, how digital we are, what we do here in Taiwan, maybe an interesting example from my own country -- I’m from the Netherlands -- and then some topic we could do to possible collaborations here in Taiwan.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    The RELX Group, we help scientists do better science, very important lawyers win their cases. We help doctors treat their patients better and work for the insurance companies as well. There are four big areas. The one we work for is Elsevier. You might have heard of this. It’s a science publisher. You might have published yourself. I don’t know.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, I published.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Very good. We didn’t check your publishing record. Then there’s legal risk business or information for insurance companies. We’re one of the largest exhibitors. Without people knowing when they go to big exhibitions, often they’re done by our colleagues from Reed Exhibitions, like Comic-Con, for instance, if you have ever heard of that one.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    A quick overview. We’re a large company or medium sized. €8 billion in revenues, 33 billion in capitalization. We’re 74 percent digital right now in revenue. More active in North America and then Asia and Europe. Lots of income through subscription model.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    This is a bit how our digital transformation took place -- very happy about that because it’s been pretty fast for 2000. Digital was still a small percentage. Now it’s the vast majority. The orange is face-to-face. People still come to exhibitions in person.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Remained pretty much constant.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. That’s what you would expect, actually. The core drive for our industry is first a deep understanding of our customers, very high-quality content and data sets, good analytics, and also very powerful underlying technology. To go a little bit deeper, this is for the four businesses.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The four groups.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. We’ll just look at for Elsevier. We focus on scientists. We focus on the health professionals. We have amazing networks, 17,000 journal editors, almost a million reviewers. We have 10 million monthly unique visitors that come to our platform. It’s a great example of economy of scale there.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    What kind of data sets do we have? We get 1.5 million article submissions every year. Of those, a third survive. Two thirds are rejected. The ones that survive, they’re usually rewritten two or three times. It’s quality selection and quality enhancement.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Today we have 15 million articles on our platforms, every single one peer reviewed. When you’re a computer scientist, you can trust them, just as I can trust, I guess the ACM or IEEE. We also have database for drugs, for chemicals, etc.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    We do lots of analytics. We have got an example we’ll get into a little bit later specific for Taiwan. Today, we hired lots of technologist, so to say, invest a lot in technology as well. We have technology hubs. One is actually here in Singapore.

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  • Audrey Tang

    How many people in Singapore?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That’s a good question. We can double-check.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Hundreds or dozens?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah, something like it.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    I think it was more than...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    No, it’s more than hundreds and thousands.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s good.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    When I was there, I did...

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s a regional hub.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah, exactly. We’re actually building up on in Amsterdam, where I’m based, which is kind of funny because it’s our headquarters. From a technology perspective, we’re a little bit behind. They always had the big hubs in the US and in the UK.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Good to know. [laughs]

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  • Michiel Kolman

    What do we do with the technology? These are the typical big data solutions. We have all these datasets. How can you make sense out of that? How can you focus on the quality? How can you do entity resolution, the link analysis, the clustering analysis, etc.?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    If we talk about Elsevier, more the science publisher, today’s researcher has many, many difficult tasks to survive. Get grants, get published, do the teaching, attract the right people to work with, start collaborations, keep up-to-date with today’s research. I’m sure there are other things here, but the form size is too small for somebody of my age.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s OK. I can read them just fine.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Because you’re younger.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s right.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    The approach from Elsevier is that we have the big data solutions, we have the rich content, and we have all these networks. If you combine that, it’s quite powerful.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    You see on the next slide, very digital. 81 percent is digital today. Also strong on technology -- lots of machine learning, search, data visualization. One of the big databases we have is called Opus, which is all the digital metric data. Are you familiar with this?

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  • Audrey Tang

    Not very familiar, but I have friends working in that area.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Very good.

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  • Audrey Tang

    There’s a clear pipeline here, right?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yes.

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  • Audrey Tang

    From the publishing, to the storage of data, to the applied knowledge.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. We are still a publisher, what we call a quality information provider. We still very much focus on getting the right content in. This diagram, this is where we see the different segments based on what is called the field-weighted citation impact.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Every discipline has a different way of working. A typical article in the life science will have 50 references, and therefore many more citations. In mathematics, you can write an article from first principles, nothing wrong with that. You can have one reference.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s far more difficult to get citations in mathematics, so you have to compensate for that. That’s why the field-weighted citation impact. It’s a proxy for impact, for quality. Here you see the orange is the Elsevier journals, and then...

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  • Audrey Tang

    The other companies.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    ...other large companies. Springer Nature is one of them and Wiley is one of them, Taylor Francis probably. You see that we do pretty well in the top 10 percent on that field-weighted citation impact. We do very well on the 10 to 25 percent. We do also pretty good 25 to 50 percent. We have very few journals in the lower...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That actually wasn’t the case -- I’ve been with Elsevier for a long time -- 10 years ago, 15 years ago. We really ramped up our quality. That’s something I think we can be proud of.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    This is a bit of the transformation, very high level. Before we were a publisher and we just said, "Here it is. Go and read it." We invested very much like search for exactly the right information. Now, we want to give advice and do the right thing, answer questions.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    When you’re a doctor, we don’t say go and read articles or search for articles. We will try to give you the answer you need to when you’re next to the patient.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Quite active also in managing research data. I don’t know if you know this approach. This is a bit on Nirvana, successful data management. Today, we are already lucky in certain disciplines if data is stored. Sometimes, it’s not even stored let alone preserved.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s accessible. They can discover it. You can cite it. You understand it. It has some kind of quality seal that is reviewed. You can reproduce it. It’s also that you can reuse it. This is a bit like where we want to work towards.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It depends on the field. In our own field, astrophysics, we do a pretty good job. Within chemistry, they’re still struggling at the bottom of the pyramid, so to say. We are developing and we have developed solutions for all these different parts. I’m not saying that we’ve solved everything, obviously, but certainly getting there.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In the government open data strategy, we’re working on the same thing.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Taiwan has been, for two consecutive years, ranked the top country, international, on open data. I think that’s because we have a very firm commitment that everything that is freedom-of-information accessible, it must be provided in a machine-readable manner. It’s not just for the right to know, but actually the right to reuse.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    And the right to search.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Exactly. This doctrine is essentially saying machines are people, too. Just like we need to provide blind people with universal access, we need to provide AI with equal access. The jump from comprehensible to reusable is a strictly followed guideline in all the levels in Taiwan government.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That’s great.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s a part of the pyramid.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Excellent. You see also that it’s used a lot. People find it and they download it and cite it.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It increases trust. People, like in climate research or in air quality, if their data are not compatible, then they are not actually doing science because you cannot compare the different models, which is why we all follow the international standards in such things.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Some of the things we do specific for the datasets. It’s linking from articles to the datasets and repositories. We have our own data repository.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I see we use the same open data license, which makes things very easy.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. We’re active in most of these more technical communities. We want to stay with the right standards as well, and also contribute to developing some of the standards.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    In Elsevier in Taiwan, how many people work here?

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    In the realm of 30 people.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Like a branch?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. We see here on the bottom, we provide the right content, journals and books, a drug database. We also have the right platforms. We already mention Scopus. There’s been Mendeley. It’s a bit of Facebook. You probably have heard of Mendeley. SSRN, this is for the pre-print, which started in the social sciences. We’re now doing it in other areas as well.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Here, to provide this insight, we have the more analytical solutions. You see a little bit like an evolution going from content to platforms to insights.

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  • Audrey Tang

    What’s Engineering Village? This one is new to me.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s a specific collection of data, which start mostly around publications and the citation database for engineers.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I see. What kind of engineer, like civil engineering and so forth?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    All engineering.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Software engineering, everything?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah. It goes back actually a century, so there’s lots of information there. Knovel is also something in the engineering space which we acquired.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    I already mentioned Scopus. It extract the information from 5,000 publishers, certainly not only Elsevier. Then we have this analytic solution, SciVal, which is based on Scopus.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    I’ll skip all the Chinese, but I’m sure it makes sense to you.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It makes sense.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Here, we provide the data for two rankings. Take, for instance, Times Higher Education Ranking. They have this weighted impact of teaching, research, citations, international outlook, and industry outcome. In that, big chunks are provided by Scopus.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Look at the QS World University Ranking. We provide all the citations, so it’s 20 percent. They also use the Scopus database to find the right people to write for the academic reputation. This is kind of a questionnaire. Weiwei’s going to tell you about the very specific ranking we support here in Taiwan.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    We just recently partnered with Global Views...

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  • Audrey Tang

    GVM.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yeah, GVM. They have special list for Taiwan university ranking.

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  • Audrey Tang

    You make have to speak a little bit louder. Sorry.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    This is a special project for Taiwan university ranking. Here you can see five different measurements. For the research component, data comes from Scopus and the SciVal metrics. I think this is in July this year issue. Based on the metrics that we discuss with them, we came out like...

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    You can see on the website. They have four main categories for Taiwanese ranking. One’s for comprehensive university, public university, and also medical university. Different categories use different...

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  • Audrey Tang

    Metrics.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Metrics, yes. The 18 university president came to receive the award. There is a press conference that we hosted. There was a...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Launch event.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    ...award presentation.

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  • Audrey Tang

    You help with four of the five indicators?

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yes.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yep. We don’t do teaching performance. We don’t have that information.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    They also add their own measurement. They add research center and do their own metrics. They combine with ours to come out this ranking.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Societal impact, this is media mentions, right?

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yes.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s a bit of a proxy. [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s totally a proxy, but I’m not going to challenge that. What I’m going to say is that what kind of media links are you doing for so-called online media? Do you mean online media as in other online versions of traditional media, social media, or blogs?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    I think it’s both.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yeah, it’s both.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Certainly, it’s the social media as well.

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  • Audrey Tang

    There’s a social media part analytic in your database?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s called Plum Analytics.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Traditional media, too, like CNN. Any news or any exposure on CNN is traditional news online. This data state also got collected and stored in our database.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I mean more of the independent blogs...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That’s a good one.

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  • Audrey Tang

    ...things like Twitter accounts with a lot of followers, but they are not traditional media.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    No, but certainly the social media is there, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I don’t know all the blogs. That might be more difficult to get a good overview.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s a different world.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    I can double-check.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In humanities, like philosophy and so on, they rely heavily on self-organized forums for societal impact.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly, and that’s where most of the discussion takes place.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Exactly. For example, in mathematics, maybe in Terence Tao’s blog...

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    ...that’s where the conversation happens. It’s, of course, a proxy, but I’m happy to see that you’re including various different forms of social media and online media.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    We’re actually thinking very hard to develop better metrics, also because we get this demand from the universities and the funders. An easy one is economic impact. We can make this link between articles and patents.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s the corporate collaboration part.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    No, actually those are articles which are...

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  • Audrey Tang

    It counts patents.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah, but here the one is mostly the articles which are published by, say, a researcher at a university and a researcher in industry.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That’s academic-corporate collaboration. That’s are easy. For instance, it would also be very interesting for you do research and at some point -- say, in environmental studies -- you shape a new environmental policy.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Policy impact.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s reflected in the legislation. We’re trying to explore that, but it’s very tricky to really follow that path in a way and then really link policy with research.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It would help, of course, if at the end of our policy-making process, we link back to the citation.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Absolutely.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That would help you, right?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah.

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  • Audrey Tang

    [laughs] We have our own government research bulletin board. I’m sure you know about our website. Everything that is publicly funded, we’re now having a policy of having the policymaking context linking back to the taxpayer-paid research. That provides you with a clear back-link to the research that’s done. If that happens to be also published in your database, that’s a very clear link.

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  • Audrey Tang

    We’re using the Sustainable Goals as the primary index.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs?

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, the SDGs...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Perfect.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Which is what I’m wearing.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    ...as the main index, especially for the environmental and social impact, exactly as you said. There’s very few reliable, internationally useful indicators in this area, but SDG at least everybody has agreed to. [laughs] It’s a proxy. I would also admit that, but it’s a good start. [laughs]

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s a start, and this implies that your policies are based on scientific evidence. [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That’s not always the case in all countries, right? [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    I’ll refrain from commenting.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Very good. How is Taiwan doing? We have all the data compared to other countries. Taiwan is in the top 20. It’s number 20.

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  • Audrey Tang

    We’re the global average in the sense of field-weighted citation impact. [laughs]

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. You’re very, very close. Here, we have another graph where you see an interesting correlation. Here again, you see the field-weighted citation impact versus international collaboration.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Countries like Switzerland and my own country the Netherlands, we have loads of international collaboration, of course. We are a bit smaller, so that also forces you. Taiwan is not that huge, either. You see that they do very well within the impact as well.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    One advice that I would also give when I meet a university president, I say, "Can you stimulate international collaboration?" It seems to be really...

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, that it’s a worthwhile goal.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah.

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  • Audrey Tang

    We’re slowly rolling out a bilingual policy where in kindergarten we start, maybe next year, to teach immersive English. By the time they’re grad students, maybe we switch to add English as one of our official languages.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    For master’s level?

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, but his whole process will take a decade or so. Slowly, we’re rolling out English as one...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    You think the language is really the bottleneck?

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  • Audrey Tang

    It is one of the bottleneck. Language acquisition is getting easier with machine translation anyway. This is more of a familiarity of the field. Instead of relying on people to translate, we can now use machine learning and basically jump in into any discussion.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Even though there’s bound to be some errors in machine translation, at least that gets people to know the right people on the international communities. Not afraid of using broken English, because most people are speaking English as the second language anyway...

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  • (laughter)

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Not our mother tongues, either.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s right. Not afraid of publishing in a not-perfect English is one of the psychological barriers that we have to get across.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Absolutely, but a bit also cultural factors. I lived in Japan and I go there a lot. Actually, the number of Japanese scientists willing to go abroad is going down.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I see that.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Here, we compare Taiwan to other countries in output. Taiwan is stable. It’s the green one with the green arrow. The one that really jumps out here is, of course, China. Here you see the international collaboration. Of course, Hong Kong and Singapore do very well there. All the countries are more or less grouped together. A positive is that Taiwan is going up a bit.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    You see the same kind of clustering for the impact. Again, Singapore and Hong Kong are together, and then all the other countries are more or less at the same level. The only thing that really changed over time is China. That was far below the world average already in 2008 and is now on par with the world, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The more people who do science, the greater the total contribution.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah, but this is a quality measurement.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I know.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    You often see it...

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s a good thing.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah. We have lots of detailed data. This is at the university level, just to say that we have that as well if you’re interested. If you want to look at your favorite university, we have that.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I’m a junior-high dropout.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    I don’t have a favorite university.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Sorry, we don’t have your junior high in here.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    We also mapped out Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy. Maybe Weiwei wants to say something about this. I see something upside down.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I think there’s a special report here.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    There’s more analysis in this one. These are aligned with the government policy, using the government’s data to pull out the Southbound countries. Majorly used Southeast Asia. You don’t see Australia and New Zealand here. Usually, we recruit students and new professors from Southeast Asia countries, so that’s why I focused on these countries.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Also, India, of course. There’s a lot of India collaboration.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    You can see India. You can see a lot, in terms of collaboration, Taiwan and India’s. You see India is top one or two.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I’m well aware of that.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    This one is collaboration, publication in these five different areas. The first one you see, in engineering, the country that we collaborate with is India. The second one is in Singapore. You can see different country in different subject areas.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    This one, as you can see, it’s only measured Taiwan research performance in 2012 to ’16. You can see in this I only placed the top four subject areas. You can see engineering is our major focus, and then the second one is medicine, and computer science, physics, and astronomy.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    This chart is different from this. This, you can see what most of the collaboration comes from, which country in different subject area. This, you can see...

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  • Audrey Tang

    The country.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yeah, by country, you can see. With India, the highest collaboration is physics and astrology.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Astronomy.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yeah, astronomy. Sorry. [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    I’m sure they’re very good at astrology as well.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yeah, but they don’t publish much about it.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    You can see the...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    My background’s in astronomy, so I’m sorry, I...

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  • (laughter)

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    I know.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Before we talk about your astrological sign.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    You can see by the number of publications and also the quality of papers.

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  • Audrey Tang

    This is really insightful and very well-prepared. Is there a reason why you choose a lighter color over here? It’s just because it’s less collaboration?

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    No, this is just the design. I send the data to our...

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  • Audrey Tang

    Designers.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    ...the backend design, yeah. This is our...

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  • Audrey Tang

    This is more like your color palette.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    [laughs] That’s right.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It’s very easy on the eyes.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    [laughs] I thought I would bring a Dutch example. We worked with the Dutch government. Essentially, they say, "We want to live in this knowledge economy and to enter our societal challenges, for instance, around affordable food or sustainable food production." The Netherlands is the number one food producer in the world producer in the world after the US, just as an example.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s this mix of technology and innovation policies. You see here how the Netherlands is doing compared to the other European countries. Again, pretty good in quality. Denmark is a little higher, unfortunately. Just in the middle as output, because we’re a mid-sized country or small, whatever you want to look at it. We cannot compete with Germany.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    We looked at specific top technologies and we really zoomed in to very detailed ones. What jumped out is that the Netherlands does pretty well in the life sciences, for instance, stem cell technologies.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Genomics.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. What also jumped out is, for instance, microreactors. This is more chemical technology. Imaging technologies and optical, mechanical engineering solutions.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Then we see, "Who exactly is doing that research?" You see an example here for nanotechnology. This is at the technical university of Delft and Twente. This you see the number of publications and, again, the impacts and who would be their competitors abroad. MIT, CIT, and CRS and what is their quality?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    What will jump out in this whole list is this ASML, which is a company, very big in the Netherlands, but also very active here in Taiwan. I think there are thousands of people working for ASML here in Taiwan as well.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    That’s a bit. Overall, the conclusion of this study is very research-intensive. The Netherlands really perform way about our size. Very good in all these key technologies. We outperform many other European countries. I mentioned already it’s very much in the life sciences, chemical, and engineering.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Very international, more international than others, except for the Swiss, but they’re not in the EU. Then, there’s a very nice mix of mature technologies and new technologies. This is all based on data. This not interviews or expert opinions, this all comes from our database. This is a bit of an introduction.

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  • Audrey Tang

    This is great. Like almost pushing the limit of what two-dimensional media can do.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    I’m sure you’ve used virtual reality. There’s more dimensions to work with.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yes, absolutely.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    Thank you for sharing. This is very exciting work, and certainly, as we already mentioned, in Taiwan we are looking towards expanding more international collaborations. As a minister in charge of social innovation one of our goal for the next four years with the social innovation action plan is to develop a way to measure social impact and environmental impact of academic activities.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In Taiwan, we have a plan called the University Social Responsibility or USR, which is like CSR but better...

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    ...because it can make the students complete their custom projects just by working and focusing on a community issue. Just as you said, maybe they work on biodiversity, maybe they work on ecological economics -- not astrological astronomy.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    Ecology and economy, and to figure out the way for those two fields to bridge together, maybe as a social enterprise or some other way to create value together. If it doesn’t work, it’s science, so people learn from what doesn’t work, because they’re still in the university. Their parents doesn’t feel like is it a failed entrepreneur, [laughs] so maybe it does work.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Then there is academic contribution, so their professor will publish, but then we face a problem of how to define the social and environmental changes. That’s not necessarily policy.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It could be a change in people’s mindset toward endangered species, toward recyclable, renewable materials of viewing plastic not as a waste but as a way to regenerate biofuel or whatever, so it changes a social dynamic, but how do we actually measure that?

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  • Audrey Tang

    Most of the ways we learn from the EU especially is either a SROI, which measures the social return of investment in dollar terms, like how much time or money down the line are we saving by intervening before the social problem happen. That’s one way.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    So a preemptive thought.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Preemptive one. The other one of course is like the...I don’t know whether you know the B Corp Movement, the B Lab Movement that declares a corporation as a benefit corporations meaning that...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    The B is benefit?

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, yeah. The corporate declare for themselves what kind of social environmental and governance impact they have like triple bottom line, in addition to the original bottom line...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Financial, yeah.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The financial ones. This is more of a huge checklist of hundreds of micro items, and they assume that if the company is doing a majority of this well, it’s a well-balanced company that creates certain impact, but as you can see, this is a proxy.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It doesn’t actually measure the actual impact, but actually it measures the shape of governance that could lead theoretically consistently to positive impact. Between those two paradigms, I’m sure that we can develop something that is specific to university and graduate level studies that works on the basis os sustainable goals, but doesn’t end with sustainable goals.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Because the goals just say, "You know, by 2030 we need to be here." They don’t say how are we getting there and whether doing this movement is actually moving forward or backward. It doesn’t say anything about it. [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    I think in the next four years there’s going to be a lot of funding and a lot of academic interest in bridging the corporate ESG accounting and the social return of investment and of dollar conversion into something that can measure the societal impact in a more consistent way that also work across countries.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That is an active area of research study. If you have any insight or anyone you know who has any insight will be totally thrilled to have this conversation.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    We’re also active in the area of the SDGs. We have a SDGs resource center. I’ll send you the link and see if there’s anything in there...

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, we’re integrating that into our curriculum, so anything that helps people to raise awareness is a good thing. We work with international organizations already. There is a GSMA, the association that does the GSM, and they are mobile telco providers and so on.

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  • Audrey Tang

    They are actually shaping their SDGs Explorer like this, so you can very clearly see that we’re in a world by engaging which telco operator, which SDG goals are they making.

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  • Audrey Tang

    We’re going to do the same mapping for social entrepreneurs for USI and CSR here in Taiwan, so we’ll have consistent data maybe down to the target level data for everybody to do data science around. It makes it easier for social entrepreneurs to find the academic support that they will need, because then we’re working on the same goals and targets.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Of course, we should work together. If you have a resource center that is somewhat similar to this shape, I’m sure that we can collaborate more closely.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Perfect. What is this, say, for Taiwan?

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  • Audrey Tang

    There’s quite a few cases for Taiwan telcos, usually the Digital Opportunity Center, and then there’s also UA4G project which makes use of ET. Japan uses the natural disaster recovery which we are doing a compatible called the CI, the Civil IoT project, which you may be interested, because it is the first time that we’re using citizen science data alongside academic science data.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Usually they’re two different worlds, but now we’re making sure that people here are using advanced data science. They can upload their own air quality measurement data, snapshot it, and store on a distributed ledger to make sure that we don’t modify anyone’s data.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In any case, making sure that people can see the whole air quality through citizen IoT, also our law enforcement-based IoT and sensors.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    And it’s measured to smart phones, right?

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  • Audrey Tang

    That is exactly right. There’s citizen science, what we call AirBoxes that are all over Taiwan, and we integrate in a way that ensures their quality.

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  • Audrey Tang

    For places where the citizen scientist cannot go to, for example, I usually use this map where there’s citizen science points that measures the air quality and correlates to the academic research on these things. It shows the digital gap in Taiwan, I guess. [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    These are places where citizen scientists are active, and the universities and environmental protection agency...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    And the color means the quality

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  • Audrey Tang

    The color means air quality, yes, PM2.5 in this case, and of course we flew in the places where the civil society cannot go to like high mountains, and even in the middle of the Taiwan street, because we’re going to have off-shore wind turbines...

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    ...where we’re going to put air quality permanent sensors on all the turbines to help getting the root cause of which air pollution comes from out there or from inside of Taiwan. The important thing is that all this is open innovation meaning that it’s open source.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The data is out in the open so that everybody in the word, even though it’s Taiwan-innovated, they can download and run it locally in Asia and build on this, which in this case informs the Japanese community through code for Japan, so this is a cross-country collaboration right there.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In addition to the Taiwan cases which I talked about, we’re also working with NZ to make sure that our civil IoT for water pipeline, like pressure and flow and so on, can be used to detect water leakage using machine learning.

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  • Audrey Tang

    They didn’t use to have a water shortage problem, but now because of climate change they do, and so they’re partnering with us for three months to codevelop a AI algorithm that works for both countries, and I think this is a new kind of diplomacy. We call this warm power. Not just sharp power, warm power, in the sense that people can share easily.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s the old science diplomacy.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Right, exactly. The real issues that we’re facing with, and making sure that, for example, Italy, just imported our model of budget visualization. This is a Taiwanese round, but they are setting their Italy chapter to do budget visualization.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Controversial budgeting it.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, and analysis and a real-time conversation. What I’m getting into is that this is by Nature International, because of open data, open source, and open science, and any work that you...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    And open access.

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  • Audrey Tang

    And open access. Any work that you have in terms of the environmental data, we’re happy to integrate into the CI system. Which stands not only for civil IoT, but also collective intelligence.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Oh, OK. Good, we’re happy to share what we have. On a more mundane level, the publishing industry is very active also around SDGs. They’re going to launch an SDG book club for children in all the six UN official languages.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    For every month, so for 17 months in a row, there will be books in Spanish, for kids in Peru.

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s great.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Around say, water, or about gender issues in the Arab world for a child in that...

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  • Audrey Tang

    I wrote some system that can take simplified Chinese and automatically produce traditional Chinese.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Oh, OK, all right. The children won’t notice when they read it.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It is one of my early contributions in year 2000 or so. I think BBC and a lot of media use it. If you have those kind of books in simplified Chinese, and you’re willing to contribute to traditional Chinese books, the translation is entirely automatic nowadays. You don’t have to hire a translator.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    I hope it will all be digital, by the way. That’s the assumption here.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah. If it’s paper based, then we’ll have to scan it, anyway.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Exactly. Part of the publishing industry is extremely advanced. You’ve seen Elsevier or Relics. It’s all digital. Till and book publishers are quite conservative.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In Taiwan, broadband is a human right, and we make sure that all the schools have access to broadband access, which is part of our education strategy. Because of that, anything that you publish digitally, you can be assured that the indigenous people, the remote people up in very rural areas, they have equal access to them, including tablets, and so on.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Yes. Very nice. Anything else from your side, Weiwei, you want to bring up?

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    I’m interested to know if any projects that you’re involved in is about to collaborate with the Ministry of Science Technology’s project?

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  • Audrey Tang

    I’m on the weekly Board of Science and Technology meeting, although I’m not the BoST minister. That’s Minister Wu-Jen Cheng. When it comes to digital or technological issues, like the civil IoT, then I personally review the project and lead the technical part of it.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The CI project is actually led by the MoST, although it uses data from the EPA, from the MOEA, from all the different ministries. I think one of our contribution is that we make sure that for such cross-ministerial and cross-municipal projects, we always use a domain name like CI.taiwain.gov.tw.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Our AI strategy is AI Taiwan. Social innovation is SI Taiwan, and our digital strategy being smart Taiwan. Instead of you google and find five ministries I’m sure is very different and confusing message, we make sure that it’s just taiwan.gov.tw now.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The main work that I’m involved with is AI Taiwan, CI Taiwan, SI, for social innovation, Taiwan. All the three have Ministry of Science and Technology involvement.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Last time that I was here, I met with Minister Chen.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, he’s great.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    And smart.

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  • Audrey Tang

    Very, very smart.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It was a very good, good dialogue. He came well-prepared as well, with his team of directors-general.

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  • Audrey Tang

    For AI Taiwan, for example, there’s a grand challenge going on to work on speech recognition, and developing Taiwan-based AI speech recognition that includes semantic understanding and so on.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The next on is going to be IoT cyber security, I think. There’s going to be quite a few sandbox -- that is to say, limited time, breaking the law -- trials on automated vehicles as well, and the fintech sandbox as well.

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  • Audrey Tang

    All of these, although not directly MoST-led, there will be a MoST component in it.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Good, exciting.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Any informational data analysis provided by the STPI?

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  • Audrey Tang

    Yeah, sure, and the NAR Labs and so on.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    We also work with them.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I am aware of that.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    For not just MoST, MOE, for the research performance projects.

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  • Audrey Tang

    What about NARLabs, ITRI, III, as well as the other think tanks?

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yes we have worked with NARLabs, STPI for some projects such as University rankings and researcher mobility but haven’t worked with ITRI and III yet.

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  • Audrey Tang

    OK. Traditionally they work with e.g. the Smart Electronics Industry Project Promotion Office.

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  • Weiwei Cheng

    Yeah, I think ITRI and III probably just focus on how they can directly convert the science work to more commercialization, right? [laughs]

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  • Audrey Tang

    That’s true. What we’re trying to do now with the SDGs, though, is to co-develop a Horizon Project, just like the European Horizon Project, or the Japan Society 5.0. We’re trying to say, "By 2030, we’ll be here, but what about 2050?"

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  • Audrey Tang

    How to get there, and what’s our collective imagination. The think tanks are now tasked with not just applied science, which is always with a horizon with only five years or less, but actually the envisioning of the society.

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  • Audrey Tang

    There’s that part, more like speculative design part, and also a social conversation consultation as well. That actually, you need a lot of scientific, maybe more scientific research and data-backed, because that’s how we to tell the science fiction from science nonfiction, right?

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    As far as I understand, many ministries are working together all toward this common horizon-setting scenario planning. This is a new development, like new as in this year.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Excellent. Any questions from your side?

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  • Audrey Tang

    No, I think this is a great contribution. It’s good to know that in Taiwan, your branch is doing well. If there’s anything that I can help, especially in terms of SDG. That is my main mandate now, is to make sure that our voluntary national review include not only the governmental contributions.

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  • Audrey Tang

    In Taiwan, frankly speaking, the civil society space is expanding, whereas everybody near Taiwan has a shrinking civil society space. We are the most equipped to do social innovation, but it’s not always accounted for. It is not always linked back to research.

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  • Audrey Tang

    The professors, they do a lot of work, but they don’t always reflect that in their scoring.

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  • (laughter)

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  • Audrey Tang

    We really need to build a system where their work in creating social impact...

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Get the credit for that.

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  • Audrey Tang

    ...about getting the credit. The same as you have one of the pillar of the excellence in teaching. We also want to have a pillar in excellence in creating social change. That is more than media exposure, of course.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Which is on the agenda in many countries, but difficult to solve.

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  • Audrey Tang

    It is, which is why we need international collaboration.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    In the UK, for the REF, the Reinsurance Evaluation Framework, they used anecdotes, essentially.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I know.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    It’s difficult to quantify.

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  • Audrey Tang

    I visited the Ministry of DCMS — well, the D and C and M, I have not yet visited the S — they are experimenting with different ways to measure. Many of those are anecdotal at the moment. They are working, of course, with Nesta and folks to try to develop new methodologies.

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  • Audrey Tang

    As far as I know, they all of this are all in early research phases. It’s the same for all of us.

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  • Michiel Kolman

    Good, great. Thank you for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation. We’ll send you a...

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  • Audrey Tang

    The PDF, the digital counterpart?

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  • Michiel Kolman

    A PowerPoint, or a PDF, yes, absolutely.

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  • Audrey Tang

    We’ll publish alongside the transcript, which we can edit together for 10 days.

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