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By Chiueh Tzi-cker 闕志克
After years of deliberation, planning, coordination, laws and recruitment, a extremely anticipated new Cabinet-level company, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, was accredited by the Legislative Yuan in December final 12 months and is to be formally established and begin operations subsequent month.
Officially, the ministry is tasked with masking 5 sectors: info, telecommunications, media communications, cybersecurity and the Internet.
Part of the brand new ministry’s duty is the institution of digital infrastructure to help coverage areas, together with info safety safety, wi-fi and broadband communications, and the digitization of presidency.
However, its most essential mission is to carry to bear the complete would possibly and assets of a Cabinet-level company to advocate, advance and facilitate the event of business segments in which Taiwan is usually thought-about to be much less aggressive globally. These are data, info know-how providers, software program, media content material and digital content material.
Focusing on the data business, the concept that it’s the “21st century’s oil” has grow to be extensively accepted. In the digital economy, person data and content material may be exploited to boost the effectivity of day-to-day operations. This is obvious in that 4 of the world’s 5 most precious firms by market capitalization closely exploit person data to enhance the standard of their services, and to extend their competitiveness.
In Taiwan, the idea of a “data economy” has been prevalent since President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) first time period in workplace. For the previous couple of years, the federal government has made some effort to facilitate a data economy, together with by promulgating private privateness safety rules, opening up government-owned non-personal data, growing data de-identification applied sciences, and standardizing codecs and protocols for data sharing.
However, the cumulative progress up to now has not been as spectacular as anticipated, regardless of vibrant data analytics and the fixed emergence of synthetic intelligence (AI) start-ups.
A serious thrust in a data economy is enabling a number of data sources to be aggregated to totally extract their collective worth.
However, in Taiwan it’s tough to share data from disparate sources, if not unimaginable. The foremost impediment isn’t data privateness, however possession safety. When the proprietor of a data set agrees to share it, how their possession rights and pursuits are protected isn’t clearly outlined.
As a outcome, despite the fact that everybody agrees that the National Health Insurance database is a treasure trove for novel biomedical purposes, no such business exploitation is feasible as a result of its proprietor, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, insists that the database be accessible solely by licensed personnel who’re on web site, by no means over a community.
To take the data sharing problem one step additional, contemplate a number of hospitals which can be considering whether or not to contribute their very own medical report databases to a world pool for business utility.
They have two foremost considerations:
First, easy methods to retain possession of the data and be sure that their database isn’t stolen.
Second, easy methods to pretty estimate the contributions of their database to the outcomes of the cooperative effort to calculate revenue distribution.
In the previous few years, “federated learning” know-how — also called collaborative studying — has been touted as an answer to deal with the primary concern. In actuality, it’s a partial answer at greatest, as a result of it solely ensures {that a} data set by no means bodily leaves its proprietor, however doesn’t forestall an adversary from stealing it by coaching an AI mannequin and piggybacking a part of it onto the AI mannequin, which is finally despatched out.
This technique of stealing data has been efficiently demonstrated — it isn’t merely a theoretical menace.
As for the second concern, the state of affairs is much more grim, as no sensible options have emerged.
To allow extra pervasive data sharing and collaboration, which might assist speed up the event of Taiwan’s data economy, the digital affairs ministry ought to make one of the best of the contemporary political capital related to being a brand new company and develop a government-backed data sharing platform that successfully addresses the 2 considerations, maybe utilizing some mixture of technological options and statutory protections.
Chiueh Tzi-cker is an affiliate professor at National Tsing Hua University.
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