Academicians and government representatives from India and Taiwan gathered together at an online meeting to promote a 'start pandemic prevention' system to further the bilateral cooperation between the two countries for the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. 

The 'start pandemic prevention' system, developed by the National Chung Cheng University (CCU), automatically detects body monitoring, facial recognition and performs social contact analysis. 

CCU installed the system at the entrance of a few of its academic building last year in March; the same system was deployed in the buildings of Sri Ramaswamy Memorial (SRM) Institute of Science and Technology in July, last year. The system uses a thermal camera to detect body temperature and can help in contact tracing if necessary, as it also collects data on student movement on the campus. To address data security, the system does not upload the data on a cloud.; it operates through AI computing. According to CCU Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering professor Hsiung Pao-ann, both CCU and SRM contributed funding for the project. 

Taking this collaboration forward, in May, both the colleges intend to start working on a project to detect fabricated news and videos. "The project would be related to fabricated news, as demonstrated by a video that went viral online a few years ago showing former US president Barack Obama making phoney speeches," said Hsiung.

"Taiwan-India cooperation in technology focuses on engineering, information technology and sciences, said Wang Chin-tsan, Director of the Science and Technology Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India, who was present at the conference. Chadaram Sivaji, Director, the Indian Department of Science and Technology International Cooperation Division also joined the conference.