NTU-KU Joint Symposium 2020: AI & Smart Medicine for Digital Health

The NTU-KU Joint Symposium 2020: AI & Smart Medicine for Digital Health held on December 16, 2020, was conducted both online and onsite due to the pandemic. The symposium was co-organized by the National Taiwan University Industry Liaison Office (NTUILO), MOST All Vista Healthcare Center (MAHC), and NTU SPARK and sponsored by Quanta Computer, which saw more than 250 participants. To comply with the disease prevention guidelines, the organizers required all participants to have their hands sprayed with alcohol before entering the venue and have their masks on throughout the whole event.

The morning session included the opening remarks from NTU and KU presidents and two keynote speeches and six featured talks given by NTU and KU scholars. The afternoon session mainly focused on the industry, which invited six experts from academia or industry to give talks on industrial technology innovation. In addition to the speech sessions, the symposium also arranged a poster session for both schools and companies to display their research. To engage KU members and participants that joined online, the symposium also displayed digital and audio posters online for them to view in the hope of increasing the opportunities for international cooperation among industry-academia partners and the visibility of NTUILO partners.

The symposium kicked off with the opening remark of President Chung-Ming Kuan (管中閔), in which he highlighted the important bond between NTU and KU. President Kuan said that since 2005, the two schools have signed nearly 30 cooperation agreements and have established active research collaborations and exchanges, as well as opened up collaboration opportunities in 14 research fields. The two schools also signed a strategic partnership agreement on August 5, 2020, to advance mutual cooperation. The joint symposium held this time was intended to encourage the development of AI technology and smart medicine and further deepen the cooperation between the two schools as strategic partners.

The KU President Nagahiro Minato (湊長博) also expressed through the video conference that he looks forward to furthering the strategic partnership between the two schools and expects the two top universities to make far-reaching contributions to the international society.

NTU’s President for Research and Development Pai-Chi Li (李百祺) also shared how the internet is changing healthcare and pointed out that knowing how to extract valuable data for establishing a healthcare open database that supports healthcare services will be the future challenge for healthcare and AI.

The chairmen of Quanta Computer, Barry Lam (林百里), said that we are now mature in 4G, stepping into 5G, and expecting 6G. The mature 4G network makes our life convenient by allowing us to handle multiple tasks on our phones. The 5G age we are stepping into is the age of IoT and smart living. With 6G, we are expecting a world of superintelligence that could potentially benefit surgical practice. Lam said that the current effort is to integrate intelligent automation, data decision analytics, and AI computing to improve digital health and move on to smart medicine.

During the symposium, experts from various disciplines exchanged their ideas on the impact of digitalization on clinical trial, health system, computer-aided diagnosis, mental illness, occupational injuries, and aging society. The symposium also invited the research teams of the partner schools of Global Industry Platform of NTU System, T4 GIP, including National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, National Taiwan Normal University, and Chang Gung University, and NTUILO members such as Robust Technology (聯毅), QNAP Systems (威聯通), ATEN International (宏正), and Quanta Computer (廣達) to introduce their research and display their self-developed technologies in the poster session.