The Ministry of Science and Technology is to work with Uber Technologies Inc to cultivate talent for the development of autonomous driving systems, it said yesterday, adding that it would send domestic talent to intern at the firm’s headquarters in the US.
Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Hsu Yu-chin (許有進) last week led a delegation of Taiwanese start-ups on a visit to the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, after they presented their firms at this year’s CES gadgets expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, which ended on Jan. 12.
The ministry has invited Uber Taiwan to serve as a corporate partner of its Taiwan Tech Arena incubation platform, which opened at the Taipei Arena in June last year, Hsu said, adding that the two sides would organize networking events together.
The ministry is also planning a bilateral talent cultivation program, in which it would send domestic high-tech talent on internships at the Uber headquarters for six to 12 months, Department of Academia-Industry Collaboration and Science Park Affairs official Huang Kuan-yu (黃冠毓) said.
The internship program would prospectively offer doctorate holders with high-tech expertise subsidies during their internships, Huang said, but added selection details are still in the works.
The ministry last month opened an overseas office in Boston to expand Taiwan-US collaboration in technology, the fifth one following offices in Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston.
In related news, Taiwan’s first closed test track for autonomous vehicles , covering about 1.75 hectares, is to open in Tainan in the second half of next month, an official said yesterday.
High-ranking officials from different ministries are to join the inaugural ceremony, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater