The UK Tech Rocketship Awards are open to Taiwan for the first time and six Taiwanese firms would be invited to join London Tech Week in June, the British Office Taipei said yesterday.
More than 58,000 people attended the London Tech Week in June last year, which held more than 300 events, its Web site showed.
“We’re already seeing a strong increase in the number of innovative technology companies taking advantage of what the UK has to offer through expansion, enjoying the lowest corporate tax rates in [the] G20,” British Representative to Taiwan Catherine Nettleton was quoted as saying in a statement, encouraging Taiwanese firms to use the program to expand their global reach.
Photo: CNA
For applicants to qualify for the awards, they must be companies that supply innovative and technology-led solutions and which have had trade operations for more than two years, the office said.
The awards for Taiwan are divided into three categories — artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, technology for an aging society (life sciences) and future mobility — with two firms to be selected for each category, the office said, adding that categories are set according to each participating nation’s strengths.
The awards for Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea include other categories, such as clean growth, agricultural technology, or connected consumers and creativity, while AI is a category for all countries except Japan.
The term AI remains ubiquitous in the global tech media, even though its hype peaked in late 2011, and the data science cluster is taking center stage in emerging technology, the UK’s Tech Nation Report for last year said.
“While the US, China and Israel have significantly more mature, late-stage AI companies, the UK ecosystem remains dominated by start-ups,” with only 3.2 percent of all high-growth tech company births in 2017 specifically related to AI, the report said.
Applications from Taiwanese firms would be accepted through April 13 and winners are to be announced on May 11, with selected teams able to join London Tech Week from June 8 to 12, the office said.
The office would sponsor the round-trip flights of one representative from each selected company, it added.
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