Chiayi, Tainan and Taoyuan have been named among the top seven Intelligent Communities for 2018, the New York-based think tank Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) said on Thursday.
The other four nominees in the list are Ipswich, Australia, Hamilton and Winnipeg, Canada, and Espoo, Finland, the forum said.
The forum said that one of the seven cities will be chosen as the Intelligent Community of the Year to succeed Melbourne, which was the top city last year.
The award is to be announced in London at the Intelligent Community Forum’s Annual Summit, held from June 4 to June 6.
“The successor to Melbourne will come from one of four countries this year,” ICF cofounder Louis Zacharilla said in a statement on the think tank’s Web site.
“Even though these places are diverse and spread across the world, they share an emphatic effort to use broadband, open data and other digital tools to humanize policy and remove anxiety from daily life,” Zacharilla said.
The seven cities were selected from the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2018, named by the ICF in October last year, referring to 21 cities, counties and rural communities that have applied digital tools to building local societies so that they can prosper in an age of “digital disruption.”
It was the first time Tainan was named among the top seven cities, while Chiayi was nominated for a second time, and Taoyuan for a third time.
Taipei and Taichung were awarded the title in 2006 and 2013, respectively.
Candidates are evaluated based on six major indicators: broadband environment, knowledge workforce, innovation ability, digital equality, intelligent environmental sustainability and advocacy for positive change in an intelligent community.
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