A team from National Taiwan University (NTU) is in the UK with 30 teams from around the world to compete in this year’s Hult Prize Challenge, with the top prize being a US$1 million start-up fund.
NTU’s “interWellness” team — consisting of students Joyce Chen (陳敏而), Sandy Tsai (蔡岑珊) and Lin Fang-ju (林芳如) — won a regional challenge in April to represent Taiwan at the competition.
The Hult Prize Challenge is an annual competition that crowd-sources ideas from university students to solve a pressing social issue.
Photo courtesy of Joyce Chen
With the theme of “Food for Good,” the goal of this year’s challenge is to create jobs, stimulate economies, reimagine supply chains and improve outcomes for 10 million people by 2030, the organizers said.
The team is using the challenge as an important learning opportunity and a chance to do things that are “meaningful and impactful” for the world, said Chen, a second-generation Taiwanese-American.
Chen said that interWellness is a platform that enlists the help of nutritionists and chefs to offer diet-friendly meals to people with chronic kidney disease.
After repeatedly updating their business model, the team registered interWellness as a company in Taipei and opened for business a week ago, Chen added.
The team is one of 30 that qualified to participate in the Hult Prize this year after 30,000 teams participated in the preliminary round.
The 30 teams are in the UK, participating in a five-week global accelerator program. At the end, only six teams will move on to the finals, with the winning team to receive US$1 million in seed capital next month.
During the accelerator program, the 30 teams are being housed at an English castle, Chen said.
As well as preparing for the challenge, the team has made trademark Taiwanese snacks — pineapple cakes and cream puffs — to give to the other teams and promote Taiwanese culture, she said.
Chen said that her Taiwanese parents raised her in Fremont, California, but that she came to Taiwan to study at NTU four years ago.
The decision was “one of the best decisions I ever made,” she said, adding that it also improved her Chinese-language skills.
“Now I can read books in Chinese, and be closer to my friends and relatives in Taiwan,” she said.
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
TRAPPED IN CAMBODIA: A woman said that a job offer in Cambodia led to her being imprisoned in a fenced industrial park, where she was sold four times in a week An inter-ministerial task force has been set up by the Executive Yuan to tackle the issue of Taiwanese being lured to Cambodia with promises of high-paying jobs, but getting stuck there as targets of human trafficking, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said on Thursday. Legislators, including Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) of the Democratic Progressive Party, told a news conference that a task force should be set up to address problems exposed by reports of Taiwanese being lured to Cambodia, Myanmar and other countries with promises of lucrative jobs before being forced into illegal work while being subject to abuse. Later in the
RSS