Commentary: How Taiwanese Smart-City Tech Can Benefit Georgia Communities

Editor’s note: At the invitation of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, with support  from the Taipei Computer Association, Michal Jensby traveled to Taipei to report for Global Atlanta from the Smart City Summit and Expo in March. 

Almost as soon as I arrived in Taipei to cover the world’s second largest smart-cities conference, I was treated to an unplanned demonstration of the power of these technologies to meet citizens’ needs. 

On my first night, after ordering food to go near the Zhongxiao Fuxing Station, a friend and I returned via cab to my hotel to catch up and eat. 

We’d been chatting for half an hour when we began comparing the populations of Taipei and Atlanta, so I went to grab my phone to look up the numbers, only to find that it was nowhere to be found.

After some frantic retracing, we deduced that I’d left it in a local cab, about which we had basically no information. I began kicking myself that we hadn’t used Uber.

While we could track the phone moving through Taipei using the location pin shared with my husband, I was fully resigned to it being gone. If you lose your phone in the U.S. and over half an hour elapses, you know you’ll never see it again.

We headed down to the police station to report the phone lost and were told by the two young officers, one in the midst of eating noodles, that they would contact us if the phone turned up. 

After hearing us explain the situation, one officer ushered us over to a computer in the lobby, turned on the monitor and typed in a password. We suddenly could see every CCTV camera in every major intersection of Taipei, laid out like Google Maps with camera icons showing the direction each camera was facing. 

After fewer than 20 minutes and a couple of orienting questions, the officer tracked down the license plate of the cab, identified the driver in his system and called him directly to ask if my phone was in the back seat. By some miracle, it was. The driver dropped it off at another police station, and we went in another cab and picked it up. The whole ordeal lasted less than an hour. 

The experience had a tangible effect on how I viewed the 2024 Smart City Summit & Expo, where Georgia cities would be honored for innovative projects including some of the same technologies that helped me: cameras monitoring intersections and a digital twin project aiding license-plate identification. 

On the exhibition floor and in conference panel discussions during the next three days, I would come face-to-face with the latest smart-city technologies from around the world and would hear leaders from Taoyuan (Taipei’s airport city) and the Georgia cities of Woodstock and Warner Robins assert that the defining aspect of a smart city is utilizing technology to deliver value to constituents, the essence of improving governance. 

While I wondered what everyday Taiwanese citizens felt or knew about the amount of surveillance and data collection occurring to make the island a leader in such technologies, I couldn’t deny the efficiency and value of having it available when I needed it.

A key takeaway from my interviews with Warner Robins Mayor LaRhonda Patrick and Woodstock Mayor Michael Caldwell was that no matter their size, cities in Georgia can save money and deliver better experiences without breaking the bank. The key is adopting an innovative mindset. 

The Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN), based at Georgia Tech, has been working to do just that and played an integral role in introducing both participating cities to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. 

“Being at the expo and seeing so many examples of new technology and different ways to use existing technology really helps us evaluate project proposals and to choose the most cutting-edge and the most impactful tech to apply in our communities,” Katie O’Connor, community research manager at PIN, told us. 

Indeed, once we got over the intimidation of the expo floor, where flashing lights and neon signs announced slogans like “AI is Everywhere” and “Smart Living,” we were treated to multiple demonstrations.

At iPhone contract manufacturer FoxConn’s CityGPT booth, we were asked to test their chatbot which was integrating a lot of siloed information from both public and government open sources. You could ask about popular tourist attractions or about public records on city planning or transportation. We asked, “Hey Foxconn, where are the most popular dumpling spots in Taipei?” After a few seconds where a large graphic of a brain simulated connecting dots, it gave us a clunky answer no different than Siri or Google might provide. 

Later in the day, we encountered a chatbot AI “Mayor” that could answer questions you might ask a city official or public servant – things like specific recycling days for glass, or when to file taxes or pay a ticket. 

This seemed to me like a much more practical use of a chatbot tool – synthesizing a lot of data a city might want their citizens to know, while potentially saving resources being used on daily, run-of-the-mill requests.

This was just one instance showing that the most complex solution is not always best. Amid booths on artificial intelligence, data-collection devices and innovations in parking and electric-vehicle charging tech, the chief of Taoyuan’s innovation section told us one of his favorite deployments was a QR code system placed in the stalls of the metro station bathrooms so users can quickly alert maintenance staff which stalls might need attention.

“This application is rather simple. And yet it’s a very potent solution,” said Hsieh-Hung Cheng.. 

After seeing such a practical application, it’s hard not to look around at other ways to improve cities, which is presumably why the conference attracted some of the biggest names in Taiwanese and foreign tech to the conference — Far East Communications, FoxConn, ChungHwa, Qualcomm, to name a few — as well as incubators like Startup Island and Startup Terrace, which are smoothing the way for entrepreneurs in this space. 

In some cases aided by PIN, Georgia cities are already experimenting with technologies similar to what Taiwanese companies and cities are developing and deploying. Here are three examples: 

Monitoring urban waterways. The same week Woodstock and Warner Robins broke into the Smart21 of the Intelligent Communities Forum, the west Georgia city of Columbus was also honored for its use of a digital twin to evaluate water flows and create a search-and-rescue plan for its whitewater rafting course along the Chattahoochee River. Taoyuan, meanwhile, showed us sensors monitoring its nearby rivers for pollution. 

Traffic and road maintenance. Mayor Caldwell of Woodstock showed particular interest in cameras that could detect modified exhaust pipes on scooters, pairing with license-plate readers to issue citations where relevant. Mr. Caldwell wondered whether an audial system could pick up violators of the city’s noise ordinance. Woodstock and Savannah have already utilized Roadbotics — a system introduced by the French firm Michelin, to evaluate road quality. 

Autonomous and electric mobility. While not represented at this conference, the city of Peachtree Corners in Gwinnett has been lauded for its use of public infrastructure for pilots of autonomous and electric vehicle technology, netting a IDC Smart 50 Award for its efforts to develop a city street of the future. Curiosity Lab maintains a partnership with Taipei’s Startup Terrace, through which five Taiwanese companies pitched their solutions during a virtual launch and MOU signing in 2022. Noodoe EV, a charging station provider with a built-in payment solution, set up its first installation in the U.S. at Curiosity Lab. 

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It may have been a bit challenging to navigate the conference floor, where countries like South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Turkey and the Czech Republic operated booths and companies like Asus and Prologium showcased parking solutions and solid-state battery research, respectively. 

But it was worth weaving through cute AI characters and show girls in white dresses to converse with companies over sound systems that competed for guests’ attention. 

As I learned personally, there’s a reason Taiwan has a megaphone in the global smart-city arena.