2023-03-23 Conversation with Cisco

And I just would be able to say, so I was looking at Plurality.net, the project you’re working on for a while, it looks really interesting and very timely.

Yeah, we’re in an era where everything can be interactively deepfakes, so we’re thinking about how to restructure the societal infrastructure.

Fascinating, and it looks like you’re publishing it as you write it.

Yes. I’m training a large language model to write in my style. So basically, this is like catechism. I only work on the prompt, like, what questions to ask it, and I calibrate the results, and it’s all inferred on the edge, in this Macbook.

That’s so cool … I didn’t mean to geek out.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about a whole variety of things. So first of all, again, our team here, Cisco Taiwan, is honored to be with you.

Sure.

Your reputation precedes you. Does the best they could to follow you for many, many years. Silicon Valley and elsewhere… it’s just extraordinary what you are bringing to the dialogue and the discipline that we all practice. I’m going to introduce you to a program called TDA, Taiwan Digital Acceleration. Are you at all familiar with the investments Cisco’s been making in Taiwan since 2018?

Yeah, a little bit, in a previous meeting.

Yeah, okay, very good. Well, there’s going to be a…

Hey, hello. Deputy Minister Chiueh, CIO and CISO of our ministry.

So, we have been actively investing in Taiwan since 2018, and by investing, I mean that we have a program that we started almost nine years ago now, when we have 50 different economies that we’re investing in, economies that want to invest in themselves, and we align to their digital agendas, whatever those happen to be.

Mm-hmm.

The nice thing about Cisco is that we’re a good networking company and a great security company.

Now, we have over 1500 individual digitization projects that we have funded and completed, some more successful than others, but most of them have been truly impactful. Closing the digital divide, inclusion, connecting the unconnected, securing the unsecured… I mean that… we’ve done energy, transportation, smart connective cities. If you can digitize it, I think we’d probably funded a project.

Well, we have huge success here with our first round of investments, and we’re here to announce our second round of investments. So CDA, or TDA as we call it here, 2.0, is getting started, and obviously you are our first stop for us, because if there are things you want to experiment with, that you want to try that maybe you can’t find all the right pieces to try it with, we want to be those pieces, we want to be that partner, and I think it’s really exciting that we’re getting to sit down with you at exactly this time, exactly this time. So that’s the quick introduction, and if I may, can I have the team quickly introduce themselves?

Yeah.

Yeah, I’ll quickly introduce myself. My name is Ming Wong. I’m the Corporate VP with Cisco, and I’m with the Asia-Pacific Team, and I’m responsible for the Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong business, and my job is to make sure and enable Steven’s team, he got all the support and resources and everything needed for the Asia-Pacific and corporate level to serve the Taiwan market. It’s been one of our fastest growing markets in the Asia-Pacific in the past three, four years. We literally doubled our business in Taiwan in the last four years. Of course with the help of the CDA program that Guy just mentioned.

Great, thank you, and this is my card.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Steven. Nice to meet you again. So this is our team, Taiwanese company bring more resources like we have Guy, and my boss Ming, support to bring more resources to Taiwan. It’s our commitment to follow up action of previous meeting.

Excellent.

Hey, minister, nice to meet you. I’m Guy’s chief of staff, and it’s a pleasure to be here in Taiwan. I think it’s an exciting time, so I look forward to hearing from you on what your priorities are and how we can map to those.

Cool.

I’m Alan, I’m the chief responsible for government-centered telecom and thank you for meeting with us. So, we are here to invest in Taiwan, hopefully we have a win win situation, done a lot of case study of smart city and cybersecurity.

Great. Thank you.

My name is Hoon Park. I am based in Seoul, South Korea. I belong to Guy’s organization, and I manage our programs in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and other countries in APEC, and it’s very exciting to be here, and it’s an honor, I’ve been looking forward to this meeting. Thank you.

Welcome.

This is Robert from Cisco Taiwan, again. It’s really nice to meet you again.

Hello Nice to see you again, I’m Irene, and I’m responsible for Taiwan TDA program. Yeah, thank you.

Great. So this is Dr. Chiueh.

So, I’m Herming Chiueh, I’m the deputy minister here. Before I came here, I was a professor in electrical engineering, so I’m currently CISO and CIO in this organization.

Hi I am Wei-Jan, I’m architect in Moda. I help build the Moda infrastructure and other services for the department..

He’s our architect. We’re his spokesperson.

So you work for them.

That’s right, exactly. Usually, it’s like this.

It’s great.

Okay, so would DM like to say something? Any priorities that you would like to explore?

Well, I think I met Cisco Taiwan many times, so…

So, on this 2.0, so to speak, what are your priorities or areas that you’re interested in?

Well, so, we align to yours, but what we’ve heard thus far from various ministries and engaged officials in TDA 1.0… are around definitely security.

Yeah.

So yes, that’s how you get your Cisco certifications. It’s also how you get your cybersecurity certifications now. It’s also how you can learn Python and probably the other programming languages, penetration testing and a number of other things.

Oh yeah, definitely.

That’s a conservative figure.

Oh, yeah.

So that’s it. That’s the down and dirty.

That’s great. Yeah, so Dr. Chiueh is currently working with our national institute of cybersecurity on exactly the alignments of AI around diversity — not just diversity in cultures, but also diversity in modalities.

Like in Taiwan, sign language is a national language, so that’s an extra modality that we would have to support. If you have seen the Central Epidemic Command Center daily 2PM press conference during the pandemic, each and every one of it has a sign language interpreter, so there’s a lot of those data for us.

Of course, it stems and translates into Hakka and other languages, and we’ve chosen this for two reasons. One is that evaluation in alignment by the language community is easier, because the input and the output is of a comparable size. If this is generated from a few questions, it’s hard to evaluate. But for translation—culture translation and multi-modality translation—it’s easy to evaluate, so that’s what we’re going to focus on. For instance, we’ll give equal opportunities to the various different communities in Taiwan in order for them to become cybersecurity analysts because we expect that humans will not write most of Python code by hand, soon, maybe in a few months from now.

Yeah, I’ve written more code in the past three months compared to the past six years.

Also, I’ve got this local model, LLaMa 65B, running on this MacBook Pro with 96GB RAM, instructed with the source code, and just locally can replicate quite a bit of results.

Really?

Yes, you just tell it what to write, and it’s like disposable, like these things, right? picks up business card The Industrial Revolution made this disposable in the sense that you can mass manufacture it according to your need, and the same goes for Python coding now, and specifically Python, because Salesforce CodeGen trains on Python.

With GPT and similar language models, we’re looking for ways for people not very fluent with English and not very fluent with specific subset of Mandarin that the coders in Taiwan use in their comments, if they speak Taigi or sign language and so on, they can also join this cognitive revolution, without getting left behind. This is one of our priorities this year.

There’s a point that they brought up with the Google VP the other day, so it’s on public record. So we get asked by the legislators, all the time, why Google Translate behaves in a certain way that it writes traditional Mandarin, but with a specific way of translating things that doesn’t fit with local cultural expectations, to be politically neutral here.

Oh, very good.

Right, and the same for the CDA (Country Digital Acceleration) / TDA (Taiwan Digital Acceleration) thing, right? So basically, when we talk about cultural translation, we don’t just mean an AI that takes a bunch of text that works in a certain jurisdiction and make it work in the other jurisdiction. But also, the guardrails, the value guardrails as well, what we’re essentially looking at is a set of system prompts, right?

In OpenAI GPT4, you can give it a system prompt, like its personality. In Anthropic Claude, they instructed them to be, I think it’s… harmless, honest, and helpful. That order is important, I guess.

For those basic rules, they instructed them with a series of cultural sensitive trainings, but just as the example you pointed out, with the face masks, these are the cultural choices of certain designers in the Silicon Valley, somewhere in San Francisco, and it may or may not match perfectly with the local community’s expectations, and then our expectations in the legislation may not actually meet with, for example, the indigenous nation, which has its own identity and want to be referred to as a nation within Taiwan, I mean, which is very fractal, I guess.

So, right, the point I’m making is that it needs to be instructed and tunable, every layer, and the way we naturally do that is by collecting conversations and expectations of those conversations, so-called alignment assemblies and so on, might need to be bootstrapped on that, so this is actually a wider-range project that would also have value for the journalists as well and the many communication experts.

I’m going to stop now because all I’m doing is thinking of projects.

I’m not gonna speak for you guys [gestures toward his team members] Would you like to share your thoughts?

I understand you’ve already met President Ho of NICS?

I see you have.

I’m not confident [laughs].

They run the show. Without them, we’re nothing.

So what would we like the next step to be? I mean, I’m guessing that you have just a wealth of ideas that you have places you want to go. We want to go with you, and it’s just a matter of making sure that the right connections are made so that we have a next step. What is absolute top of mind for you? If you were going to pick a single project, given everything we just talked about, just one that we can start tomorrow.

And we wanted to be, really, a place where not just the threat of intelligences, but also as you said, an overview of what’s actually going on so that junior people, instead of learning things piecemeal or other exercises and so on, they can go to the NICS and then take on these interactive simulations, participate in a kind of life replay of the actual red team assault, and understand what are the strategic parts, because, as I mentioned, the tactical parts are all being automated now, so this strategic view is the most important thing for NICS. I thank you for providing that.

Yeah. So this is Dr. Chiueh’s…

The CISO’s…

So we said publicly that this year we’re focusing on three things. One is the integrity of communications in the event of submarine cable malfunction due to some fishing vessels, I’m sure.

Yeah. “Earthquakes.” Natural or not-so-natural disasters. So these are, of course, communication resilience, one of our top priorities. And with that, we’ve worked with pretty much all the public clouds for them to offer local zones, local computation. We work with the MEO and LEO providers to ensure that there’s decentralized mutually backup solutions for communication resilience so that the earthquake will have to destroy multiple vendors’ infrastructures to totally close off our communication posts internally, which is the outside at this point. And the second is the co-prosperity of journalism, including professional and civic journalism, with the largest digital platforms. This is so that interactive defects posing as news will not get any eyeball, and actual civic journalistic work will get the authenticity, for example, around election counties and so on. That can actually travel faster than those interactive defects. So that’s the journalism part.

And finally, we want to, as quickly as possible, switch all the places in our government and critical infrastructure that has national personal data to switch that entirely into zero trust architecture that makes sure that, even if the attacker takes over, my biometrics or my device, they cannot fully simulate my behavior pattern, because maybe I’ll be the target of the next spear-phishing, and my account may be compelled to do things that I wouldn’t usually do, right? And in those events, it will have to stop my account from doing things.

So this kind of ZTA is actually, we planned it for the four-year, but we accelerated to the end of the year for the current T-road agencies, the agencies that are already connecting through T-Road — similar to X-Road — to exchange personal data. So this is also our priority. So yeah, so there’s ZTA, the journalistic and the communication resilience, that’s the picture. I’m just being a spokesperson.

Well, I’m sure that there are ways that we can interact and that we can contribute to that. That’s just a matter of getting, I know you guys talk, so you’re going to probably talk after this and figure out something. But I also want to make sure that, you know, this is a journey and we want to be alongside you for that journey.

Well, that question has been asked since the invention of fire, right? And there are civilizations that are really destroyed by fire. And fire is democratic in the sense that really anyone can see that it perfectly aligning with civilization is not easy, which is why we have dedicated firefighters, which is why we teach fire safety at a very tender age. It’s called cooking classes, and so on. And we need to adapt to this general-purpose AI exactly as the civilizations adapted to fire, and the civilizations that didn’t will get destroyed by fire. That’s exactly what will probably happen.

And you saw that.

I saw that, yes.

And it looked pretty good.

Yes.

Yeah.

And this is happening before our eyes… Ozone was healed, I guess, now, thanks to coordinated action. So I think there should be a lot of coordinated action now to ensure that.

So I was talking to Herming the other day. Maybe we should revamp our digital signature act. Maybe we should establish a trust system anchored on PKIs and DIDs to ensure — for example, unless online investment advertisements carry a proof that it’s from a financial institution, through signatures or verifiable credentials, everything else is considered scam.

We just passed today in our cabinet meeting an increased penalty, even criminal penalty, for deepfake scams and robocalls and so on. Previously, that was reserved to broadcast media. But now we see that micro-targeting on a mass scale is not broadcast, it might just be worse than broadcast.

Yeah.

So it deserves like stricter punishment than traditional broadcast propaganda. But then not all jurisdictions see things this way, and currently not all jurisdictions work together on this. And we had a similar like the previous AI in 2013-14, the recommendation systems in social networks. Every jurisdiction responded very differently.

Back then, the PRC regime responded essentially with zero tolerance, zero hate, I guess, and enlisted significant cybersecurity capabilities to make sure that the so-called civil society, even that word, cannot appear in their internet, and their journalists, of course, suffered for it. I guess it’s a kind of lockdown strategy for COVID, I guess.

What we did instead was digital competence in education, so that all of our children and also elders become participating journalists in fact-checking. And that’s how we survived that particular AI disruption to the fabric of trust. But now with targeted spearphishing and interactive deepfakes, we need to do something like that, upskilling for the civic journalists, again, and on a coordinated scale.

Right? And you can almost feel like you’re on the precipice. But it’s moving so fast.

Yeah, definitely. I’m raising this issue at the upcoming Summit for Democracy. And hopefully we can all work to align things better this time. This is like working on counter-pandemic before it gets to communities.

You got it. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what we think about that.

Okay.

Well, thank you for going off script with me for a little bit. Alright, anything else from the team? Because there’s a lot of opportunity here, clearly.

I think that we still will do the continuing of team work with. And Minister, if you need any support or any questions, just let our local team know. Then we can get more resources and experts to work together with Taiwan.

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much.

So I think that may be something that we can explore to be able to get the consistent platform. Because WebEx is not just a conference tool as all of you may know. It’s instant messaging, it’s calling, it’s meetings and everything.

I use WebEx every week with my students.

So I think that may be something we can explore as well. So those are the things that I can think of. And as I just mentioned, my job is to make sure Steven and Robert get everything they need, basically.

Last August, I asked Wei-Jan this question. Some people are still using passwords. Can we get them off passwords by the end of the year? Not very easy.

We do have some ideas in the area as well.

And some public servants are still using LINE for work. Can we get them off of it? That can be even harder.

Wei-Jan had the idea that maybe it’s not the particular applications, it’s about the protocol. Because we know the EU already, through the Digital Market Act, have interoperability requirements. So at some point, it wouldn’t matter what software the host uses. It would become like email. So you run Exchange, that person runs Gmail. That doesn’t matter. You can still send emails. So this kind of end-to-end secure interoperability is something that we will also talk to Signal.

Because currently, if all the submarine cables are cut, we don’t get to send Signal, because it’s not located here. But if it can be interoperable and federated in some way, like with the Matrix protocol, it will be much easier.

I’m not sure if you’re aware, we actually demonstrate our WebEx talking to the Space Shuttle. Not Space Shuttle now, it’s basically the Space Center, the International Space Center. Over, we have a special kind of encryption and compression algorithm to get the standard WebEx kind of communication over the satellite network up to the Space Center, which is very interesting, actually.

Definitely. Thank you.

Awesome, Thank you.

Thank you, You’ve been very generous with your time, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks very much, and I’m sure you’ll have continued communication. Pick something quick. Let’s do something early, and let’s figure out how to work together and that will start the journey. And I hope I get to come see you next time I come back, and we can see how progress is going. Is that good?

Yes. Let’s rebuild the fabric of trust.

Thank you, indeed.

Thank you

Thank you, Minister. So good. Thanks.