Strong Ambitions are motivating Thailand’s Electronic and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec). It aims to build the advanced technology ecosystem for the country.

To do that it needs to work out how to bring advanced technologies – including advanced sensors, artificial intelligence, and unstructured Big Data – to widespread commercial use throughout the economy, says Chai Wutiwiwatchai, Nectec’s director.

Under its strategic mission, Nectec will focus on eight advanced technologies in the next four years. First is the Thai People Map and Analytics Platform (TPMAP), based on Big Data concerning the Thai population, and which comes along with cybersecurity. TPMAP’s first data set consists of health, education, address, spending and financial information.

It would included a marked increase in collaboration between 11 organisations on collecting welfare data, and it will be completely integrated during this year.

“It is the Big Data strategy of the country, as well as data governance,” said Chai.

Second is a precision farming mission to drive smart agriculture. Nectec aims to support decision-making around technology, including an AgriMap and a precision control system, moving from fragmented implementation to integrated deployment throughout the whole nation.

Nectec is talking with IBM Thailand in order to collect satellite remote sensing to support the precision farming mission. It is also working with Mitr Phol to launch a pilot for precision sugarcane farming with the use of remote sensing technology using AgriMap.

“We aim this year to build a significant impact from our precision farming initiative throughout the country [advancing it beyond] fragmented pilot areas,” said Chai.

Third is the “smart factory” to support Industry 4.0. Nectec will establish the Cyber-Physical System Centre (CPS) as a demonstration centre, showing embedded systems, Internet of Things and other technologies used in the plant.

“In Thailand, there are a lot of manufacturing plants that need technologies to help improve their competitiveness and capability. This centre will play the role of a demonstration centre and to test the systems, as well as to simulate how the smart factory system works,” said Chai.

The centre will be established this year, first locating at the pilot plant in Science Park before expanding to the Eastern Economic Corridor of Innovation (EECi) over the next two years.

Fourth is advanced sensor technology, including the terahertz sensor. Chai says Nectec’s three strategic missions – smart farming, smart industry and TPMAP – all also require this kind of advanced sensor.

Next is artificial intelligence (AI). Boasting around 60 to 70 areas of AI expertise, Nectec aims to build AI as the country’s premiere technology infrastructure, including in areas such as language processing, computer vision, face recognition and chatbots.

Nectec will establish a high-performance supercomputer for tech and computing AI, investing around Bt300 for three years. The move is to help facilitate universities and the private sector to upgrade their computing and training in AI.

“The move is to create the AI human resources and the business capacity in the country,” said Chai.

Sixth is “smart city”, for which Nectec will play the role of developing technology. The centre does not focus on smart city as a whole, but rather is strong on developing CCTV technology. The centre will provide this technology to smart cities for two main purposes – traffic and surveillance.

“We are also focused on disaster management and city data management,” said Chai.

Next, up is science education. Nectec will collaborate with partners to co-develop the ecosystem for advanced technology throughout the country. The role of Nectec is to both initiate research and development and to actively work with the private sectors to bring advanced technology in wide use in the country.

KidBright, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education learning board, is an example. Nectec plays the role of “sparker”, building the initial 500 boards sponsored by Bangkok Bank, which was later expanded to 200,000 boards sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology and distributed to 1,400 schools nationwide. Another more than 500,000 boards will be created, sponsored by the private sector to apply in other kinds of learning.

“KidBright created an economic impact of Bt2 billion on the country in 2018,” said Chai.

Nectec has also developed the massive open online course (MOOC), a large e-learning system developed and provided by Nectec to nine universities, that then developed about 200 available online courses. Above 100,000 students now study through MOOC. The system can support concurrent users of up to 10,000 students.

Finally, there is health. Nectec collaborated with the Institute of Nutrition at Mahidol University to develop Big Data about nutrition for the health of Thais.

This led to the “Thai School Lunch” programme. The platform will generate a thousand-meal menu of healthy nutritious options, and connect to the supply chain to facilitate local food sourcing.

Moreover, Nectec will also focus on two future technologies – terahertz and quantum computing. There will be many more research and development initiatives around these two technologies in the future.

With around 52 million monthly active users in Thailand, Facebook may be the most influential social media platform in the national election, which is soon to officially kick off.

Facebook quickly announced its commitment to support the election’s integrity and transparency. Katie Harbath, the platform’s global politics and government director, said the company had doubled the number of people working on “safety and security” issues around the world to 30,000.

It has dedicated teams working during all of the world’s elections to help detect and prevent malicious abuse on Facebook, including among Thai language speakers.

“We are absolutely committed to preventing all kinds of inauthentic behaviour on our platform, be it misinformation, misrepresentation, phishing, bullying, violence, harassment, or interfering with elections,” said Harbath.

“Combating false news is crucial to the integrity and safety of the Thailand election, but we cannot do this alone. We believe it requires a concerted effort across industry, civil society and the government.”

She said Facebook has collaborated with third-party fact-checkers around the world. The company has worked with many third-party fact-checkers certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network. Fact-checkers can review and rate public, newsworthy Facebook posts with articles, photos or videos.

Facebook has five measures to support informed community and to protect election integrity on its platform. They are cracking down on fake accounts, reducing the distribution of false news, making advertising more transparent, disrupting bad actors and supporting an informed electorate, according to the company.

To crack down on fake accounts, Facebook is identifying them through both automatic and human processes. Its security systems run in the background millions of times per second. It also uses Artificial Intelligence to identify over 99.6 per cent of the fake accounts, and removes them before they are even reported. In the second and third quarters of 2018 alone, it removed around 1.5 billion fake accounts, the company claims.

To reduce the distribution of false news, it removes content and takes enforcement measures against those who repeatedly violate its policies. It aims to reduce the spread of problematic content, and informs the community with additional content.

“We are exploring how to promote awareness of false news and share our ‘Tips to Spot False News’ in partnership with local organisations through a public service announcement both on and off the platform,” said Harbath.

“And we will host a training session for our Thai news partners and leading media organisations to share best practices for newsrooms, including elections coverage case studies and highlights.”

Facebook also wants to make advertising more transparent, she said. Anyone can now view active ads from Pages on Facebook. The feature allows people in Thailand to see ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and its partner network, even if those ads are not ‘shown’ to them. People can also learn more about Pages, even if they do not advertise. For example, they can see any recent name changes and the date the Page was created.

Facebook aims to disrupt “bad actors” through detection, taking action, and adapting. Harmful types of election-related activity are flagged for manual review. Security teams investigate suspicious activity and take down violating accounts. Meanwhile, the process aims for continuous improvement, learning lessons from each experience globally.

It also has been supporting an informed electorate through the election journey, she said, including registering to vote, making a voting plan, voting and getting friends to do the same, and connecting with new representatives.

Fact checking commitment 

Google has committed itself to being an able supporting tool for journalists in order to strengthen the quality of journalism and also to fight misinformation, especially during the upcoming election in Thailand, a senior executive said.

Google said it is combating misinformation alongside news organisations in Asia Pacific and around the world through Google News Initiatives. The challenge is how the platforms and newsrooms could together strengthen quality journalism and fight misinformation, said Saiyai Sakawee, communication manager of Google Thailand.

One part of this mission is the verified fact-checkers. Google is working to increase the number of verified fact-checkers throughout the ecosystem, Saiyai said, including for Thailand.

Saiyai said Google is addressing this challenge in three ways: first, it is building products to elevate quality journalism on its platforms; second, it is collaborating with newsrooms to ensure accurate information, and third, it backs research and builds programmes to improve digital literacy.

She said that Google, as a search engine, is not an oracle of absolute truth. Search results are ranked based on their authoritativeness and relevance. The Google search algorithm balance between relevance and authoritativeness varies, depending on the nature of the query.

“Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We are training our systems to recognise and address crisis events,” said Saiyai.

She added that Google was working with the media industry to develop the parameters for quality journalism. For example, it provided the Digital News Innovation fund to The True Project to identify eight indicators of trust: best practices, author/reporter expertise, type of work, citations and references, methodology, locally sources, diverse voices and actionable feedback.

The Google News Initiative was launched two years ago with the aim of building a stronger future for journalism. It consisted of three parts: products that help news organisations and journalists succeed in web partnerships; partnerships with publishers to create joint solutions for business challenges; and programmes that help build the future of journalism.

Under Google News Initiative, Google develops and supports programmes called Digital News Innovation Fund and Google News Lab, Saiyai said.

The role of the Google News Lab, whose Asian centre is located in Singapore, is to work with journalists and entrepreneurs around the world, including Thailand, to drive innovation in the news industry. Its global team works with journalists worldwide.

It also provides an online trading centre to offer online training courses for journalists around the world. Currently, it is offering 55 lessons in 17 languages on the best practices for using Google’s tools and products.

“The online courses are now available in Thai language. It is free of cost and facilitates journalists as they learn how to use and utilise Google’s tools and products in doing reporting and storytelling.

There are many courses, for example, basic knowledge, publishing and monetisation, data journalism, fact-checking, and others. Some of the tools are: Election Databot, Google Search, Google Earth, Google Chrome, Google News, Google Maps, YouTube and Google Public Data Explorer,” said Saiyai.

She also mentioned tools journalists could use for election coverage. For example, Flourish, funded by Google News Lab, is free for newsrooms, allowing journalists and developers to upload and reuse data visualisations.

She added that Google also offers in-person training, which was done in Thailand once last year. It has trained 130,000 journalists across 65 countries, including Thailand, since 2015.

Moreover, YouTube’s Breaking News Context is also available in Thailand, which provides a context to help people make their own decisions.

The legacy computing corporation also announced plans to open its first IBM Q Quantum Computation Centre for commercial clients in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 2019.

IBM Q systems are designed to one day tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle.

Future applications of quantum computing may include finding new ways to model financial data and isolating key global risk factors to make better investments, or finding the optimal path across global systems for ultra-efficient logistics and optimising fleet operations for deliveries.

Designed by IBM scientists, systems engineers and industrial designers, IBM Q System One has a sophisticated, modular and compact design optimised for stability, reliability and continuous commercial use. For the first time ever, the system enables universal approximate superconducting quantum computers to operate beyond the confines of the research lab.

Much as classical computers combine multiple components into an integrated architecture optimised to work together, IBM is applying the same approach to quantum computing with the first integrated universal quantum computing system.

Meanwhile, the IBM Q Quantum Computation Centre is scheduled to open later this year in  New York. It will expand the IBM Q Network commercial quantum computing programme, which already includes systems at the Thomas J Watson Research Centre in Yorktown, New York.

This new centre will house some of the world’s most advanced cloud-based quantum computing systems.

It will be accessible to members of the IBM Q Network, a worldwide community of leading Fortune 500 companies, startups, academic institutions, and national research labs working with IBM to advance quantum computing and explore practical applications for business and science.

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director of IBM Research, said that the IBM Q System One is a major step forward in the commercialisation of quantum computing. This new system is critical in expanding quantum computing beyond the walls of the research lab as we work to develop practical quantum applications for business and science, he said.