The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) held the ICF Global Summit London 2018 on June 4 to 6 (London time), during which Tainan City Deputy Mayor Chang Chen-yuan accepted the 2018 Top 7 award at The Crystal on behalf of Tainan City. The other cities listed as Top 7 this year are: Espoo, Finland; Ipswich, Australia; Hamilton and Winnipeg, Canada; and Taoyuan and Chiayi City from Taiwan. Seven representatives from the respective cities participated in dialogue and shared how their cities used ICT technologies to establish a smart and pleasant city environment.
Deputy Mayor Chang headed the Tainan City Government delegation which took part in the three-day annual summit. Through interactions with different cities and industries around the globe, the delegation enjoyed fruitful discussions and also shared the beauty of “high-tech and historical” Tainan City with other participants.
Tainan City is a major agriculture city, therefore the city government rolled out projects such as the “New Farmers” project for young and small local farmers to help them deal with professional and technical problems concerning farming technique, farmland seeking, loans and capital, and marketing channels. For smart disease prevention, the government set up "The Mosquito Man" Dengue Fever Prevention website and app that provides the latest disease potential infomation in the area, and other information related to rapid screening tests at clinics and disease prevention. Tainan City also developed smart mosquito zappers which utilize IoT technology to collect data on vectors, and leverage cloud data statistics and AI to analyze disease prevention strategies.
Deputy Mayor Chang expressed that “we should not seek the latest technology just for technology’s sake, but use technology to create smart applications that are helpful and useful.” Recently Tainan City has been actively utilizing Open Data and big data analysis in areas including city governance, tourism, agriculture, disease and disaster prevention. These smart applications are all user-driven, which is in the same spirit as ICF’s theme for this year - Humanizing Data. Tainan, Taiwan’s culture capital, is now enthusiastically integrating technology with local culture to revitalize the area, giving this historical city a high-tech flair.
In the area of tourism, the city government promotes Tainan on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Tainan "Ang Yi Tao" Club fanpage, Instagram, and Twitter. International visitors can use the Tainan visitor info Line@ for 24-hour customized and immediate travel inquiries in multiple languages, or sign up for guided tours on the official sites.