U.S. Fulbright to Taiwan 2026-27

I applied to the U.S. Fulbright program to Taiwan last term to study AI in the U.S. Taiwan and China. I didn’t get the grant, but hoping to apply again in the future and visit Taiwan and China. I may write more about China’s AI tigers.

Recording the national identity: A fully digital future public

The state of AI in the U.S., Taiwan and China: During the fall of 2020, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to Mainland China ended, a move during the final few months of the first Trump presidential administration. I relocated to the UK the day after election day, for a position with Meta London. I spent the next three years as an American in the U.K. leading a team responsible for Meta’s ads products—the five-year-old Ad Targeting product being the core responsibility as it transitioned to automation.

Automation language quickly evolved to AI between 2023 and 2025, and companies like Nvidia have been in the spotlight. Nvidia, which develops advanced AI chips, is based in Santa Clara, Calif. along with Intel. Both Nvidia and Intel have a presence in China— the former in Beijing and the latter in Chengdu.

TSMC is a Taiwanese company with a presence in Shanghai. Second to the tech-focused Beijing, Shanghai is the more traditional city for business. Nvidia partnered with TSMC to produce AI chips, and recent reports highlight changing government relations among Taiwan, the U.S. and China.

Following the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, the U.S. announced tariffs on China and Japan at the same time during spring 2025, and a truce was announced allowing Nvidia to purchase chips from TSMC during the summer—the truce was extended and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was well-received in China.

Nonprofit OpenAI (now a public company) has also partnered with Nvidia. AI chip development and exports to the U.S. and countries globally have made Taiwan foundational to the future of AI.

Recording an evolving national identity: The purpose of my project is to create an interactive experience about the evolving national identity of Taiwan, the U.S. and China. My research will focus on the relationship between “Big Tech” and government, AI and identity data.

The research will contribute to documenting AI in the U.S., Taiwan and China and how all three countries may be moving toward a fully digital future public.  As an American in Taiwan, my interest is specific to how the host country may contribute to this evolution.

A fully digital future public in the United States is likely in this century, and by 2050 a global cloud could store both the national identity and the identity data of countries around the world.

The responsibility of people and government: The research is work into our data future. My study focuses on shaping the responsibility of people and government and the design of how we understand the national identity as digital data.

Investment in data centers, a positive relationship between AI tech and the new presidential administration, an upcoming 2030 U.S. census and the release of Login.gov are a move toward a future public understood as digital data.

During my stay in the host country, I plan to record interviews with tech employees, university students and researchers  in Taiwan, China and the U.S. My research will also aim to include observations at TSMC and National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, and if possible—TSMC, Tsinghua University and Nvidia in Beijing. The flight from Taiwan to China is a little more than three hours.

Data, storage, devices and computing power

 The stability of memory of data/countries in the 21st century

While standing in an apartment you can’t find on Google Maps, I pinch to search on my mobile phone for the Clonshaugh data center and listen to “Power Grab: the hidden cost of Ireland’s datacentre boom,” reported and written by Jessica Traynor for The Guardian’s Audio Long Read.

 The story details “the long and patchy memory” of Ireland, the country’s rise as the “Celtic Tiger,” and a possible future of instability.

Data

Traynor’s anxiety about the country is an eerie contrast to her description of acquiescing to the task of managing her data. She describes spending a few hours of moving her family files to cloud storage after receiving a common notification: your storage is almost full.

Her experience with data in Ireland is a parallel to the U.S. I’ve experienced since returning to America last spring.

After 35 years as an American citizen and working internationally for a major tech company from 2020 to 2023, I began to see my life as data. Messages, emails, images, accounts, passwords, mobile numbers and apps stored across devices. The complexity of life as a global professional is managing an identity understood as logins.

Data and identity

The top left of my U.K. mobile phone reads SOS and by June 2023, access to my U.S. mobile phone isn’t available. My United States passport is scanned during visits to AT&T and I’m told that a passcode or pin is required to access my account from the store. I spend a long afternoon on a landline waiting to be transferred to customer service.

The line goes dead.

Alt text: The commute from the Greater Anglia train, Suffolk to London. Railroad tracks, fields, trees and a cloudy bright sky.

During a visit to the Apple store during the Spring of 2023, I’m told that my two Apple IDs—one created in 2020 with my U.K. Gmail, U.K. mobile number, and U.K. address—and one created around 2008 with my U.S. Gmail, U.S. mobile number and U.S. address— aren’t allowed under Apple’s policies.

 My mobile phones and two Apple accounts are linked to my personal and professional devices, some issued by former employers.

I’m unsure if having two separate devices, as a U.S. citizen living and working in the U.K., is a typical use case, but the rationale was to organize the complexity of my identity documented by major institutions including governments, banks, and employers.

Alt text: The Deben river from a grass and dirt path; houses and trees in the far distance below a cloudy bright sky.

The contrast to the tension in the U.S. during the years after 2020 makes it seems as though I was living a life of leisure.

When the UK opened for an extended period in 2021, I walked along the Deben midday, a break from my desk on the upper floor of the flat, adjoined to another flat. The village, a market town, was quiet for the first year or so, and long after masks were mandated, everyone continued wearing their masks for the older and retired. At the pharmacy, I considered the stories of people in the U.S. arguing about having to wear a mask.

It’s an oddly frustrating thing to consider, but you can be born in a country where your family has lived for generations, never have been unemployed, graduate with an undergraduate and graduate degree, have no criminal history and have your citizenship disregarded.