The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (Nectec) is getting behind efforts to promote the sharing of open data in the medical and agricultural sectors and develop a large language model (LLM) in Thailand to increase the value of the country's businesses and drive innovation and economic growth.
"Data is important for everyday life and is key to reducing costs and making business decisions. An improved, leveraged use of data will be a key development for society and economic growth," said Nectec executive director Chai Wutiwiwatchai at a Nectec-ACE 2023 conference entitled: "Power of Data: Data for Thai, Data for All."
Nectec is a research foundation involved in 200 projects per year, which collaborates with the public and private sectors to utilise researchers in IT and electronics.
Mr Chai said Nectec has more than a decade of experience in overcoming data challenges related to the integration and exchange of data. The centre has more than 400 researchers.
"We need to unlock the power of data to leverage it for the development of the economy and society," he said.
Nectec has ambitions to promote open data in three sectors: medical data sharing (without the disclosure of personal data and security); agricultural data; and language data and LLM.
These will benefit key sectors, namely medical through artificial intelligence (AI), agriculture through the benefits it provides for farmers, along with LLM, which is a back-end technology for applications such as ChatGPT.
"We will encourage the sharing of open data that enables public and private sectors to leverage such open data for innovation and to serve the country's pain points," said Mr Chai.
In 2023, Nectec developed the Thai People Map and Analytics Platform (TPMap) on an open data basis. The platform is owned by Office of the National Economic and Social Development Council, which holds the data of 48 million members of the country's population. This is used for planning public and welfare services policies, particularly with regard to low income earners.
Nectec is utilising TPMap data to build the Thailand Agricultural Data Collaboration Platform (Thagri) platform, which contains the country's agricultural data that developers can use to develop new features and applications.
Nectec has developed the Open D platform as the back-end for state agencies such as the Digital Government Agency, National Statistical Office, and Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to share data with the public.
Ling Company, an agriculture tech startup, has recently been using Thagri data concerning soil, water, and the monitoring of weather and seasons to develop new features aimed at helping farmers to plan and plant their crops.
Mr Chai cited a study by UN Escap on the challenges of open data in Thailand, including information regarding the value of data, a lack of confidence in data quality, and a lack of understanding of the legal aspects, such as the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) and the Cybersecurity Act.
Chomchana Trevai, head of AI and machine learning Asean at AWS, said data-driven organisations need to have a culture that aligns business and technology leaders, people and processes that build the right organisation and process model, along with technology that can empower builders with end-to-end data strategies.
"Customers still demand using a mix of traditional AI and new generative AI to fine tune with their use cases and business such as personalisation and credit scoring," said Mr Chomchana.
He also suggested Thailand look to Japan and South Korea as examples from which it could develop its own national LLM.