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Research研究

A three-track research agenda: local platform labor, cross-national East Asian comparison, and U.S. politics and tech diplomacy.

The Center’s research draws on both faculty and students. Three AY 2025–26 projects run in parallel — local platform labor, cross-national East Asian comparison, and U.S. politics and tech diplomacy; faculty research also covers "AI as a social phenomenon," AI and criminology, and AI and social welfare; students, under faculty supervision, produce AI-related research through NSTC undergraduate projects and paper competitions.

Current Research Projects研究計畫

  1. Project 1

    Digital platform-labor patterns among single mothers in East Asia — "Cumulating Precarity in a Hybrid Platform Economy: Gender, Class, and the Social Exclusion of Single Mothers in Taiwan." Centering on single mothers in Taiwan’s hybrid platform economy, it combines gender, class, and social-reproduction perspectives to analyze how platform labor accumulates into precarious employment; in-depth interviews span food delivery, online freelancing, and home-based piecework across northern, central, southern, and eastern Taiwan. Hui-Fen Hung, Shao-Fen Li, Fang-Yi Huang, Chung-Yang Yeh. Under second-round review at the Journal of Asian Public Policy.

  2. Project 2

    A six-country East Asian "triple transition" AI study — comparing social policy under demographic × digital (AI) × climate transitions, with members from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China (Yonsei, Ritsumeikan, Lingnan, Singapore Management University, South China Normal University, and others). At the January 2026 international workshop at Yonsei University in Seoul, Fang-Yi Huang presented "Gendered Risks and Protections: Pension Reform and Labor Market Change amid Triple Transitions in Taiwan," proposing the concept of a "third type of social risk." Taiwan team: Fang-Yi Huang, Chung-Yang Yeh (Soochow Sociology), Wei-Ting Yen (Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica).

  3. Project 3

    From the CHIPS Act to the Trump AI Action Plan — how U.S. conservatives are reshaping Taiwan Strait deterrence and Taiwan–U.S. AI/semiconductor cooperation. Linking three literatures — populist diplomacy, religious politics, and geoeconomics — it uses Florida as an "elite–media–grassroots" triangulation site for semi-structured elite interviews, analyzing how conservative commitments to Taiwan become transactional and conditional, and the two-sidedness of the "silicon shield." Fang-Yi Huang. Interviews and text analysis in progress.

  4. Outputs

    Chapter assignments for the draft "White Paper on Social-Security Policy in the Age of AI" are complete; a joint research proposal, "A Comparative Study of Bias in East Asian AI Recidivism-Prediction Models," has begun; an abstract was submitted to the EASP 2026 Annual Conference; and submissions are planned to the Journal of Social Policy and Social Work and the Taiwanese Journal of Social Welfare.

Faculty Research Themes教師研究

  1. Theme

    AI as a social phenomenon: an ethnomethodological study of AI, human–machine interaction, and autonomous driving. Yu-Cheng Liu

  2. Theme

    AI in criminology and criminal justice: predictive policing, algorithmic bias, and due process. Fang-Yi Huang

  3. Theme

    Microsimulation of gender gaps in pensions and its translation into public communication — the Taiwan–Japan–Korea Pension Calculator and the documentary animation "Ten-Minute Countdown." Fang-Yi Huang

  4. Theme

    Welfare states and pension politics: comparing East Asian social-security systems under digital transformation and aging. Chung-Yang Yeh

  5. Theme

    Cyborg feminism and posthumanist thought: gender, the body, and boundaries in the age of AI. Chun-Mei Chang