The 2025 Taipei Youth Overseas Internship Program offered the opportunity to take part in research at the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab (DDL), an in-depth journey combining social science and information technology. DDL’s core research explores how deliberative democracy can help groups reach more comprehensive consensus; the Taipei interns’ mission was to use emerging technologies to lower the barriers to this research, making democratic discussion more efficient without sacrificing depth. Here, Kevin and Hao took part in a concrete and far-reaching experimental project. Let’s take a look at what inspired them and how they changed.

⚙️ Tech for Good: From Programming to Democratic Process

Kevin and Hao’s research work included Chinese speech transcription for the lab’s Metaverse platform, as well as developing the architecture for a chatbot. The chatbot ensures that all participants have actually read and understood the meeting documents before the discussion begins, so they can engage in in-depth dialogue on a shared foundation of information.

This task not only tested their research skills, but also reshaped their humanistic thinking:

💬 Hao shared: “I had to re-examine the word ‘democracy’ and look at ‘people’—the participants themselves—from a different angle. Psychologist Gordon Allport once said that prejudice often stems from distance, and that more contact can narrow the gap between us. The LLM tools I used are actually helping bring people a little closer together, and I think that is one of the most heartwarming applications of all.”

🌱 Planting Seeds: A Change That Keeps Growing

The chatbot platform Kevin developed will become part of the lab’s long-term research and continue to evolve with new research topics. The significance of this experience is that it is not a short-term output, but a seed that can keep growing. They came to clearly realize that they must always know what they are doing in order to move forward bravely through any challenge.

Beyond the research project, this journey was also the first time Kevin and Hao had lived on their own in a foreign place for an extended period, and they experienced the challenge of “stepping out of their comfort zone.” Through this process, they learned to talk with themselves, recognize their inner anxieties, manage daily life independently, face problems with courage, and find solutions. These many “firsts” helped them grow into braver, more confident, and stronger versions of themselves.

This Stanford journey was not only an academic achievement, but also a profound journey of self-discovery, laying an important foundation for the life choices Kevin and Hao will make in the future.