The computing center is located in Room 308 of the new Institute of Information Science (IIS) building. The center is responsible for supporting research activities, administrative affairs, and library management at the Institute. With the steady expansion that IIS has experienced in recent years, new hardware and software are being introduced and integrated every day. In such a dynamic and demanding environment, we now have six staff members dedicated to maintaining the availability and reliability of computing resources throughout the Institute, including our FireWall, VPN Server, CA Server, Email Server, WWW Server, and so on.

In order to further improve productivity, we have built intranet systems as communication bridges between faculty and staff members, research assistants, and engineers. Services provided include PC maintenance requests, work attendance logs, file and bulletin management systems, facility requests, conference room reservations, IP management, and Employee White Pages. Furthermore, we have systems specifically dedicated to faculty members, such as travel requests, research project management, visiting scholar invitations, annual performance evaluations, and budget requests and allocations. Lastly, we have also integrated portions of the workflow between our human resources and accounting branches, such as attendance record keeping.

We currently have a long list of ongoing projects designed to help improve the efficiency and quality of our services. Examples include (1) integrating our purchasing, discretionary funding, and accounting systems; (2) computerizing the applications for English editing assistance and office hour reservations for our English Editing Service; (3) developing a system for requesting and approving budget proposals for Academia Sinica; (4) developing a method for instantly supplying information on conference room availability.

In addition to these projects, we also provide conference management services. For all national and international conferences, our online conference management system allows users to submit manuscripts, transfer files, submit papers to referees, manage registration and online payments, and various other data management and on-site registration tasks.

September 2010