Computing center is located at Room 308 of the new building. The center is responsible for supporting research activities, administrative affairs, and library management in 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 high availability and reliability of the computing resources including FireWall, VPN Server, CA Server, Email Server, and WWW Server, etc. throughout the institute.

In order to increase 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 projects management, visiting scholar invitations, annual performance evaluation, and budget requests and allocations.

We are also constantly improving the following systems. (1) An on-line purchasing sub-system is developed to integrate accounting, general affairs, and reimbursements. In the system, an approved purchasing request will be automatically processed by accounting. The Director will be able to monitor all the expenses of the Institute, as well as manage budgeting and purchasing. (2) A resource management sub-system is created to integrate human resources management with research resources management. We plan to integrate three processes, starting with budget planning, to personnel renewal, new hiring, salary evaluation and finally to budget allocation and execution. (3) Access control for security sub-system that monitors personnel attendance records, building access, conference rooms and other common utility usage.

We also provide conference management services. For all national and international conferences, our on-line conference management system allows the user to submit manuscripts, transfer fi les, submit papers to referees, and register for conferences. We plan to reconfigure and develop necessary utilities associated with conference management activities to increase automation and effi ciency of services.

June 2006