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Director’s Message 所長的話
所長的話
fellows with about 30 post-doctoral researchers, and
slightly more than 300 full-time research associates and
specialists. Many of them have received distinguished
awards and honors both nationally and internationally.
We are especially happy that Prof. Wen-Tsuen Chen, a
former President of Tsing Hua University, joined us as a
Distinguished Research Fellow this year.
Many research fellows supervise or co-supervise MS and
PhD students in top-ranked Computer Science depart-
ments in Taiwan, and collaborate very closely with their
faculty members. In 2003, a PHD program was estab-
lished in Bioinformatics under the auspices of the Tai-
wan International Graduate Program (TIGP) in Academia
Sinica. It has enrolled about 34 students over the past
eight years, which has benefited the biological research
a great deal in Academia Sinica. Many of our research
fellows hold joint faculty appointments at top universi-
ties in Taiwan, which has played a very significant role in
training and fostering advanced research talents in the IT
industry and academia in Taiwan.
As the IT industry has long been the crown jewel of Tai-
wan’s economic miracle and the envy of the world, IIS
strives to play a unique role in this major endeavor. It
has always focused on fundamental and long-term re-
search to further Taiwan’s competitive edge and sustain
the growth of this strategic enterprise. At the same time,
Welcome to the Institute of Information Science the Institute manages a research portfolio that includes
(IIS) at Academia Sinica. cutting-edge, application-oriented information tech-
nologies that are unique to Taiwan’s society and culture.
Since the established of the Institute of Information Sci- Our main research areas cover a wide spectrum of fields
ence (IIS) in 1982, at the dawn of the information technol- in both computer and information science. Many are
ogy (IT) revolution in Taiwan, it has experienced very rap- cross-disciplinary and require close collaboration with
id growth in less than three decades. Since its inception, researchers in bio-medical sciences, social sciences, lib- cus on the construction of various randomness extractors
IIS has emerged as one of the leading research institutes eral arts and other major fields.
in both computer and information science and related
technologies in Taiwan. Currently, we have 38 research We lead a major research effort in Chinese language pro-
cessing. IIS developed the first balanced Sinica Corpus
with more than 5 million words and part-of-speech tag-
所長的話
6 Director’s Message
Director’s Message
ging, which is available at http://www.sinica.edu.tw/Sini- Our research in bioinformatics has also flourished. We
caCorpus. More than 130 licenses have been issued to lead the world in the prediction accuracy of membrane
major research groups and companies around the world, protein structure, and structure similarity of proteins. We
including Yahoo and Apple. Our intelligent Chinese input have produced a complete suite of mass spectrometry
system, “GOING”, has been used by more than a million data analysis tools. We have studied several important
people in Taiwan. We have also developed Chinese word issues on plant photosynthesis and microRNA biology
segment system (http://ckipsvr.iis.sinica.edu.tw/) that and published the results on top biological journals. In
has processed more than a million documents. In addi- gene regulation, we have successfully developed com-
tion, we have developed Chinese question answering putational approaches to identify the function and bind-
system that has won major international competition. ing sites of transcription factors. Our colleagues have
Currently, the group is developing sophisticated Chinese received the World Cloud Research Collaboration Project
natural language tools combining pattern matching and awarded by Microsoft Research. Finally, IIS has produced
machine learning techniques to provide more concise the first semantic role-labeling system for biomedical lit-
and accurate results to users. erature and developed literature mining techniques that
could provide highly accurate gene and protein name
In early 2008, our colleagues developed a “people count- identification, which can save tremendous amount of
ing’’ system which can effectively count the number of time for biomedical researchers.
people who have watched advertisements in front of a
TV wall during a period of time. This product won the Many of our research efforts have significant practical
15th small business innovative research award sponsored implications, which could generate potential commer-
by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the best choice cial opportunities. In addition, many of our application-
award of 2009 Computex Taipei. In 2010, we developed a oriented and development-intensive projects require
blur license plate image recognition system, which is the different specialists to maintain and support application
first in the world that could solve the blur license plate software and interact with large user communities. To fa-
image recognition problem in a systematic manner. We cilitate such efforts, the Research Center for Information
have also successfully transferred our technologies on Technology Innovation (CITI) was established in 2007 to
online game traffic and user behavior analysis to Gama- work synergistically with IIS.
nia Inc., one of the biggest game companies in Taiwan.
Our technology has helped them reduce the frequency These are exciting and challenging times for IT research
of network lags and game cheating incidents. IIS built an and the IT industry in Taiwan. Many emerging technolo-
efficient agent-based simulation system, which has been gies and opportunities are on the horizon. IIS, in working
used by CDC, Taiwan since 2010 in preparation to deal with the newly established CITI, looks forward to a con-
with the H1N1 pandemic flu outbreak. Finally, the Insti- certed effort in leading the fundamental and practical
tute conducts research in complexity theory, with the fo- research in this important field.
that could be used in cryptography to derive extremely
secure encryption schemes, an increasingly critical tech-
nology for on-line transactions and communications. The
above projects are just a small sample of many highly vis-
ible research projects being conducted in IIS.
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