My early research works were on software engineering. There was no systematic approach to software testing in early 1970s. I had done works on software testing design, automated software testing, and software instrumentation in mid-1970s. My research results have been used in automated software testing systems designed for NASA and other institutions in USA and incorporated in modern CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools. I had helped develop the software engineering program of the Institute for Information Industry, a non-governmental organization established by late Minister K. T. Lee (李國鼎政務委員) for promoting information industry in Taiwan, by serving as a technical advisor for more than 10 years since its founding in 1979.

My research team designed the first computer resource sharing network in Taiwan in early 1980s that enabled precious computing resource sharing at a time when budget for universities was insufficient. We were probably the first to recognize the efficiency problem of secure broadcasting in networks of broadcast type, such as Ethernet, packet radio, and satellite. We proposed an efficient approach to securely encrypting a message based on Chinese Remainder Theorem, so that only one copy of the message needs to be sent for secure broadcasting. With recent proliferation of wireless networks such as WiFi, WiMAX, LTE, and mobile networks, design of efficient secure broadcasting becomes even more important.

With the trend of integration of telecommunications networks, Internet, and media broadcasting networks, provisioning of QoS (Quality-of-Service) becomes ever important in future networks. My research team has done works on provisioning of QoS in mobile and wireless networks. We proposed a signaling protocol for mobile hosts to reserve resources in the integrated services (IntServ) Internet. The mobility impacts on packet delay, bandwidth utilization and packet loss rate are minimized. We have extended the concept to All-IP (Internet Protocol) wireless networks by integrating mobility management and QoS provisioning in a proposed hierarchical system architecture design. All-IP wireless networks with QoS provisioning are considered as the next generation wireless networks to provide seamless access for mobile applications. These works are expected to contribute to the design of the future generation All-IP mobile Internet networks.

On parallel computing, my research team designed the first parallel processing system in Taiwan in late 1980s, with its parallel processor designed with state-of-the-art IC technology. We discovered that an optimal mesh with broadcast capability is a rectangular instead of a square one for many parallel algorithms and generalized the result to multidimensional mesh. This result has been widely adopted by other researchers to reduce computational complexities of many well-known optimal mesh algorithms with fewer processors. We also proposed a constant-time sorting k-dimensional parallel architecture with the least number of processors n^k/(k-1) that approaches the theoretical lower bound n for larger k. Other notable works of my research team include image sequence coding, high-speed packet switching networks, vertical handoff in heterogeneous wireless networks, and wireless sensor networks.

For the next few years, my research team will focus on researches on intelligent sensing and mobile networking technologies and their applications. Emerging technologies and applications for Internet of Things (IoT) have progressed tremendously in recent years. IoT is considered as one of the most important components of future Internet. Things will be given computation and communication capabilities to enable intelligent interactions between human and things, among themselves, and to autonomously take safe and urgent actions according to environmental changes. A new age of applications with efficiency, safety, and sustainability is coming with the aids of comprehensive sensing from intelligent sensors, intelligent computation from cloud computing, and ubiquitous communications from mobile networks. My research team aims to developing the enabling key technologies for IoT, including fusion of intelligent sensing technologies, efficient and energy-saving transmission mechanisms in wireless sensor networks, resource allocation and scheduling schemes in next-generation mobile networks, and design of common service middleware and platform. Intelligent home, healthcare, and crowdsourcing-based monitoring are chosen to demonstrate the technologies that are developed in my research team. We intend to extensively collaborate with researchers in universities and industries. We expect that our research results will contribute to the national project “Intelligent Taiwan,” and increase competitiveness of related industries.