Research
 

ICL and MIT co-develop advanced information technology

The Computer and Communications Research Laboratories (CCL) of ITRI is collaborating with two laboratories of the world famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab)—in order to undertake three forward-looking IT projects. The research program will cover the development of agent-based spoken dialogue system (智慧型語音代理人軟體), intelligent visual surveillance system (智慧型環境嵌入式視覺監控技術), and reconfigurable embedded CPU (可重組嵌入式處理機技術). These three projects are the pivot of the next-generation advanced technology greatly supported by the Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). The technologies will provide momentum for leapfrog advancement of Taiwan's IT industry.

Dr. Bao-Shuh Paul Lin, General Director of CCL, said "MIT is a world-acclaimed pioneer in many technologies. It is also the leader of the industrial technology trend. Both LCS and AI Lab are responsible to execute the famous "Oxygen" project. CCL began its first cooperative program with MIT in 1998 to develop two intelligent man-machine interfaces known as the "Spoken Language Dialogue System" (口語交談系統) and "Content Based Image and Video Indexing." (影像與視訊檢索) CCL also sent its researchers to the Labs at MIT for training in advanced technology and international team work. MIT expected to establish long-term collaborative relationship with ITRI, believing the outstanding quality of both research teams would speed up the development of advanced information technologies.

"With the assistance of Dr. Victor Zue of LCS, we have completed the initial interface of the Chinese spoken dialogue system which allows humans to interact with the computer for global weather inquiry. Also Dr. E. Grimson of AI Lab made it possible for us to put through the prototype of the Internet image and video retrieval system. The system has already been on display in several IT exhibitions," stated Dr. Chao-Huang Chang, Deputy Director of CCL's Advanced Technology Center. He further emphasized that the prototype of the dialogue system developed with MIT used the Chinese speech recognition and text-to-speech engines designed by CCL. CCL and MIT have been sharing the results achieved jointly, laying a solid ground for further collaborations.

Working on the current three projects with MIT, CCL will develop three key devices: an agent-based Chinese spoken dialogue system called Mandarin Orion, a visual surveillance system capable of detecting, tracking and recognizing faces in indoor environment, and RAW architecture for RAW chip, compiler, and simulator. It is also worth mentioning that RAW architecture is the kernel of Oxygen projects; it has quite a potential to become the next-generation mobile IT processor, and so its significance cannot be overstated.

For more information, please contact Mrs. Margaret Chen at Tel:+886-3-5917921; e-mail:margaret@itri.org.tw