Amidst dramatic rumbling thunder, splashing rain and the sonorous singing of our alumni, the 2010 NTU Azalea Festival opened to a grand debut on March 13th.  Since its inception in 1997, the NTU Azalea Festival has now entered its 14th year.  Not just an event for high school students to experience NTU, the Festival included an assortment of activities, including the Department Expo, the Student Associations Expo, and an exclusive series of events for alumni, such as the special exhibitions, “Conserve Energy and Reduce Carbon Emissions—Save the Earth through Greening” and “Internet, Cell Phone and Me”, as well as campus recruitment, etc.  This year, we held the Alumni Karaoke Contest for the first time-- which drew an enthusiastic response.   

NTU campus landscapes are undergoing tremendous changes! The construction of the landmark building—the New College of Social Sciences—has  already been set in motion at a cost of 1.61 billion dollars.  “Bi-Zhen” Hall, the industry/academia cooperation building at our Chu-Bei Branch School, has been unveiled and christened; the transplant wards of the “Tony Tai-Cheng Gou Stem Cell Treatment Center,” the first operational unit of Foxcoon Group Chairman Terry Gou’s 15 billion endowment to NTU, have commenced operations; and, the first of their kind in Asia, the NTU “Animal Cancer Research Center” and “Animal Cancer Treatment Center,” which integrate clinical medicine and basic animal medicine, are now in operation. 

As to faculty honors, the National Science Council just released the list of winners for its 2009 Outstanding Research Award.  Thirty NTU professors won this award, a new record.  Many members of our Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department were elected to IEEE fellowship; Dr. S. Ping Ho, Associate Professor from the Department of Civil Engineering, was awarded Visiting Chair Professorship by Stanford University; Dr. Hung-Chun Chang, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, was elected to be a 2010 OSA Fellow (Optical Society of America); Dr. Ray-Nien Kwo, Director of the Center for Condensed Matter Sciences, was named 2009 APS Fellow (American Physical Society); Dr. Gong- Ru Lin, Professor from Department of Electrical Engineering, was elected to be a British IET fellow; and Dr. Ching-Ray Chang, Professor of the Department of Physics, was also named an APS fellow.

While the faculty have excelled, the students are no less outstanding.  The NTU student team won the “Excellence Award” in the “Cross Strait University Students Entrepreneur Program” for its “sensor fusion” energy conservation system which, fully automatic and low cost, reduced the utility bill by 20%.  NTU students are outstanding in electrical engineering and computer science;  this year, our student team took third place in the ACM ICPC, and the student team led by Dr. Liang-Gee Chen won the student design contest at ISSCC for the fifth time with its high resolution 3-D film chip.  This amazing feat not only demonstrates the success of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering’s talent cultivation efforts; it shows that NTU is strongly competitive in international programming contests. NTU spares no effort in cultivating its talents, so we cooperated with Micro Trend to offer “Trend Courses in Cloud Computing,” hoping to strengthen our training of cloud computing experts. In order to foster the next generation of leaders, we initiated the “leadership curriculum” and held an exhibition of our achievements—in an effort to show our concern for society.

As to research achievements, we have much good news to report.  Professor Hongey Chen of the Department of Geosciences researched the extent of meandering of the rivers in the North Pacific region, and his results were published in Science; Associate Professor Chuan-Chou Shen’s research team worked with Professor Debbie Kelly, Washington University, Seattle, to study the evolution of new microorganisms (a distinct field from Darwin’s theory of evolution), and their results were published in the January 11th issue of the internationally renowned Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States; Professor Lung-Chih Yu of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences analyzed the molecular structure for cell surface glycol-antigen expression and glycol structure, and his results were published in the top journal of hematology Blood. Professor Yit-Tsong Chen of the Department of Chemistry worked closely with Associate Professor Chien-Yuan Pan of the Institute of Zoology in applying silicon nanowire field-effect transistor (SiNW-FET) technology to the detection of interaction between proteins. Their results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States. The research team led by Associate Professor of Entomology Chun Che Chang joined a cross-national research project on the genomes of aphids. The results were published in the top journal of life sciences PLos Biology.  Finally, Professor Min-Jang Chen of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering studied highly efficient hetero-structured silicon light emitting diodes, making significant breakthroughs. His paper was the “highlighted article” in the internationally renowned journal Nanotechnology.

Responding to the increasingly serious climate crisis, NTU has devised a new way to save energy and reduce carbon emissions!! The Office of General Affairs has cooperated with NTU farm in turning the natural wastes on campus into natural organic fertilizers, called “green-gold”, which provide nutrients to plants. And, our animal medical team also achieved breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of canine tumors by developing new vaccines.  In sum, the research achievements reported in this current issue are quite substantial and exciting.