Institute of Information Science

In July 1974, the 11th Assembly of Academia Sinica recommended the establishment of the Institute of Information Science. It was later confirmed by the Council of Academia Sinica, and a preparatory office was subsequently inauguratedin July 1977. An advisory board was also formed to provide guidance for its development. In December 1980, the four-story information science building was set up and the advisory board recommended removing the status of preparatory office. The recommendation was approved in August 1982 by the Presidential Office. After five years of preparation, the Institute of Information Science was officially inaugurated in September 1982.

RESEARCH

Our current research activities focus on software metho-dologies, intelligent systems, Chinese information pro-cessing, computer systems and communication, real-time network, and computation theory. The research topics of these areas are as follows:

SOFTWARE METHODOLOGIES

Based on the objected-oriented technology, we focus on the following projects:

• Software Engineering and CASE Tools:
  Study the development of the object-oriented paradigm in software engineering and system design. Develop software CASE tools.
• Object Persistence:
  Using automated code generation techniques, we develop an object persistence system allowing complex objects to be saved and retrieved without additional efforts of the application programmers.
• Object Distributed Stream (Object Sending and Receiving):
  Using automated code generation techniques, we develop a system allowing complex objects to be sent and received in a distributed environment.
• Graphical User Interface:
  We develop a user interface builder allowing users to build an entire user interface, including the static layout and the dynamic behavior of the user interface, in a visual and natural way without any traditional programming efforts of the application programmers.

CIS for Fishery Research

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

• Modeling: To study the automatic construction of object models and extensible database.
• Recognition: To study object recognition by using both 2D images and 3D range data.
• Tracking: To study dynamic image analysis and visual tracking of multiple moving objects in 3D space.
• Rendering: To combine technologies of computer vision, image processing and computer graphics for efficient generation of high-quality images required for virtual reality.

  Computer Graphics

• Vision-based intelligent security systems: To develop an integrated computer vision system that can combine the recognition of a human face, fingerprints and sig-nature for security and identification.
• Applications of computer vision to virtual reality: To apply the core technologies of modeling, tracking and rendering to different aspects of virtual reality.

CHINESE INFORMATION PROCESSING

Chinese Database

• A Chinese lexicon: Aims at compiling a machine readable dictionary for the purpose of Chinese parsing in Chinese.
• A grammar formalism and parser: To stipulate a unification-based representation model suitable for ana-lyzing Chinese syntax and semantics.
• Intelligent Chinese Network Information Retrieval: To study efficient techniques for speech and natural language information retrieval and create applications in Chinese network resource discovery and information extraction.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS AND COMMUNICATION

• Real-time system theoretical research
  Real-time system scheduling
  Real-time verification
• Real-time system supports
  Operating system supports
  Network supports
• Real-time continuous media application
  VOD system
  Wide-area and local area video conference system

REAL-TIME NETWORK

• To study real-time network in fulfillment of distributed multimedia applications by designing and integrating realtime fast Ethernet, real-time communication protocol and real-time video conference subsystems.

COMPUTATION THEORY

• To study the design of efficient graph algorithms.
• To study the computing problem in combinatorial mathe-matics.
• To study the algorithmic problems in computational biology.
• Computational Geometry.

PERSONNEL AND FACILITIES

PERSONNEL

The Institute has 7 research fellows, 7 associate research fellows, 13 assistant research fellows, 1 research assistant, 6 joint appointment research fellows, 1 joint appointment associate research fellow, 1 adjunct research fellow, 4 correspondence research fellows, 2 technicians, 3 administrative personnel and 58 project employees.

FACILITIES

• Internet available.
• About 100 SUN, HP, and IBM workstations, including high-end models.
• nCUBE2 parallel computer with 32 nodes.
• 4 Silicon Graphics workstations (including a Crimson and an Indigo ), and 2 E&S graphic systems.
• Active binocular head, AGEMA 470 thermal sensor, Kodak DCS-200 digital cameras, Data Cell S2200 and CFG frame grabber, Panasonic and Pulnix CCD ca-meras, laser markers and other peripherals, such as scanners, printers, and film recorders.
• PUMA 560C robot, Kawasaki JS-10 robot, Scorbot IX robot, Cimstation simulation, Nitta F/T sensor, KL F/T sensor.
• A library with a collection of about 11,000 books and 300 journals on computer science, electrical engineering, and operations research.

MAJOR RESULTS OF RESEARCH

SOFTWARE METHODOLOGY

• Inheritance plays an important role in objected-oriented analysis and design. We established a formal model and a set of refined guidelines regarding the use of inheritance by exploiting class and inheritance theories.
• We developed a parser-based C++ Class Exerciser by fully exploiting and utilizing the parser technology. Given a set of classes as input, the class exerciser, with its easy-to-use graphical user interface, allows users to test the given classes interactively.
• In computer graphics, we developed a software tool which converts the descriptive graphics language to the computing graphics language so that animation systems of complex facial expression are simplified to achieve the design of the user-friendly human-machine user interface.

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

Video-on demand System

• We completed the calibration of an active binocular head which can now achieve high accuracy (with an image prediction error of 1 pixel and an epipolar error of 0.2 pixel) even when all its joints are moving simultaneously.
• We developed a cascade fuzzy adaptive Hamming net (CFAHN) as a prototype for the extensible object database, and have also modified it to be a cascade fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (CFART) network for many different applications.
• We developed a user-friendly 3D interactive system for editing computer-generated digital terrain models (DTM) from aerial photographs, with the help of stereo glasses and 3D mouse. We are currently extending it to model construction of 3D objects and environment.
• We proposed an image registration method for con-necting partially overlapped images, and have imple-mented an experimental system of panoramic stereo imaging with complete-focus views for virtual reality.
• We developed a 3D object recognition system which uses both mathematical morphology to extract 3D invariant features from range data, and geometric hashing to recognize partially occluded 3D objects.

CHINESE INFORMATION PROCESSING

Chinese Text Search

• A comprehension study of Chinese measure words has been done. The collocation dictionary for nouns and measures has been completed.
• A 3.5 million word Chinese balance corpus with part-of speech tagged and its investigation program has been completed and is open to public.
• A Chinese word segmentation standard has been pro-posed and submitted as a draft for national standards.
• We developed an information retrieval system which can automatically extract useful information from the Internet and allow users using speech and quasi-natural language queries for rapid information access.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS AND COMMUNICATION

Coordinated Robots

• Research on real-time scheduling applied on multi-media systems.
• Research and development on VOD server. Currently one PC-based server can serve up to 8 clients. (MPEG/1)
• Research on real-time OS and file systems for video conference system recording and video/audio playback.
• Implementation of a high performance video conference system for Ethernet LAN (end to end delay time for audio is no greater than 0.2 sec., and is no greater than 0.5 sec. for video).
• Implementation of a distributed real-time clock syn-chronization system software for 150 mg accuracy.
• Preliminary results in providing real-time services over Ethernet LAN.

Video Conferencing System

PARALLEL PROCESSING GROUP

• We have designed and implemented several compiler optimization techniques for high performance com-puters, such as loop parallelization and scheduling, data distribution, communication and synchronization opti-mization, and processor-level code optimizations.
• We have also designed several efficient parallel algo-rithms for scientific and engineering applications.
• We developed a parallel framework for high-perfor-mance N-body simulations. We demonstrated the efficiency of the framework via two applications: (a) large-scale astrophysic simulations, and (b) high-resolution multi-filament vortex simulations for compu-tational fluid dynamics. The simulations compare very favorably with previous implementations, in running time as well as problem size.

COMPUTATION THEORY

• Linear algorithms for point location problems on cycles.
• An efficient algorithm for finding the smallest set of edges whose addition 4-vertex-connects an undirected graph.
• A linear algorithm for the optimal edge augmentation of bipartite graphs achieving bipartite componentwise biconnectivity.
• Fast algorithm for transforming boolean functions into FPGA.

RESEARCH STAFF

MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE