ICL invites MIT "Oxygen Gurus" to speak at ITRI-MIT Joint Research Workshop

The MIT Oxygen Alliance is an international cooperative effort that claims "Computation is like the oxygen in the air we breathe, it is essential, pervasive, but intangible. "As the information technology becomes more user-friendly, the ideal of humanistic computers will become a reality gradually blended in human lives. ITRI and MIT have collaborated on intelligent human interface technology since 1998. To announce the achievement of this joint research and provide the local industry and academia with the most updated development of the MIT Oxygen Project, ICL held a workshop titled "Foreseeing with the gurus a future of humanistic computers" on ITRI campus on June 30th.

"Founded in June 2000, the Oxygen Alliance consists of MIT and six major international companies including HP, Nokia, NTT, Philips, Acer, and Delta Electronics. The last two are Taiwanese firms," said Dr. Bao-Shuh Paul Lin, the General Director of ICL, ¡§ICL has forged a tight collaborative relation with MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AIL). These two labs are responsible for carrying out the Oxygen Project at MIT.¡¨ ICL invited four heavy weight experts led by Professor Victor Zue, the Director of MIT LCS, to present their latest progress in the Oxygen Project. The other speakers are LCS's Stephanie Seneff, Saman Amarasinghe, and AIL's Tomaso A. Poggio.

Attracting a huge audience of more than 400 attendees, the workshop highlighted the new frontier of IT research such as multi-lingual (Mandarin, English, Japanese and Spanish) dialogue system, visual surveillance system, and MIT Raw processor. Also delivered were feature presentations on "Handy-21" hand held device, "Enviro-21" intelligent room, "Orion" multi- lingual dialogue system, etc.

To encourage and motivate the young generation to pursue advance scientific studies, Professor Zue also hosted face-to-face discussion with college and graduate students in the "Student Summit" during the lunch break of the workshop.