The “2014 National Symposium on Telecommunication” (NST2014) started on Nov. 27 at Asia University (AU) and lasted for two days. Chaired by AU President Jing-Pha Tsai, NST2014 was the most important and magnificent domestic symposium on telecommunication, information, and internet technologies. Over 400 experts and scholars attended the conference to present papers and join in discussions. 182 papers were published, with topics on communication systems, internet technologies, signal processing, electric waves, as well as policy and management of telecommunication. Research results of 193 projects financially granted by the Communications Engineering Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology were also presented in this grand event.

    The NST2014 was hosted by the Department of Computer Science at AU, and co-sponsored by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the Chunghwa Telecom Laboratories, and the Smart Network System Institute of the Institute for Information Industry. Many experts of the telecommunication and information technology industries took part in the symposium and brought forth lots of new ideas in the two-day meeting. Jing-Pha Tsai, President of AU, said in the opening speech that information and communication technology (ICT) played an important role to help solve problems while we confronted challenges such as climate changes, diseases, food shortages, and wars. He took climate changes for example and added that we could analyze the big data generated by the atmosphere changes and environmental parameters, which were collected through sensors, to provide forecasts and warnings and take actions to address the problems by cross-field cooperation.

  Jingshown Wu, a Life-time Distinguished Professor of National Taiwan University, was invited for a speech entitled “Network Communication Industry and Technology” and talked about future development trends of the Network Communication Industry, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services, applications of big data, and mobile communication technology. He pointed out that in future the ICT industry there would be full of enormous business opportunities of IoT, big data, cloud computing, as well as ubiquitous computing, and that Taiwan should work harder to have its place in the intense competition of the fifth generation development internationally on mobile communication technology.

  Wei-Jun Lin, Vice President and Director General of Advanced Research Institute at Institute for Information Industry, followed to give a lecture entitled “IoT Development and Plan.” She mentioned that business models and value verifications were not reliable yet in the current IOT development and that Taiwan should seize the chance to carry out an industrial restructuring and aim to be a “Pioneer of Life Style” by taking advantage of manufacturing superiority to maximize output value. She predicted that no doubt IoT would integrate big data with cloud computing and create great business opportunities ever. Thus, she hoped that domestic enterprises could get rid of keeping techniques for their own and cooperate with one another to form a business alliance of cloud IoT.

  This year, the “National Symposium on Telecommunication” was held together with the research result presentation of the Communications Engineering Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology. Guu-Chang Yang, Convener of the Program and a Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering Department at National Chung Hsing University, said in the symposium that big data research would be listed as one of the major projects of the Program in the future as well.