Research Collaborations in Taiwan
Boy, am I jetlagged!
After spending the New Year’s Day celebrations in Tokyo with my wife and son, I flew to Taipei for a conference. I just flew back to the USA today, landing this morning in Seattle and then immediately going to Microsoft Research for a series of meetings starting at noon. Whew!
The conference in Taipei was for the iCAST research collaboration. The name iCAST stands for the “International Collaboration for Advancing Security Technology”, and has two unique features. First, iCAST is the largest government funded research project in the history of Taiwan. Second, large fractions of the funding go not only to Taiwanese researchers in computer security, but also to researchers at two partner institutions, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley. Taiwanese students are also funded to make extended (4-month long) visits to CMU and Berkeley. On the CMU end, researchers in CS, ECE, and Cylab receive iCAST funding.
In the CS Department, students advised by Ed Clarke, Hui Zhang, and Peter Lee are involved in the research. In my case, Stephen Magill’s research on analysis of pointer programs using separation logic is supported by iCAST, and we are helped greatly by our Taiwanese collaborators, Ming-Shien Wang, Yih-Kuen Tsay, and Bow-Yaw Yang. Our collaboration has been pleasantly productive, and in particular Stephen and Ming-Shien have done excellent work not only on the formal foundations but also on the implementation of a program-analysis tool called THOR. A paper is in the works as we speak. The collaborations by the Taiwanese researchers with Ed Clarke’s and Hui Zhang’s groups have also been very good, with some really very good publications being produced.
Looking ahead, the situation in Taiwan is extremely interesting, because the government has committed itself to going all-WiMax, as part of its campaign to completely connect every citizen, at all times, to the Internet. The security, privacy, and software reliability concerns are obviously of paramount importance. With a booming economy (the trade surplus, for example, was over $27B in 2007) and heavy investment in next-generation networking deployments, I look forward to some interesting research problems emerging from Taiwan.
Stephen and I traveled a long way to attend the conference, so of course it can’t be all work and no play. One of the joys of traveling to Asia is the food, and we were treated to some really great meals. Here is a picture of an outing with our Taiwanese collaborators to a local dumpling house.
In the upper picture, from left to right, we have Yih-Kuen Tsay, me, Stephen, Ming-Shien Wang, Yu-Fan Chen, and Tyng-Ruey Chuang.
The soup dumplings (dumplings in paper-thin shells, somehow with hot soup held inside) were delicious.
We also walked the night markets and spied lots of “challenging” foods:
I’ll leave it as an exercise to identify these delicacies. Comments welcomed.
Peter Lee @ January 10, 2008