TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan's first school of computational intelligence (CI) held its first contest on Sunday (July 30) with students from across the world to visualize AI-driven solutions to various social problems.
The Miin Wu School of Computing was established in 2020 with the strong backing of National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) alumnus Miin Wu (吳敏求), who founded Macronix, the world's leading ROM and NOR flash memory chipmaker. The school aims to nurture talent in the AI-powered world, offering bachelor's and master's credit and degree programs, with interdisciplinary courses in electrical engineering, computational science, data science, statistics, and mathematics, among other fields.
This year, the Miin Wu School of Computing hosted its first contest where teams from universities worldwide envisioned AI-driven solutions to social issues. Research teams aimed to tackle various problems, from identifying a deep fake to testing the morality of ChatGPT, to proposing an AI-driven dementia assessment system to developing more effective guide bricks for the visually impaired.
On Sunday, 28 shortlisted teams presented their ideas in front of the judges. The winning team, comprised of four NCKU students, leveraged generative AI technology to create efficient prompt-based language modeling for visual question answering (VQA) and visual grounding.
The chief judge said the winning idea was highly applicable, even given the resource-constrained computing environment, such as autonomous driving, and is reliable thanks to its improved image and text comprehension.
Lin Ying-jian (林英嘉, left) received the top award on behalf of the four-student team researching at NCKU on July 30. (NCKU photo)
Miin Wu School of Computing Acting Dean Su Huey-Jen (蘇慧貞) said computing power plays a fundamental role in the digital era and can greatly advance innovation. This is the vision that drove NCKU to form the school of computing, to leverage existing technical capabilities in collaboration with research talent, she said.
Su also expressed her hope that graduates become well-rounded engineers, who can bring more value to businesses, make positive changes to society, and solve complex problems for generations.
Former NCKU President Su Huey-Jen (center), currently acting dean of the Miin Wu School of Computing, posed with judges on July 30, 2023. (NCKU photo)
