Professor Hsu Wen-lian is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica, while also serving as director of its Institute of Information Science. After graduating from the Department of Mathematics of National Taiwan University in 1973, Dr Hsu went to the United States for further studies. In 1979, he obtained a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University, and later taught at Northwestern University. In 1989, he decided to return to Taiwan to enter the Institute of Information Science of the Academia Sinica, where has been to date.
Dr Hsu’s early research focused on graph algorithms. After returning to Taiwan, he became involved in the study of Chinese natural language processing techniques and systems, among which the most famous project was the intelligent input method “GOING” released in 1992. The semantic core combines rules, allowing the computer to automatically select the correct character, and this has become one of the most popular input methods for Chinese.
Later, he became increasingly involved in the research and development of a Chinese question answering system, pioneering Chinese semantic analysis, and which won the first place in the NTCIR international competition.
In addition, Dr Hsu applies natural language processing technology to biological data, using natural language techniques, combining biological knowledge with machine learning algorithms to solve important problems in protein structure prediction. Furthermore, in the field of data mining the biomedical literature, natural language processing techniques are used to deal with protein and gene name identification and interaction, and so the world’s first biomedical semantic role labeling system, BioSmile, was established.
Professor Hsu has made a tremendous contribution to natural language studies as well as bioinformatics, and he was made a fellow of the IEEE in 2006 in recognition of this work.

Professor Huang Yi-long is a scholar of the history of science and academician of the Academica Sinica. He graduated from the Physics department of Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu in 1977, and received a PhD in Physics from Columbia University in 1985, before studying astronomy at Massachusetts State University. He has published papers in such authoritative journals such as Nature and Science. Since 1987 he has worked at the Institute of History at Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu. He is the former deputy provost of Tsinghua University and is currently the director of the Tsing Hua University Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2006 he was appointed an academician of the Humanities group of the Academia Sinica.
Professor Huang‘s research fields cover the history of science, the history of Sino-Western exchanges, the history of the late Ming and early Ch’ing dynasties, the history of medicine, the history of military affairs, and the history of marine exploration. The evolution of his research interests can be described as legendary within the academic world.
Professor Huang was the first Hu Shih Visiting Professor for Chinese Studies in Leiden University, the Netherlands, and has served as Honorary Professor of the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Yangtze River (Changjiang) scholar at Tsinghua University, Beijing; Guandu chair professor, Taipei National University of the Arts; and is an honorary fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
Representative works include “The Two-Headed Snake: the first generation of Catholics in the late Ming and early Ch’ing dynasties” (Shanghai, Ancient Books Publishing, 2006), “Ten Lectures on the Social History of Astronomy” (Fudan University Press, 2004), and so forth.
In 2010, he announced his research into the digital textual analysis of the “Dream of the Red Chamber”, and published in 2014 the book “Duet: A Dialogue between ‘Red Studies’ and Ch’ing History”, which has become an important representative work of the history of literature in the era of Big Data.