A government-sponsored project has successfully developed technologies involving advanced information storage standards, which is more user-friendly to interactive media information receivers, the National Science Council announced yesterday.
Dozens of researchers from the Communication and Multimedia Laboratory at National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday demonstrated their research results at a press conference held by the council.
By having only a digital image of a friend (the target), researchers said, a user can within seconds retrieve all digital pictures of the target from a database containing thousands of pictures by using powerful international-standard software developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
MPEG developed the Emmy Award-winning software known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, which are used in VCD and DVD format respectively, for information storage. MPEG-4 and MPEG-7, later versions which ensure a better media-storage performance, were accepted worldwide in 1998 and 2001.
MPEG-4 is applied in the fields of digital television, interactive graphics applications and interactive multimedia. It provides standardized technological elements that enable the integration of the production, distribution and content-access paradigms of the three fields.
According to Wu Ja-ling (
"Our new technologies aim to create a coordinate framework integrating both the service provider and receiver," Wu said.
Other results include software that edits TV news pieces into more concise segments, software making virtual sculptures and a scalable-coders application, which coordinate information transmission between a service provider and receivers.
Wu said that the university's achievements attracted several foreign firms at the MPEG-4 Industry Forum last year and this year.
Tsay Chung-biau (
NTU will officially host a public exhibition of all the research results next Monday at its Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS