Speaking into a microphone attached to a "groundbreaking" voice translation system yesterday, National Chiao Tung University vice president Lee Chia-huang (
"The system just `heard' what I said and translated it into Hakka," Lee told a press conference on the latest breakthroughs from Chiao Tung and National Tsing Hua universities -- two institutions that are churning out cool gadgets, oft-cited academic theses and billion-dollar businesses after receiving the equivalent of tens of millions of US dollars in subsidies from the Ministry of Education last year.
Chiao Tung's new translation technology was the least of its achievements; the school has just developed a rubber-based solar energy cell boasting a record-breaking energy transfer rate of 5.2 percent, a Chiao Tung press release said.
Although the prototype cell isn't market ready yet, it represents a big step toward lessening the world's dependence on fossil fuels, it said.
Tsing Hua demonstrated its business-oriented approach to putting government cash to good use. The university has "spun off" eight publicly listed companies boasting a combined market value of more than NT$50 billion (US$1.5 billion) since receiving NT$1.2 billion in subsidies last year, a press release said.
"We saw how universities like Stanford and MIT were involved in the creation of innovative, high-tech companies, and we sent our professors there to learn how to foster spin-offs," said Tsing Hua's head of research and development, Lin Yung-lung (林永隆).
Yahoo, Cisco Systems and Google are shining examples of how companies can arise from academia, he said.
Yesterday's conference was one in a series featuring the achievements of 12 universities that have been awarded billions of dollars since January last year as part of the education ministry's five-year, NT$50 billion "Awards Plan for Outstanding Universities."
The plan had been proposed by President Chen Shui-bian (
Even now, much of the subsidies remain frozen, mostly because of pan-blue lawmakers, who refused to approve NT$20 billion of the subsidies last year, alleging that the ministry dispersed funds inconsistently.
Vice Minister of Education Chou Tsan-der (周燦德) pleaded with lawmakers in the legislature's Education and Culture committee in March to retroactively free up last year's frozen funds and pass a separate NT$50 billion budget for the awards plan in the 2007 to 2008 academic year. The budgets are still pending legislative review.
Chou met with stiff opposition from pan-blue and Taiwan Solidarity Union legislators, who demanded that he submit a report explaining why some schools had been selected for subsidies ahead of others, and a justification for the amount of funds per school.
Of the passed amount, Tsing Hua received NT$1.2 billion last year, while Chiao Tung received NT$800 million.
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