A current major undertaking of the center is the excellence project: Advanced Technologies and Applications for Next Generation Information Communication Networks, sponsored by the Minister of Education, R.O.C. The primary goals of the project are to develop technologies and applications for next-generation information communication networks, with a purpose of carrying related research into excellence in the next decade. The project started in March 2000 for four years with a total budget of 14 million US dollars. It consists of nine subprojects. Six of them are executed in the National Tsing Hua University and the other three are in the National Chiao Tung University.

The six subprojects executed in the National Tsing Hua University are the followings:

Subproject 1 aims to develop key technologies for next generation internet switching, including core switching technologies, internet telephony, next-generation network management, and new protocol testing technologies.

Subproject 2 develops the theories and techniques related to agent-based platforms, software, languages, components, and abilities on the next-generation Internet.

Subproject 3 studies essential research subjects related to the integration of Internet and mobile computing. Research subjects include: quality-of-service guaranteed wireless IP, roaming users location management, connection management and multicast, etc.

Subproject 4 develops techniques related to effortless networking and pervasive computing, which aims to allow effortless and seamless access to network services and resources.

Subproject 5 studies content-based multimedia synthesis and retrieval technologies. Different abstraction levels of multimedia representation such as conceptual level and feature level will be investigated. Mechanisms for transforming high-level conceptual structure to low-level feature structure will be devised. Technologies for scaling up multimedia processing will also be studied.

Subproject 6 aims to explore the capabilities of the Internet in education and investigate the impact that the Internet will bring to societies and life-long learning. This project focuses on two aspects: (1) the establishment of a large virtual Educational Park in promoting the rationale of life-long education, and (2) the investigation of the potential issues and new social problems in the information society.

A unique feature of this project is that it is cross-disciplinary and cross-collegiate, joined by researchers from College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Tsing Hua University, and College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University. In addition, we have invited many researchers from other universities and research organizations, domestic and abroad, to participate. We have visited several outstanding research laboratories abroad and exchanged first-hand experiences. The project also cooperates closely with R&D institutions, such as CCL of ITRI, III, and industries to enhance the research and development capabilities of the nation and thus increases our competitiveness into the next century. With these outstanding researchers and our existing research infrastructure, we expect to develop in this project most advanced techniques and applications for next-generation information networks. This in turn should promote networking related research in our university to world excellence.