Professor Phone Lin of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering and Associate Professor Ying-Jer Kao Won the 2010 Junior Researcher Award from Academia Sinica

In order to encourage young scholars to think deeply and to publish excellent academic theses, the Academia Sinica specifically established the "Junior Researcher Award" from 1995. For this year, the "Junior Researcher Award" had a total of 149 applications. For the math and natural science division, 69 applications were received; for life sciences, 38; for humanities and social sciences, 42. Altogether 15 winners were announced, and NTU had two professors winning this award in the math and natural science division, who were: Professor Phone Lin of the Department and Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, and Associate Professor Ying-Jer Kao of the Department of Physics. The Academia Sinica presented these Awards to the winners on June 3rd in the Lecture Hall of its Institute of Information Engineering.

Professor Phone Lin had outstanding performance in the area of mobile communications. Because he made specific contributions to the complexity and functional analyses of mobility management algorithms, he was elected by IEEE ComSoc (Communications Society)'s APB(Asia Pacific Board) as the Most Outstanding Young Scholar from Asia in the 2007 IEEE Conference (Professor Lin was the first scholar from Taiwan to receive this honor). In his papers presented at the Conference, he solved the problems of telecommunications' fee assessment which were caused by a person's mobility. He developed a complete theory, and designed proper algorithms, using comprehensive safety analysis and complexity analysis to prove the superiority of his algorithms, and successfully achieved mobile billing safety on cellular phones whose power supply were limited, storage capacity were limited, and wireless transmission rate were limited. His research solved the major problem in billing for telecommunication companies and was adopted by Chung-Hwa Telecom. In the 2005 wireless communications software contest called Mobile Hero organized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, he demonstrated his algorithm method and won the top prize. Also, he won the "Innovation and Research Award" by Intel, an internationally renowned company. His other award winning records include the 2009 Ten Outstanding Youth of the Republic of China (category Science and Technology), the Young Outstanding Electrical Engineer Award from the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineers in 2006, the 2005 Ta-You Wu Memorial Award from the National Science Council in 2005, the K. T. Li Young Researcher Award from ACM in 2004, and the Wen-Yuan Pan Research Award in 2004., etc.

Associate Professor Ying-Jer Kao's area of specialization is in strongly correlated quantum systems, such as: quantum self spin systems, strange Bose model systems, and the numerical simulation of the theory of strongly correlated electron systems. He has made solid and concrete contributions to these areas, and his research results have been published in the top notch journals of physics. For instance, in a paper published in PRL, he and his collaborator discovered that if a magnetic field which was perpendicular to the magnetic moment was added externally, LiHoxY1-xF4 was a system that could concretely realize Random Field Ising Model. This discovery allowed people to use sophisticated ferromagnetic measurement techniques to more directly modulate the random field, and to understand the interaction between ferromagnetic domain and the impurities. Also, in another paper, they maintained that in strongly correlated systems, non-magnetic impurities played an important role, triggering frustration of interaction. This viewpoint, not only explains the difference between theory and experiment in high temperature superconductors over the years, but also made it necessary for researchers to reexamine the role that impurities play in strongly correlated systems.