To ensure the effectiveness of student counseling, the Office of Student Affairs is determined to bring the Center for Student Well-Being, the counselors at each college, and the mentor system to the next level in order to build a comprehensive safety net for students by facilitating communications among departments/colleges, university administration, and mentors. It also established the Student Affairs Advisory Committee to solicit opinions from the faculty. Students as well as faculty are invited to join discussions on targeted topics in policy-making.

Communications, coordination, and constructive criticism are the backbone of student affairs. Every month, the Office modestly gathers and reviews precious feedback from students, seeking to make positive changes. The Office strives to make learning and feedback a two-way street to turn diversity and inclusion into reality.

During the past eighteen months, a key mission of the Office of Student Affairs has been epidemic prevention. Advance preparations and timely responses require effective collaboration among the different offices on campus. Also, to ensure student mental health under the threat of the pandemic, the Office enhances student counseling and assistance for mentors. The Office acts as both the first line of defense and the support system in waging the battle against COVID-19 on campus.

Finally, once students have identified their interest, Field Expertise allows them to learn systematically by organizing courses into modules. During the 2022-23 academic year, 39 departments will launch a total of 167 such modules opening the door for students to challenge their strengths or engage in cross-disciplinary learning as they plan their individual topics for future learning. This unprecedented flexibility will revolutionize university education and encourage students to be more proactive in the future.

NTU has issued its second social responsibility and sustainability report, an overview of NTU’s progress towards meeting the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in governance, research, service, and teaching. In addition, this year’s report includes a summary of NTU’s efforts in the global fight against COVID-19 and its achievements in safeguarding the health and safety of the Taiwanese people.

NTU’s ongoing efforts in social responsibility have proven effective. In the CommonWealth University Citizen Rankings (USR) survey conducted by CommonWealth Magazine, NTU took the top spot in the category of public university for two consecutive years since 2020. In the same year, NTU was also awarded Taiwan Corporate Sustainability Awards in the categories of “Outstanding Sustainability University” and “Outstanding University Sustainability Reports.”

Ever since he took office, President Chung-Ming Kuan has actively collaborated with students and the Office of Financial Affairs to promote socially responsible investments. Under his leadership, NTU completed the divestment of high-pollution and high-emission industries within 2 years, making it the first university in Asia to take such firm actions.

Two students were invited to speak at the ceremony, including Gladys Yu Sook En of the Department of Bio-Industry Communication and Development and Fang-Yu Hu of the School of Medicine. They shared stories of their personal growth at NTU and hoped that the freshmen would draw on NTU’s abundant resources to overcome their difficulties in setting their values and one day contribute to the world. The ceremony concluded with a video produced by the Office of Student Affairs to offer the freshmen a sincere welcome, marking a great beginning of the 2021 academic year.

Biotechnology, which encompasses food, medicine, agriculture, industry, and energy, plays an ever-greater role in our lives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, biotech has entered the spotlight owing to the global focus on the research and development of vaccines and drugs. On August 19, NTU hosted a biotechnology workshop on cutting-edge developments in RNA technology and synthetic biology applications. Leading experts from MIT were invited to discuss their latest findings.

NTU Plus Academy Global Vision Workshop, hosted by the Office of International Affairs on July 13-15, 2021, was conducted in English for students with a passion for international issues. The participants included mostly high school students from Taiwan, but also students from abroad, such as Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Japan. The participants’ diverse nationalities and backgrounds added an interesting layer to the experience.

Analyzing wood flakes collected during violin repairs, scientists found that Stradivari and Guarneri used chemically altered wood for the front and back plates. This technique was developed by their master, Amati, who added chemicals (like borax and copper sulfate) to prevent worms and fungi. Stradivari and Guarneri took it one step further to achieve acoustic tuning by using much more aggressive chemicals. To make the wood stiffer, Stradivari added table salt and Guarneri tried alum, KAl(SO4)2. They also aged the wood by alkaline treatments.

The salt stiffened the wood by altering the distribution of water molecules, similar to the principle of salt-cured meat. The alum stiffened the wood by forming chemical crosslinks between wood fibers. The alkaline treatments caused the rearrangement of wood fibers. The hydrolysis of hemicellulose fibers under basic pH conditions allowed extra space for the remaining cellulose fibers to reorganize and form thicker bundles. On a side note, the artificial aging of wood using lime has been recorded by ancient Chinese guqin makers, with the same cellulose bundling observed by Associate Prof. Tai.

These new discoveries take us one step closer to reproducing the famous tonal quality of Stradivari and Guarneri violins. Associate Prof. Tai believes that different chemical recipes are associated with the distinct tonal colors of each master. Leading modern violin makers are incredibly skilled and they will probably surpass Stradivari once they master the principles of materials engineering for tonewood. Associate Prof. Tai started this line of research when he was a PhD student at Caltech during a visit to Joseph Nagyvary, the biochemistry professor at Texas A&M who pioneered Italian violin materials research. Associate Prof. Tai is also an avid collector of classical music CDs and hi-fi audio equipment, and plays on a Nagyvary-Chen violin made in 2009.

A cutting-edge study led by the assistant professor Huei-Ting (Tina) Lin of the Institute of Oceanography, in collaboration with distinguished chair professor Chuan-Chou (River) Shen of the Department of Geology, two post-doctoral researchers, Hong-Wei Chiang and Tsai-Luen Yu, and international partners, was published by the prestigious journal Analytical Chemistry on June 9. The study made a breakthrough in making extremely difficult measurements of the uranium isotope ratio (²³⁶U/²³⁸U), which is expected to lead to significant advances in modern oceanography and open a new path in ocean circulation research.

Uranium is evenly distributed in the world’s oceans, though in trace abundance. In the 1950s-1960s, a series of nuclear weapons tests in the central Pacific generated ²³⁶U, entering the ocean waters. The bomb-generated ²³⁶U was transported from the Central Pacific to other regions by ocean currents and changed the ²³⁶U/²³⁸U ratios. The ten-thousand-fold amplification makes ²³⁶U/²³⁸U ratios a sensitive ocean circulation tracer. However, measuring both the ²³⁶U and the ²³⁸U at the same time is a daunting task.

About ten years ago, quantifying the low ²³⁶U/²³⁸U in natural samples became possible at a few accelerator-mass-spectrometer (AMS) laboratories. However, AMS is rather insensitive and detects only one out of a thousand uranium.

To make the ²³⁶U/²³⁸U measurements more widespread and affordable than AMS, our team developed a new analytical method using a multi-collector high-resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (MC-ICPMS) located in the NTU’s Department of Geosciences. The MC-ICPMS is far more sensitive than AMS, detecting about two out of a hundred uranium. However, the accelerating power of the MC-ICPMS is only 8000 volts, instead of 3-10 million volts in AMS, and thus cannot achieve complete separation of ²³⁶U from ²³⁸U. As a result, the ²³⁸U interference on ²³⁶U is a-thousand-fold larger than the true ²³⁶U signal. The research team used a reversed high voltage filter to reduce the ²³⁸U interference on ²³⁶U greatly. The team also quantified and corrected the hydride of ²³⁵U that overlapped with the ²³⁶U signal. This analytical method can be applied with the MC-ICPMS found in many Earth Sciences and Oceanographic research institutes at relatively low cost, short analytical time, and the smallest sample size. The team hopes to apply this method to the study of modern global and regional ocean circulation.

Research on methylome and transcriptome co-analysis of cancer-associated fibroblasts taken from patients with non–small-cell lung cancer, published by Dr. Sheng-Fang Su, Graduate Institute of Oncology, Dr. Chao-Chi Ho, Internal Medicine at NTU Hospital, Dr. Ker-Chau Li and Dr. Hao Ho, Institute of Statistical Science at Academia Sinica, was featured on the cover of Journal of Clinical Investigation this past August. The research opens a new epigenome-wide perspective on how detecting cancer-associated fibroblast perturbation may shed light on the behavior of individual tumor microenvironment in clinical outcomes. Moreover, this discovery offers invaluable insight into the workings of precision medicine.

Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF) are a key contributor to the tumor microenvironment (TME) that engages critical participants during tumorigenesis. Studies related to genome-wide profiling of cancer patient-derived CAFs for biomarker development and CAF-targeted therapy have gained increasing attention in recent years. However, the limited molecular-level understanding of CAF heterogeneity among cancer patients has posed a challenge to researchers.

In this research, the team was able to quantify the pro-tumorigenic potency of CAFs via a DNA methylation signature and reported the smoking impact on premalignant TME. These results suggest that smoking not only incurs disarrangement in cancer but disrupts the physiological functions of surrounding CAFs. By exploring the behavior of CAFs, physicians may score those patients with risks of tumor relapse and better predict their prognosis.

Dr. Su received her advanced training at the renowned cancer epigenetic laboratory of the University of Southern California, under the guidance of Dr. Peter Jones, where she received her Ph.D. Specializing in cancer epigenetic research, Dr. Su established an epigenomics laboratory at NTU for genome-wide epigenetic studies. By cross-disciplinary collaboration, she continues her studies in tumor biology and liquid biopsy application to advance precision medicine.

Asset pricing is a core field in financial economics. One of the major challenges of asset pricing is to propose models that explain the behavior of asset prices. To this end, models that incorporate investor disagreement can be enlisted to explain empirical regularities, such as investor overtrading, asset bubbles, and stock price crashes. These are all issues of great interest to academics, practitioners, and policy makers. While models of investor disagreement are appealing on theoretical grounds, prior empirical studies do not demonstrate solid causal evidence for the role of disagreement in asset prices.

To meet this empirical challenge, the research team exploited a regulation enacted in the 1990s by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requiring all public firms to submit and disclose their financial reports online. Firms were required to participate in this system in discrete ways that effectively led to random assignments of treated and control firms. This empirical setting served as a natural experiment with which the research team compared the pre- and post-regulation differences between the treated and control firms (difference-in-differences design). The researchers found that this regulation indeed induced a reduction in investor disagreement, which in turn alleviated speculative stock price bubbles and crash risks. The team also found that these effects were more pronounced for stocks with binding short-sale constraints, consistent with models of investor disagreement. Overall, a single and parsimonious empirical identification design was adopted for this study to test all core predictions of disagreement models, thus establishing a causal relation between investor disagreement and important asset pricing phenomena. The results of this paper also shed new light on the benefits of mandatory disclosure from an asset pricing perspective. These contributions were key in receiving recognition from the world’s leading academic journal in finance, The Journal of Finance.

In view of the increasing importance of III-V compound transistors and photonic devices, IPARC collaborates with the Graduate Institute of Photonics and Optoelectronics and WIN Semiconductors Corp. in developing HBTs, Fin-HEMTs, and PICs. The project has made significant contributions to the advancement of compound semiconductors. In research on 3D sensing, the development of VCSEL array fabrication, measurement system, and algorithms of 3D image recognition are the core efforts in a collaboration among IPARC, Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, and LOTES, a leading domestic connector manufacturer. Such developments are hoped to be applicable to tests of production line yields.

Furthermore, the photonic device simulation tool developed by IPARC professors has accumulated over 500 downloads. Collaborations in the design of innovative photonic devices abound, as IPARC launches projects with not only renowned academic institutions worldwide but also key players, such as EPISTAR, PlayNitride, and Apple.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way the world operates and as it gains momentum, one of its core technologies—machine learning—is increasingly important. Since machine learning technology is rooted in several fields, the course “Machine Learning” offered by Associate Professor Hung-yi Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering was open to all NTU students. Last semester, 1280 students enrolled in the course, one of the few classes at NTU with over 1,000. To ensure that students would have the best learning outcome, lecture recordings and class materials were available in Chinese and English, to accommodate international as well as domestic students.

As NTU does not have a classroom that can seat 1,000 students, Associate Prof. Lee arranged for the lectures and class materials to reach students both inside and outside the classroom. Students in the course had the option to attend the lectures in person or participate online via live streaming. Additionally, the lectures were recorded and uploaded to YouTube for students to replay.

Machine Learning was a huge class and the students came from a variety of departments. Associate Prof. Lee strived to help students of different levels and abilities to keep up with the lectures and achieve a basic grasp of machine learning. The lectures covered a range of topics, from basic concepts of machine learning to deep learning, self-attention, transformer, generative models, and subject-specific machine learning theories, such as quantum machine learning, which presented by guest speakers. All the cutting-edge research was presented clearly and straightforwardly, to make the course beginner-friendly. Nonetheless, the course content remained challenging, even for majors in electrical engineering and computer science.

All the assignments and project results were submitted online and the evaluation of machine learning models was done automatically via platforms, such as Kaggle. However, some assignments were too innovative to be assessed on existing platforms. For example, “Adversarial Attack,” an assignment that required students to add noise to images to fool machine learning-trained imagine recognition systems. In order to evaluate this assignment, a team of teaching assistants set up a DIY platform “Judgeboi” by which students could test their models and better understand the vulnerabilities of machine learning.

In the past, the vast majority of presentations and services offered by the Library were conducted in Chinese. At present, because NTU welcomes an increasing number of international students and professors, the Library now offers its presentations and services in English, as well. Since 2017, the Library has hosted the “Know Your Library” tour each year. On this tour, international students and faculty are guided through the abundant resources and programs offered by the Library, in English. Additionally, some librarians also give presentations in English and assist professors from various colleges and departments. 

NTU Library launched its first English program: “F.I.R.S.T. Workshop in NTU Library” in 2021 to further assist foreign library users in obtaining the information they need. The acronym F.I.R.S.T stands for Foreign Students Must Learn: Information, Research and Search Techniques; the program includes sessions on EndNote reference manager, databases, and other multi-media resources. At the workshop, subject specialists act as consultants and assist participants in resolving the challenges they encounter when accessing and using   information resources.

The program was well-received, and many believe it will play a pivotal role in NTU’s internalization process. It is hoped that the program will not only open the Library’s door to a greater audience but help everyone on campus maximize their use of the rich Library collections and academic resources. This program is promoted by the Office of International Affairs, the Center for Teaching and Learning Development & Digital Learning Center, NTU Colleges and Departments, NTU’s foreign teaching faculty, and student clubs.

PEOPLE

Forge Ahead—
NTU Baseball

It felt like yesterday—The whistle blew. The game was over. He saw his teammates pat each other on the back; some were wiping the sweat from their brows, or were they tears? Their star players, including the pitcher and catcher, had just played their last game in the University Baseball League. They were outstanding. That homer in the top of the sixth inning sent chilled down his spine, and he shouted and cheered with the team, eager for a comeback. They nearly made it, just lost by one run to Taipei University of Marine Technology. NTU Baseball played fiercely this past season in the UBL games. Their hard work paid off. Going into the second round in second place of the divisional preliminary, they advanced to the quarter finals, buoyed by a winning streak.

NTU graduate student Mei-Chien Huang competed in the Women’s 50m Freestyle at the Tokyo Olympics as the only female swimmer on the Chinese Taipei team. Competing against some of the best swimmers in the world, she finished in 25.99 seconds, placing 6th in the heat and 38th overall. Although she did not qualify, it was an amazing personal achievement for her.

A graduate of the Department of Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering (2020), Mei-Chien Huang is now a master’s student in Sport Facility Management and Health Promotion and captain of the NTU Swimming Team. She finished the Women’s 50m Freestyle in 25.59 seconds at the National Intercollegiate Athletic Games last May, breaking her own record and winning a ticket to the Olympics.

As the coach of the NTU Swimming Team, Assistant Prof. Chien-Ju Lin, a former national champion and Olympian herself who participated in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, praised Mei-Chien Huang for her skills and diligence. Although she mostly trained off campus, she never held back during weekly training with the university team.

Back home in Taiwan, Mei-Chien Huang is continuing with her studies and training. As the national record-holder in Women’s 50m Freestyle and Women’s 50m Butterfly, she aspires to break her own records in future competitions.

National Taiwan University Press is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Since its establishment in October 1996, the press has published primarily academic works, as well as a variety college textbooks and high-quality general titles. The new logo was launched for this grand occasion and has appeared on every publication since August. This brand new visual is intended to add a burst of creativity and depth to the field of academic publishing in Taiwan.

A logo is a bridge that connects a publisher with the world and distinguishes the identity of the brand. The new logo of NTU Press presents an artistic interpretation of its abbreviation, NTUP, aimed to prompt readers to visualize the press’s English name “National Taiwan University Press” at first sight. Serif was chosen for the English font. Tracing back to ancient Rome, serif was the font carved into stone by the Romans in antiquity. To this day, serif is regarded as a classical and elegant font which bears incredible cultural and   historical depth.

The design of the Chinese font strives for visual harmony and is aimed to unite the images to showcase the importance and rigor of academic publishing. Moreover, it conveys the innovative spirit of the publishing house. To underscore the intimate connection between the press and National Taiwan University, a shade of brick red inspired by the buildings flanking NTU campus’s Royal Palm Boulevard was selected.

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, NTU Press launched the new logo to symbolize the press’s intention to transmit the fruits of significant research to the future generations, as well as open a new chapter in academic publishing at National Taiwan University. Besides appearing on publications, the new logo is also featured on a variety of merchandise sold by the press bookstore.