Calendar 2006–07

388 Part 4 • Research Units and University Extensions Joint Centre for Intelligence Engineering (JCIE) Tel.: 2609 8270 Fax.: 2603 5558 E-mail: pcching@ee.cuhk.edu.hk Website: http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/jcie The newmillenniumwitnesses a dire need for revolutionizing technologies that support data mining, information access, management, processing, retrieval and visualization. Research and development of intelligent information technologies with a high degree of usability has become a critical problem for the engineering discipline. The JCIE was set up in 1999 to embark on this exciting research area. It advocates close collaboration between the Chinese University and Peking University. It capitalizes on the synergy of the two institutions to fulfil the general mission of becoming a world-class research centre in the promotion of basic and applied research in intelligence engineering. ‘Intelligent Speech for Information Systems’ was the first project completed under JCIE. A sophisticated trilingual (Putonghua, Cantonese and English) spoken dialogue system was developed for financial information enquiry applications. The current research areas of JCIE cover robust multi-modal speaker authentication technologies, large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition Chinese- English mixed language and Chinese text-to-speech synthesis. Joint Laboratory for Geoinformation Science (Please refer to p.343 under ‘Research Institutes and Centres’.) Joint Laboratory for Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Tel.: 2609 6286 Fax.: 2603 5646 E-mail: bio@cuhk.edu.hk Website: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/bio In the coming decades, China and the world will face increasing demands for food security, health care, and a sustainable environment. Recent advances in molecular biology and biotechnology offer new hopes and solutions to these challenges. In view of these developments and their potential, and exploiting the high concentration of expertise, state-of-the-art equipment and facilities of both partners, the Chinese University and Peking University jointly established a Joint Laboratory of Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in March 1999. The objective of the laboratory are: (1) to promote plant biotechnology research and its application in agriculture, medicine and environment; (2) to strengthen collaborative relationships with world renowned scientists and institutes for the advancement of plant biotechnology; and (3) to build a strong linkage and foundation between the two universities for scientific collaboration, academic exchange, and training of personnel. Activities of the joint laboratory include research projects of common interest such as genetically manufactured food allergy and fungal bioreactors, joint application of research funding, and exchange visits by researchers, and students.