New IBM China Research Laboratory Ushers In The Year Of Technology And Partnership.

BEIJING--(BUSINESS WIRE)--September 21, 1995--IBM officially dedicated its new Research Laboratory here today, ushering in a new age of shared technology and partnership for the development of China.

The dedication ceremonies included speeches by IBM executives and Chinese dignitaries, a tour of the new laboratory, a wealth of technology demos (see attached list) and a series of spirited toasts to the success of the new lab. A few friendly games between Xie Jun, the current women's world chess champion from China and Deep Blue, the IBM Computer-Chess Program, capped the day's activities.

The event was attended by Chinese government dignitaries, research partners from major Chinese universities and IBM executives and scientists.

To introduce students to IBM Research technologies, the China Research Lab invited several hundred graduate students from selected Beijing universities to an Open House event on September 22nd. The students will see the full complement of technology demos that were shown at the lab dedication ceremonies.

Laboratory Director Dr. George W. Wang, who was born in China, said: "China's economy is growing exponentially. Its scientists, who are among the most talented in the world, need advanced technology to fuel such dynamic growth.

"One of our primary goals is to create world-class computer technologies that support China's growing infrastructure. Building on our links to IBM's worldwide research organization, we will create an environment in our new lab that will encourage researchers to make major technological advances. In this way both IBM and the Chinese nation will achieve major benefits."

IBM has donated hardware and software to a number of universities to support joint IBM/University original research of national and commercial importance. The universities are: Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Peking University and Tsinghua University.

By forging strong links with the universities, the lab now participates in the entrepreneurial drive of university research and can help accelerate the development of key ventures in China. This new laboratory will provide a strong channel for building bridges between IBM and research in Chinese universities, industries, the State Science Technology Commission and the Academy of Science. A senior official from the Ministry of Electronic Industry said: "This grand opening is a very significant event. It is a concrete expression of the progress and close cooperation that exists between us. The Research Lab is significant because it will focus on world class research and technology to meet the specific needs of China and because it gives China access to the fruits of IBM's R&D and to its world-wide technical community."

"In China's efforts to informationalize its economy, we hope that IBM and the China Research Lab will play an important role.... We also think it will be good for IBM because IBM will have access to our best universities and researchers. I wish the China Research Lab every success and offer MEI's strongest support."

Research activities at the new lab, which has been operational since July, focus on software and applications projects that are especially relevant to China. Examples include Digital Library, Speech Recognition for Mandarin, Chinese Language Processing, Object Oriented Technology and Parallel Processing.

"IBM technology will play a pivotal role in developing a number of national and commercial projects for China," said Dr. James McGroddy, senior vice president, Research, for IBM. "The new lab fulfills IBM's commitment to help China develop its information technology infrastructure. We are enthusiastic about its future."

The new laboratory's current staff of 16 consists of leading doctoral scientists and researchers with master's degrees, drawn from China's extensive scientific and technological community.

The China Research Lab is one of seven IBM research sites worldwide: Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., USA; Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA; Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland; the Haifa Research Laboratory in Israel; the Tokyo Research Laboratory in Yamato, Japan and the Austin Research Laboratory in Austin, Texas, USA.

The division's work encompasses computer sciences, physical sciences, manufacturing research, mathematical sciences, system technology, storage, and communications.

For more information on the IBM China Research Lab, please consult the IBM Research Home Page on the Internet at HTTP://WWW.RESEARCH.IBM.COM 

CONTACT: Mark Guan 

IBM (China)

86-10-437-6677, Extension 3284

or

Katherine Joyce

IBM Research (U.S.)

[phone]

-0- FACT SHEET

IBM DEMONSTRATES CORE TECHNOLOGIES AT DEDICATION

OF NEW CHINA RESEARCH LAB

BEIJING--September 21, 1995--IBM demonstrated a host of advanced technology systems at the dedication ceremonies for the new China Research laboratory today. IBM Research's partners from Chinese universities joined the celebration from Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Peking University and Tsinghua University.

"I look forward to the IBM China Research Laboratory working closely with major local universities and making significant contributions to education in China," said Chen Qinlong, Vice Director of Science and Technology, State Education Commission.

The demos, described below, are identified by the universities and professors who expect to be working with each project along with the IBM researchers and labs that provided the various technologies to China:

Digital Library

- Prof. Hu Yunfa

Fudan University, Shanghai

- Norm Pass, Dave Choy, Jim McCrossin, Tom Griffin, Bruce Hoenig,

Steve Boyer and Steve Newell

IBM Almaden Research Center, Almaden, California, USA

- Alan Marwick

IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

A Digital Library, from IBM's Almaden lab may be used by Fudan University in a joint study. The university hopes to be able to use the system to research Chinese texts, automatically generate abstracts for Chinese documents, study historical maps and show the evolution of maps during China's different dynasties.

To demonstrate IBM's leadership of digital library technology, several research digital libraries were shown including IBM Patent Server System for USA and the DL6 prototype. DL6 is a digital library prototype, developed by the IBM Watson Research Center, that utilizes IBM's VisualInfo and DB2 to support multimedia information objects. DL6 stores documents, catalogs their contents, and retrieves objects based on catalog data including title, author, journal, etc.

"The IBM China Research laboratory will definitely help promote education and research computer sciences in China," said Professor Shi Baile of Fudan University.

"...The establishment of IBM China Research Laboratory will contribute significantly to the advances of computer technology in China..." said Professor Hu Yunfa, also of Fudan University.

Chinese Language Processing

- Professor Wang Yong Cheng

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Natural language processing in various ways has always presented many technical challenges. These challenges are especially difficult for the Chinese language because of its non-phonetic nature and loose grammatical structure. This demo included three special Chinese language applications running on a PC:

-- Automatic abstraction, which generates abstracts of articles.

-- A legal retrieval system that provides an updated database of

all national laws of China since 1949, and a search program

driven by queries.

-- Automatic classification of medical documents, which classifies

the documents based on either the full text or title.

"You have come a long way to China to establish friendly cooperation and joint technical development. I believe the IBM China Research Lab will bring honor and benefit to IBM because you are all exceptional, and you have already won true friendship from the very beginning. Let's join hands and make significant contributions to computer technology for all mankind in this information age," said Professor Wang Yong Cheng of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Jade Bird Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) for PC

- Professor Yang Fuqin and Professor Chen Zhong 

Peking University, Beijing

JB-CASE for PC is a part of the Integrated Software Engineering Environment--a Chinese national research project named Jade Bird system led by Peking University. This system, which will be used to develop a number of applications, includes the following tools:

-- Software Analysis Tool: supports structured analysis (SA)

methods and provides consistency checking for on-going needs.

-- Software Design Tool: supports structured design methods.

The tool assists chief programmers or software designers to

fulfill design efforts through Module Structured Diagram.

-- Document Tracing Tool: assists software developers in tracing

relationships and determining the side-effects that occur when

changes of requirements or design are made.

-- Database Design Tool: carries out conceptual design and

logical design of database applications through the entity-

relation model.

-- Document Publishing Tool: assists standard software

engineering documents editing and publishing on desktop.

"I would like to extend my congratulations to the IBM China Research Lab for its dedication in Beijing. I am looking forward to the abundant and significant accomplishments resulting from the joint research projects between the Lab and Peking University," said Prof. Yang Fuqin, Peking University Chairperson, Computer Sciences Department.

Parallel Processing on a Cluster of Workstations

- Prof. Wang Dingxing, Prof. Zheng Weimin, and Prof. Shen Meiming

Tsinghua University, Beijing

Parallel computations can be run on a group of workstations when they are connected over a network. This demo showed three types of computation intensive applications programmed to run on a cluster of RS/6000s via an Ethernet connection, including:

-- Seismic data processing for modeling and analysis in the

petroleum industry.

-- Weather data processing for modeling and forecasting.

-- Parallel computation in CAD (Computer Aided Design)

applications.

"IBM and Tsinghua University have a strong, cooperative relationship. I look forward to further cooperation with the China Research Lab so that we can promote the development of the computer industry for China and the United States," said Professor Wang Dingxing of Tsinghua University.

A Prototype for Chinese OS/2 Warp Navigator

- Shen Liqin, Guo Xue Fung and Donald Tang

IBM China Research Lab, Beijing

Speech recognition has a broad range of applications. The output of a speech recognition system can be used to drive a printer, as in a dictation system, or to drive application programs directly.

One class of applications is the command and control navigation. The system requirements in such a case are quite different from that of a large vocabulary dication system and can vary from application to application.

IBM demonstrated a prototype of a Chinese speech-driven OS/2 Warp navigation system in which a human voice input replaces the mouse in directing the Warp to perform various tasks.

Prototype of a Continuous Chinese Dictation System

- Julian Chen

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

Because of the ideographic writing system of the Chinese language, keyboard input is awkward, and is a paramount hurdle for computer usage. In addition to the basic challenges presented by Speech Recognition by computers of any language, Chinese language speech recognition involves several additional technological challenges:

-- The Chinese language has lexical tones, where the pitch contour

of syllables distinguishes meanings of characters and words. (A

word may consist of two or more characters.)

-- Word boundaries in Chinese are ambiguous when written, and

spaces are only used to separate characters.

-- The regional differences in Chinese language tend to be severe.

This demo illustrated current research technology in this field. Due to system resource requirements, market affordability and other factors, it is not yet clear when this type of system will be available to general users. IBM's goal is to deliver a generally affordable speech recognition system by continuously improving the technology and by modifying the product functionality.

AutoReco/2: Japanese Printed Document Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on OS/2

- Kaz Toyokawa and Yuki Hirayama

IBM Tokyo Research Lab

AutoReco/2 is a Japanese printed OCR system, produced by IBM Japan since 1993. It handles layout analysis, Kanji recognition with Japanese contextual post-processing and viewing results. It can segment a page into text, figure and table areas during the layout analysis stage. The table areas are then processed to extract their column-structure.

This demo showed the general processing of AutoReco/2 for a page including a table and the transfer of data to a spreadsheet using a "Cut & Paste" operation.

AutoReco/2 also supports an automatic SGML-tagging function for a recognized document. The demo showed a tagged-document creation from a hard copy that can be viewed by a World Wide Web/Internet environment.

"ThinkWrite-J" Online Japanese Recognition System on Windows

- Kaz Toyokawa and Yuki Hirayama

IBM Tokyo Research Lab, Japan

ThinkWrite-J is an online Japanese recognition system in a Windows environment. A user can input handwritten characters, sketches, and select menus with a pen in a user-friendly way.

The demo showed a dental clinic record entry. With post- processing function, a user can enter a patient name and address, which the system stores in a hard disk. The pen interface with ThinkWrite-J can be applied to various form-fill applications in government, finance, distribution, and education industries.

The demo included cursive handwritten English recognition technology from Watson Research. The system can recognize an English word written by cursive, printed, or a mix of both styles.

Form Processing

- Jianchang Mao, K.M. Mohiuddin and Kwon Wong

IBM Almaden Research Center, Almaden, California, USA

The task of entering form information from paper documents into computers is labor-intensive and expensive. This demo showed the use of form processing software tools to significantly improve the productivity of operators in entering form document information.

Paper forms, filled in English, were scanned to produce black and white images. The form type was identified by analyzing certain landmark features. The fixed part of the form was then removed from the scanned image, leaving only the filled-in portions.

Hand-print or machine-print OCR was applied to image segments from fields that were previously defined. An efficient verification and correction method was used in correcting and validating the final recognition results. The demo also included form recognition and dropout on Chinese forms.

Deep Blue: The IBM Computer-Chess Program

- C. J. Tan and Feng-Hsiung Hsu

IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

The IBM computer-chess project is a research effort in exploring the computational capabilities of special-purpose, scalable, parallel computing systems. Deep Blue is a special-purpose, scalable, parallel system with an overall processing speed that can be as high as analyzing one billion chess positions per second. It can be run on either an IBM RS/6000 workstation, an IBM scalable parallel processor SP2, or an IBM personal computer.

Deep Blue now has the strength of an international grand-master. It will be playing a series of six exhibition games against Garry Kasparov, the current world chess champion, during the ACM 50th anniversary conference in Philadelphia, February 10-17, 1996.

Deep Blue played 'friendly' games with Xie Jun, the current women's world chess champion from China, at the China Research Laboratory dedication ceremonies.

IBM Research Division Overview and Ten Year Outlook

Attendees got to use an IBM ThinkPad that contained two menu-driven presentations: "IBM Research Division Overview," a look at current IBM research projects and objectives and "Ten Year Outlook," a view of the computer industry and where it is headed over the next decade.

For more information on the IBM China Research Lab, please consult the IBM Research Home Page on the Internet at HTTP://WWW.RESEARCH.IBM.COM

CONTACT: Mark Guan

IBM (China)

86-10-437-6677, Extension 3284

or

Katherine Joyce

IBM Research (U.S.)

[phone]