The mid-term international assessment of China-Singapore Institute of Digital Media (CSIDM) was held in Singapore from May 31 to June 2. This assessment was organized to evaluate CSIDM’s achievements and progress in the past three years by Singapore Media Development Authority (SMDA), according to the agreement signed by both sides. CSIDM succeeded in passing the assessment and obtaining the fund support for the following two years.
The Assessment Committee consisted of three world's well-known scientists, Prof. Mari Ostendorf from University of Washington, Prof. Dan Roth from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and Dr. Hongjiang Zhang, Dean of Microsoft Advanced Technology Center. They have achieved excellence in research from speech processing, natural language processing and multimedia computing respectively, maintaining a high international reputation.
On May 31, Prof. Bo Xu, Vice president of the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) and Dean of CSIDM, together with Prof. Weidao Huang from School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), introduced the strategic objective, technology roadmap, deployed projects, overall progress and achievements in the research field of human cross-language mediation and communication to the Assessment Committee. Then, the six leaders of the projects and one co-leader from NUS reported the project status. In the following session, the project leaders from both China and Singapore made a further communication, and answered the Assessment Committee’s questions.
On the morning of June 1, the Assessment Committee delivered a preliminary feedback on the overall situation and each project in CSIDM to the project leaders. They regarded the research field of human cross-language mediation and communication established by CSIDM to be strategic and unique, and considered CSIDM to have achieved top results in the world. The assessment of each project was based on the following five aspects: academic achievements, potential applications, correlation with the overall objective, cooperation with other projects and tests of the projects.
The Assessment Committee regarded that excellent achievements had been made in each project by CSIDM, due to high-quality papers were published in top international journals and conferences, awards were received in the international competitions, as well as the project leaders made important contributions to the international academic organizations. Furthermore, all the projects were deemed to have promising future and potential applications. Moreover, the Assessment Committee suggested that the cooperation be strengthened among the projects based on the overall objective, the application context be clearly defined and designed, as well as the technical evaluation be given in practical context. From the afternoon of June 1 to June 2, the Assessment Committee presented the evaluation report to the Steering Committee of CSIDM and the Chairman of Singapore Interactive Digital Media Executive Committee (SIDMEC) respectively.
Singapore Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (SMICA) and SMDAdecided to continue funding CSIDM after listening to the evaluation report and the proposed future work of CSIDM. It was hoped that CSIDM could furtherly integrate the projects based on the central strategic objective, and could make more influential achievements in the following two years. CSIDM’s goal for next stage is to develop an online platform of cross-language mediation and communication for the users to test. A development team will be formed to improve the market demand investigation and commercial promotion, to adjust current projects according to the central objective, to take full advantages of Singapore’s international academic communication resources and multi-language environment, as well as to enhance the cooperation between CASIA and NUS. CSIDM will spare every effort to become a world's well-known research and development institute, to make greater contributions for the development of CASIA, as well as to realize a smooth cross-language communication with one million orders of magnitude.
Founded in July 2008 by CASIA and NUS, CSIDM is a wholly foreign-funded overseas branch of CASIA, financially supported by SMDA. Vice President Bo Xu serves as Dean of CSIDM, and Prof. Changsheng Xu serves as Deputy Dean. CSIDM is the first overseas substantial research entity of Chinese Academy of Sciences, operated in a mode that is with fund support by Singapore and with scientists selected from CASIA, aiming to collaborate in the research projects meeting the common needs of both sides. The strategic objective of CSIDM is to facilitate the mediation and communication of human language. Based on this objective, the research fields mainly cover: interactive language translation, speech recognition and synthesis, virtual reality, multimedia analysis and search. CSIDM will launch more joint research, technical cooperation and commercialization of research findings with the institutes and industries in Singapore.
Since the foundation of CSIDM, 15 researchers and 24 graduate students have been invited to work in Singapore. Through continuous communication with SMDA in the past three years, CSIDM has formed a complete development strategy and executable technology roadmap. The joint achievements of CSIDM and NUS include eight applied patents, 83 published papers, of which some are accepted by the international journals of high reputation, such as IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and top international conferences, such as ACL, ACM Multimedia and CVPR, as well as two technical platforms mainly for language translation and human-computer interaction. In addition, CSIDM is actively exploring the commercialization of research findings, and has developed the cooperation with Singapore Technologies Engineering Limited (STE).
