National Taipei University of Technology signed a cooperation agreement with the U.S.-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab March 29 in Taipei City to establish an R&D center at NTUT for the development of autonomous vehicle technology and smart city infrastructure, according to NTUT.
Signed by NTUT President Li Wen-lung and MIT Media Lab Director Kent Larson on behalf of the two sides, the agreement seeks to focus cooperation on the collection and use of urban mobility data, the exploration of possible uses for low-speed driverless vehicles and the development of technologies relating to vehicle-to-vehicle communication, smart materials and smart urban infrastructure.
“With the growing popularity of the Internet of Things, smart city infrastructure is playing an important role in urban and industrial development,” Li said at the signing ceremony. “The human-centric technologies that autonomous vehicles feature are part of a major index of smart city applications.”
Under the agreement, the two institutions will establish the City Science Lab at the Taipei university where the cooperative projects will take place. Li said that the IoT innovation base jointly built by his university and the Taoyuan City Government in northern Taiwan under the Asian Silicon Valley Development Plan will serve as a venue for the testing of components developed by the City Science Lab.
The Asian Silicon Valley initiative is one of the government’s five major development objectives, aiming to promote the growth of companies involved in producing IoT technologies and transform Taoyuan City into a smart technologies R&D hub.
Meanwhile, NTUT plans to send six students to the MIT Media Lab each year for internships that will last at least two months. The Taiwan university’s teachers will also visit the U.S. lab to conduct research on topics related to city science.
This is not the first time the two institutions have conducted such exchanges. Over the past two years, the university has sent a number of its students to the MIT Media Lab to participate in driverless vehicle research and interact with top-notch students and scientists from around the world.
NTUT is one of Taiwan’s leading tertiary institutions. The school, established in 1912, is working to internationalize through cooperation and exchange programs with its foreign counterparts and recruitment of overseas students. The university was ranked 112th in the 2016 QS University Rankings: Asia conducted by U.K.-based higher education information provider Quacquarelli Symonds. (KH-E)
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