Other Activities

David Y. Y. Yun

Professional Activities:

Dr. Yun has significant experience in promoting international development of facilities and capabilities in computational technology and commercial applications. He was brought in by Taiwan as the Founding Director for the Advanced Technology Center at ITRI (Industry and Technology Research Institute), Taiwan, in 1987 to establish the foundation for advanced research and development by building a team of no less than 30 Ph.D and MS researchers from ground up.

He was appointed by the Governor of Hawaii and confirmed by the Senate in 1989 to serve on the Board of Directors for Hawaii's High Technology Development Corporation and was elected Vice-Chairman shortly, until 1995. For technology development in Hawaii, Dr. Yun has brought in over $13.5 million for the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle (EHV) programs and established, and directed, the National Data Center on the Internet to share technological development and vehicle performance information among more than 400 participating organizations and even to foreign automobile manufacturers.

Square USA, a Japanese subsidiary, donated a 240-processor supercomputer (estimated at $1.1M retail by UH Foundation) to Dr. Yun’s LIPS in 2002. This rendering farm was then converted to a general-purpose parallel computing environment, with the aggregate power of 120 GHz speed, 123 Giga-byte memory and 2 terra-bytes of disk storage. Such a computing platform places UH among the few elite universities with its own supercomputing environment for education, experimentation and application. Named LIPS240, it has been put to use as the parallel machine for students of the architecture and programming in fall 2002 and spring 2004 semesters. Over the past decade, Dr. Yun has been offering such education and training in supercomputer programming and application development in Hawaii. With its own supercomputing system as the core simulation, modeling and visualization environment to support research projects and educational programs, UH CoE is also poised to offer broader assistance to assist Hawaii-rooted application development and commercialization. Towards this goal, the Center for Advanced Computing And Virtual Experiments (CACAVE) is put in the key position to provide training of the fundamentals and resources in application development (see http://cacave.ev.hawaii.edu).

The Center for East-West Medicine Projects has been funded (by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, since 1995) and continues use remaining funds to pursue instrumentation development and diagnostic software based on scientific principles. In line with the pursuits of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in the Western world, the use of electro-magnetic measurements at acupuncture points, which have been know and shown (for thousands of years in the East) to be directly linked to functioning organs via the meridian channels and provide vital bio-feedback signals with significant diagnostic values. Experimental results include the confirmation of existence, measurability and controllability of Chi (bio-energy). Signal interpretation software that automates diagnosis and support the validation of such non-invasive measurements at acupuncture point measurements are being pursued, which also require collaborative efforts of medical and technology practitioners and students. In this case, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, or acupuncture, with the desire of applying technology and deploying scientific research principles also have the potential to make significant contributions to this interdisciplinary and international field of research.

Both the 1999 (print) and the 2001 Millennium Edition (CD) of the Governor’s publication: Science and Technology: The Key to Hawaii’s Economic Future feature multiple articles covering Dr. Yun’s results in bio-medical engineering, content-based image retrieval, telemedicine R&D, resource planning and scheduling, “virtual reality” imaging and 3D object modeling.

Technology and Business Development

Dr. Yun brought together 10 investors to form a fund that took control of the Computer*Thought Corporation in Dallas and served as the Chairman of the Board during 1986-88. Dr. Yun formed a private company, i.Solutions, inc. (iSi) in 1996 to provide computing system development and consulting services internationally. Between 1997 and 2003, iSi managed an international collaborative project that conducted research and development in supercomputed “virtual experiments” of photon behavior in human tissues, which have led to innovative (patent-pending) designs of diagnostic prototype systems for early detection of (breast cancer) tumors using non-invasive near-infrared lasers. The collaboration of Hamamatsu Photonics KK of Japan, Queen’s Medical Center of Hawaii and UH has led to not only funded research and equipment donations (>$1M) but also designs and prototype systems that are awaiting patents and clinical trial. In 2004, iSi was granted a coveted STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) award from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health. In partnership with Queen’s Medical Center, iSi will develop technology/software for image-assisted diagnosis and precision detection/positioning of prostate cancer by PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanning.

Dr. Yun’s consulting experience includes Texas Instruments; Delphy Consultants, Belgium; ARCO Research; E-Systems; Amdahl Communications Div.; Computer*Thought Corp.; I.I.I., Taiwan; ITRI, Taiwan, ROC; CADIX of Japan; Hamamatsu Photonics KK, Japan.

Honors and Awards:

· “Distinguished Scientist Award”, Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, November 2003.

· Project MISSION is an award-winning “virtual presence” system that integrates remote supercomputer simulation, 3D visualization, and bandwidth-on-demand communication for online computer-assisted radiation treatment planning, as detailed at www.proj-mission.org. The demonstration of the integrated system was recognized in 1998 as the world’s first satellite remote controlled 3D radiological imaging and received the semifinalist recognition in the “Health” category of Vice-President Gore’s Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Awards.

· Named “Mr. Telemedicine” in featured articles in Honolulu Advertiser 3/2000 and Wired News 11/1999.

· Computing Information Resources Association, “Outstanding Academic Achievement and Service to the Profession” Award, June 1999;

· Editorial Board Member or Associate Editor, Journal of Symbolic Computation (1985-2000), Data & Knowledge Engineering (since 1986), International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (since 1987), and Chinese Journal of Electronics (1996-2003).

· Who's Who in the World, 1999; Who’s Who in America, 1997; and Who's Who in Frontier Science and Technology, 1979;

· Honorary Chair Professor, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, 1994;