The next decade will see massive progress in speech and natural language technology. Demand for intelligent multimedia interfaces has risen sharply with the increasing sophistication of computing and communications systems, the rapid growth of the Internet and intranets, the emergence of computer-telephony integration, and the expanding deployment of wireless communication networks. Human language technology will enable users to communicate in their own language through wireless terminals to intelligent agents providing interactive information services, over worldwide communication and computer networks holding enormous quantities of text and audio data. Advances in human language technologies have been built upon the contributions from researchers in a number of distinctly different areas, including acoustics and transducers, signal processing, communication systems, speech coding, recognition and synthesis, natural language understanding and generation, language translation, heuristic search and problem solving, multimedia presentation, database management and design, human factors, and others. Systems built at HLTC include automated language translation for the Internet, speech-based web browsing, and speech recognition for the telephone.
Special emphasis is given to machine processing of Chinese language.
The Institute of Micro Systems is a research administrative unit that organizes and facilitates research activities in microelectronics. Under IMS, there are five centres of activities, namely the centres for circuits and systems, micromachines, nano-devices, display technology, and materials, which cover five key subject areas. The facility serves academics in all the Science and Engineering Departments and is also available to external clients from other tertiary institutions, government bodies, and private industry. In 1993, the Facility moved to larger premises in the Phase II building, thus enabling the scope of facilities to be expanded to meet more fully the needs of the growing research community of staff and graduate students. The Microelectronics Fabrication Facility was planned as a central facility during the early conception of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.