I am pleased to continue to serve as the Representative of IEICE in Taipei. The IEICE is a very successful professional society. It holds many conferences and technical meetings and issues high-quality periodical publications which has already attracted many articles from international authors. I am glad that the IEICE is strongly promoting the Overseas Area Representatives Program. One mission of the local area representative is to act as a bridge between the Institute and the members in the local area through academic meetings.

According to IEICE statistics, Taiwan has been an important IEICE overseas area in terms of the number of members as well as the number of articles published in the Institute's English Transactions. Having more lecture meetings or workshops would help publicize these facts and let the general attendants get familiar with the IEICE activities. In fact, electronics, computers, and telecommunications industries are key industries in Taiwan and therefore they are always in need of engineers in these areas. All major universities now have established College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a good population of graduate students. There is thus good opportunity in recruiting more new members. I am very pleased to know that the number of IEICE overseas members in Taiwan had increased from 315 in May 2005 to 462 in March 2006.

Since April 2005 and until March 2006, we had organized two IEICE Distinguished Lecture events at National Taiwan University. The first event included two one-hour IEICE Distinguished Lectures and was held during November 4 & 5, 2005 in association with the Workshop on Photonic Crystals and Nanophotonics which was announced as co-sponsored by the IEICE Taipei Section. The workshop has been very successful and was attended by more than 200 scholars and graduate students from different institutes in Taiwan. The workshop theme was related to important new technical areas. Prof. Kiyotoshi Yasumoto from Department of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, Kyushu University gave the opening lecture on the first day of the workshop (November 4, 2005, 2:00-3:00pm). Dr. Masaya Notomi from Photonic Nanostructure Research Group, NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Atsugi was the first speaker on the second day of the workshop (November 5, 2005, 9:00-10:00am). In addition to these two invited lectures, there were 14 invited papers presented by scholars from different universities and institutes in Taiwan. The title of the lecture by Prof. Yasumoto was "Modeling of scattering, guidance, and radiation in two-dimensional photonic crystals." He described analytical formulations he and his colleagues have derived for the analysis of photonic crystal structures and showed numerical results in the applications to different structures. The title of the lecture by Dr. Notomi was "All-optical switching and dynamic nonlinear control in photonic crystals." He presented the fabrication and development of photonic crystal waveguides and related novel photonic devices in his laboratory, in particular, the fascinating applications in all-optical switiching and dynamic nonlinear control circuits. Their excellent presentations of new research results were followed by exciting discussions in and after the sessions.

The second Distinguished Lecture event was held on March 29, 2005 and the invited speaker was Prof. Hisamatsu Nakano from Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan. There were more than 80 attendants including several faculty members. His talk was entitled "Recent Progress in Antennas." He presented five topics: (1) realization of a low-profile antenna using an EBG material, (2) beam direction control for a low-profile antenna using an EBG material, (3) investigation of the absorption characteristics of an EBG material, (4) dual-frequency operation of an inverted LFL antenna (InvLFL) at 2.45 GHz and 5.2 GHz, and (5) a PSP antenna for communications between land base stations and automobiles. His excellent presentation was followed by exciting discussions.

During the past year, I had the opportunities of endorsing new IEICE membership applications in Taiwan and answering questions from local members. In the coming year, I wish to interact with more local members and consult them about their opinions on how to promote IEICE activities. As for lecture events in the coming year, at least two distinguished scholars will be invited from Japan to offer seminars on recent important topics. I will also try to publicize the IEICE organization in conferences and symposia held in Taiwan.

Finally, I briefly introduce myself. I am currently a Professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. I am affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering, the Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, and the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering of the University, which are all under the College of EECS. My research interests include guided-wave structures and devices for photonics, computational electromagnetics for problems in photonics, and photonic crystal structures and applications.