An integrated project—E-guide Dog Global Positioning System—has reached its trial stage and is presently being evaluated to verify its validity. This is a joint venture with inputs from various departments supervised centrally by the Information Processing Center. Under the center, the Department of Information Management is in charge of the operating system, whereas the Departments of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering as well as Architecture are responsible for the mapping of all the buildings, roads and other facilities on campus. Measurements and maps they have put forward have been systematically uploaded onto the operating system successfully, which is at the final stage of integrating all information.

Director of the IPC, Hwang Ming-dar, espouses the merit of such a system, which will not only benefit the visually impaired students as well as visitors who come to TKU for the first time. With this new device, they can use their palm tops or laptops to identify their exact position on campus.

Although this is a TKU project, HP (Hewlett Packard) has donated a generous NT $ 5,000,000 worth of equipment for the running of the project. Dr. Flora Chang, TKU president, is the head supervisor, whereas Hwang Min-dar is the operation supervisor, supported by the departments mentioned above.

The system originally was docked on a commercial CPS, but found it was riddled with problems in raining or very hot days. Now it has changed to a military CPS, which proves to be more stable and reliable. This satellite system should work comparably to those of the wireless Internet or PHS cell phone network, which constantly search for the strongest signals. Presently, the chair of the Department of Transport Management, Chang Sheng-hsiung and his faculty members are working on the evaluation. (~ Ying-hsueh Hu )

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