Master Students & Professors from the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering Win the Gold & Silver HIWIN Thesis Awards

2023/3/28

Group photo of Vice President William LAI Ching-te (front row, 4th from right) & HIWIN Technologies Chairman CHUO Wen-Heng (front row, 5th from right) with all the awardees of the 2023 HIWIN Thesis Award. (Photo courtesy of HIWIN Technologies)

 

The 2023 HIWIN Thesis Award Ceremony was held on March 25 at the International Conference Hall at the CPC Building in Taipei City. The ceremony was hosted by HIWIN Chairman CHUO Wen-Heng, with Vice President William LAI Ching-te invited as the honorary award presenter. This special occasion celebrates the dynamic research momentum exhibited by the master students and professors from the College of Engineering (COE) and their active participation in the event. CHEIN Wei-Hsin and Prof. CHEN Liang-Chia from Mechanical Engineering won the gold award and a cash prize of NT$1 million with their research paper "Novel Optical Critical Dimension Metrology of High-aspect-ratio Microstructures with High Signal-to-noise Ratios". LIN Heng-Ching and Prof. YANG Shih-Chin, also from Mechanical Engineering, won the silver award and a cash prize of NT$800,000 with their research paper "Transient Fault Compensation and Tolerant Control for Hall-Sensor-Based Traction Motor FOC Drive". What is more, HUANG Yu-Hsiang, Prof. LEE Chih-Kung, and Prof. HSU Yu-Hsiang from Engineering Science and Ocean Engineering also won the special mention award and a cash prize of NT$100,000 with their research paper "Optimize High-frequency Mode Traveling Waves Using Analysis of Hilbert Transform Cost Function and Its Application in Multidirectional Two-dimensional Piezoelectric Plate Actuator". It is worth mentioning that, among the awardees, Prof. CHEN Liang-Chia has already won two special mention awards and one excellence award. This year, he is further acknowledged with the gold award, showcasing his continuous pursuit of academic achievements and breakthroughs, which garnered the unanimous recognition of the jury members.

 

Vice President LAI (left) presenting the gold award to CHEIN Wei-Hsin (middle) and Prof. CHEN Liang-Chia (right), Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

 

Vice President LAI (left) presenting the silver award to LIN Heng-Ching (middle) and Prof. YANG Shih-Chin (right), Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

 

Local universities recommended 95 papers to the HIWIN Thesis Award Committee this year, a 12% increase from last year. After a careful and fair deliberation process, 44 papers advanced to the first round. Of those, 26 passed the second round, and 16 were awarded the final prize. These winning papers were the cream of the crop, as each university can only recommend the top 10% of its research papers for consideration. The competition during the review process was undoubtedly fierce, and all the jury members worked very hard during the various rounds of review. Thus, the awardees are genuinely the best of the best in their respective fields.

HIWIN Technologies started to organize the annual "HIWIN Thesis Award" in 2004. Each year, the company dedicates more than NT$10 million to encourage university professors and graduate students to  research precision machinery. Up to now, 1,837 papers have been submitted, with 287 papers from 610 professors and graduate students winning the awards. In addition to offering attractive cash prizes and awards of recognition, HIWIN Technologies would also arrange delegation visits for the award-winning professors and students so that they can attend large-scale exhibitions and visit pioneering manufacturers in Japan. In this way, the awardees can exchange ideas with international scholars and practitioners and gain more insights into the field of precision machinery R&D. With these measures, it is hoped that the awardees can learn from the industry experts of other countries so that young students from Taiwan can align their research directions with international trends and innovate precision machinery technologies to the standards in advanced countries like Japan and Germany.

For 19 consecutive years, the HIWIN Thesis Award has boosted the morale of university machinery departments, especially the professors with an unwavering dedication to teaching. These academic efforts have laid a solid foundation for the precision machinery industry in Taiwan, in particular by producing top graduates for the sector. Witnessing the success of the HIWIN Thesis Award over the past 19 years, many other enterprises also pitched in and began to establish similar awards in various fields. Hence, the HIWIN Thesis Award has been esteemed and praised by the domestic machinery industry and academic circles for many years, even lauded as the "Nobel Prize" of the machinery industry. With the annual HIWIN Thesis Award continuing to stimulate the enthusiasm of professors and graduate students, it is expected that more students and budding scholars will be attracted to the field of mechanical technologies, which will undoubtedly help accumulate Taiwan's energy of R&D and innovation in the future.