2026 Keynote Speakers (Ubi-Media)

Biography

David Taniar's research specialises in medical data engineering, which has attracted more than $3 million in research grants throughout his career. David has graduated more than 25 PhD students. He published two books, Data Warehousing and Analytics (Springer, 2021) and High Performance Parallel Database Processing (Wiley, 2008), that have attracted more than 80,000 downloads. In 2005, he founded three SCIE-indexed journals: Mobile Information Systems, International Journal of Web and Grid Services, and International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining. David is listed as a Top Computer Scientist by Research.com and the top 2% computer scientist globally listed by Stanford University. He is an Associate Professor at Monash University, Australia.

David Taniar

Title: Multidisciplinary Research with Medicine and Healthcare: What does it look like?

Abstract:

In this talk, I will share my experiences, including challenges, issues, and impacts, in conducting multidisciplinary research between informatics and medical/healthcare, collaborating with medical doctors, hospitals, and public health professionals. I will discuss, particularly, THREE areas of how informatics can contribute to multidisciplinary teams with healthcare professionals and practitioners: (1) Electronic Medical Records or EMR, including assisting hospitals in their accreditation process, emergency department patient records, and disease analysis; (2) Public Health and GIS, covering projects in COVID, Homebirth, Gestational Diabetes, and Influenza A/B; and (3) Medical and Computing Technologies, including medical imaging, early kidney disease detection, hand hygiene, chemotherapy monitoring and other monitoring systems. The focus of this research is on data to empower medical informatics research and practice. I will discuss future opportunities for collaborative research in medicine and healthcare.

Biography

Dr. Chia-Hui Chang is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Central University, Taiwan. Her research focuses on web intelligence, natural language processing, agentic AI, and physical intelligence, with applications spanning conversational systems, educational AI, and human-computer interaction. She has been recognized in Stanford's Top 2% Scientists (Career Impact) rankings since 2021. Dr. Chang has served in leadership roles at major AI and NLP conferences, including General Chair for ROCLING 2021 and TAAI 2020, and Area Co-Chair for ACL 2017 and NAACL 2018. She served as President of the Taiwan Association for Artificial Intelligence (2020-2022) and the Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing (2019-2021). She has served as the Convener of the Intelligent Computing Discipline at Taiwan's National Science and Technology Council since 2024 and as Vice Convener of the Taiwan AI Center of Excellence since 2025.

Prof. Chia-Hui Chang

National Central University, Taiwan

Director for Office of Institutional Research

Title: Agentic AI & Physical Intelligence: The Call for Cross-Disciplinary Talents

Abstract:

Are you satisfied with current AI services? While AI can answer almost any question and even act on behalf of users, true intelligent transformation still has a long way to go. Last year's keynote address identified agentic AI and physical AI as the next stage of AI development, following perception AI and generative AI. In the digital world, building intelligent agents with language and vision capabilities facilitates systems to evolve from graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to conversational user interfaces (CUIs), transforming passive tools into autonomous agents. For example, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) functions merely as a tool, but when integrated with voice-controlled text editing, it enables genuinely conversational interactions.
     In the physical world, AI has emerged as a transformative technology for transcending the limitations of traditional mechanical control. We have already witnessed Google Gemini and several San Francisco-based startups successfully enabling robots to perform complex household tasks—playing basketball, folding clothes, and making beds—activities requiring sophisticated integration of vision, language understanding, and precise physical manipulation. Taiwan's strengths in manufacturing and semiconductor technology position it uniquely to contribute to this robotics revolution. However, neither agentic AI nor physical intelligence can be achieved within a single discipline. Creating intelligent robots demands cross-disciplinary collaboration and innovation across computer science, mechanical engineering, simulation design, and network infrastructure—from VLA model scientists to mechanical designers, from reinforcement learning engineers to network architects. This vision drives our National Agentic and Physical AI (NAPAI) Initiative sponsored by the Ministry of Education, and we invite scholars to join us in subsequent AI talent cultivation efforts.