- Nina Lin
Nina Yuhsun Lin teaches beginning and intermediate levels of Taiwanese conversation and a few Mandarin classes at Stanford University. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Languages at Stanford University. Before returning to Stanford as a full time lecturer, she has taught at Claremont Colleges and University of California at Davis. She is a certified tester for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
- Dr. Samuel So
Samuel So is a Lui Hac Minh Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Surgery Director, Asian Liver Center and Liver Cancer Program at Stanford University. In 1996, Dr. So established the Asian Liver Center to address the high prevalence of hepatitis B, liver disease and liver cancer in the Asian population through a three-pronged approach of outreach, research, and treatment. The Jade Ribbon Campaign was launched in 2001 to bring people of the world together in a united effort to eradicate hepatitis B and liver cancer.
Dr. So has served on the committees of many state and national organizations, and is currently Chair of the National Task Force on Hepatitis B: Focus on Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, a consultant for the FDA, and a member on the Board of Population Health and Public Health Practice of the Institute of Medicine. Dr. So has authored over 130 peer-reviewed articles and 25 book chapters, and leads an international collaborative research team in studying the genomics of liver and stomach cancers. He is also an Asian health activist, and helped to develop a liver cancer prevention strategy for the state of California in 2003. In addition, Dr. So spearheaded the drafting of the National Hepatitis B Act (HR4550) that was introduced in Congress on Dec 15, 2005.
- Dr. Thomas Lee
Information TBA
Information TBA
Session #2: Looking Ahead- David Yang, Intellectual Property
David Yang is a patent attorney at the Los Angeles office of Morrison & Foerster LLP. Mr. Yang's practice includes litigation, prosecution, and license of patents, as well as providing patent infringement and validity analysis, performing due diligence on intellectual property assets, and assisting corporate transactional matters involving intellectual property. Mr. Yang has worked with clients ranging from large multinational companies to startup companies and venture capital investors. He frequently travels to Asia as a part of his practice, and currently serves as the co-chair of Morrison & Foerster's Taiwan Intellectual Property Practice Committee. Locally, Mr. Yang has been recognized by the Public Counsel as well as the State of California for his pro bono services provided to the Public Counsel Law Center and to the Break the Cycle, a non-profit organization dedicated to the prevention of domestic violence. Mr. Yang received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Arizona State University in 1994, and his J.D. from the George Washington University Law School in 1998. During law school, Mr. Yang was a judicial extern to the Honorable Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and later to the Honorable Pauline Newman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Mr. Yang was born and raised in Taiwan, and is fully proficient in Chinese.
- Law Panel
Karin Wang is Vice-President of Programs at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC), in Los Angeles. In her current role, Ms. Wang oversees and develops APALC's work, which includes direct legal services, impact litigation, public policy advocacy and leadership development. From 1997 to 2000, Ms. Wang was a staff attorney at APALC and director of its immigrant health and welfare project. Her work involved state and local advocacy on many issues, including benefits eligibility and immigration and language barriers to access. Ms. Wang has advised several Los Angeles County and California task forces seeking to improve access to services for immigrants and refugees, including the State Bar's Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services. She also serves on various boards, including the Asian Pacific American Bar Association (APABA) of Los Angeles and the Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA).
Ms. Wang is a graduate of UC-Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Law Journal and a law clerk for the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. Following graduation, Ms. Wang practiced with the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Francisco. Ms. Wang received her B.S. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Stephen Chen: The experience of embracing his Asian American identity in the racially polarized South gave birth to an internal passion for social justice and a commitment to the APA community that Stephen Chen has been living out for the past 10 years. During that time, he has worked for social change through education, having spent several years in Higher Education administration at Emory University, and through the law with the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium and the U.S. Senate Legislative Counsel. Stephen currently works as an attorney for the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in the San Francisco field office and is responsible for enforcement of laws protecting individuals and communities from discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, disability, and age by educational institutions receiving Federal funds. He received both his B.A. in Liberal Studies with a concentration in Asian and Asian American Studies and his J.D. from Emory University and also has a Masters in Education from Harvard. He is a founding member and former national board member of ITASA.
Cindy Hwang is currently a trial litigator with the San Fracisco office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Ms. Hwang graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1998, with a B.A. in Political Science. Ms. Hwang served as political chair and co-president of the Yale College Taiwanese Club. She was also active in the Yale Asian American Students Association, serving as co-coordinator of the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. After graduation, Ms. Hwang worked as a trial preparation assistant in the Organized Crime Bureau of the Manhattan District. Ms. Hwang received her juris doctorate from New York University School of Law in 2002. While in law school, she served as an Articles Selection Editor on the Journal of Law & Social Change, and a staff editor on the Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. She also was an officer of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association. While at NYU School of Law, Ms. Hwang assisted in co-founding the Asian American Jurisprudence course, a course dedicated to exploring the legal treatment of Asian Americans. She also co-founded the Annual Korematsu Lecture Series on Asian Americans and the Law, named in honor of Fred Korematsu. After receiving her juris doctorate, Ms. Hwang clerked for the Honorable Adalberto Jordan of the Southern District of Florida. At Kirkland & Ellis, Ms. Hwang focuses her practice primarily on complex commercial litigation matters in federal and state trial courts.
- Emerging Technologies Panel
Sponsored by Northern American Taiwanese Engineers' Association (NATEA)
Moderator: Tom Chang, Micro and Nanotechnology
Panelists: J. Gilbert Hwang, Ph.D P.E., Energy and Environment Technology; Martin Chen, Ph.D., RFID Technology; Shinn Lee, Digital LifeTom Chang is the current President of NATEA, North America Headquarters. NATEA is a 1500+ member organization of Taiwanese American Engineers with chapters over 10 US and Canada cities. In his day job, Tom is the President of API Technology. API is a IC design house dedicated to the mobile device applications. Tom also represents Asia Pacific Microsystem (APM), the largest Taiwanese MEMS foundry in developing the North America customers.
Tom has over 20 year of experiences in micro and nanotechnology. Tom was a founding team member and Vice President of Dastek, a thin-film head start-up which was acquired by Komag in 1992. Tom was also a Senior Director at Read-Rite (now Western Digital) in charge of 150-member Wafer Fab Engineering Department. Tom holds an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Davis, B.S. from National Tsing-Hua University of Taiwan and is a Stanford Graduate through Stanford Executive Program of Graduate School of Business.
J. Gilbert Hwang is an independent consultant in Energy Options, Energy Conservation and Nuclear Power Plant Accident Analysis. He is currently evaluating the performance of a new generation of nuclear reactor that is being planned for construction in the US. Dr. Hwang received BS from National Taiwan University and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, both in Mechanical Engineering. The professional life of Dr. Hwang has covered Sargent & Lundy Engineers, Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, GE Energy, Siemens Power Corp. and several consulting companies.
Dr. Hwang has been very active with American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He has been with various positions with Regional Administration Board. He was a member of General Awards Committee and Council of Honors. He chaired the General Awards Committee from 2002 to 2005. Dr. Hwang is a founding member of NATEA.
Dr. Hwang has assessed the viability of various power generation options with respect to their technical and economical merits, as well as their political and social acceptances. Any new form of power generation should review the obstacles faced by existing energy options, and make preparation to alleviate as much opposition as possible. Dr. Hwang will offer three examples from Northwest US to show that public sentiment should be considered during the planning of power projects.
Martin Chen is a software development architect in SAP (the largest business application software in the world). He currently is working on SAP's RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) solution. He is responsible for the overall architectures of serialized object repository, EPCIS, as well as data model for SAP's enterprise RFID applications.
With the RFID project, he has opportunities to work with the pioneers in RFID application fields such as US Navy, P&G, and SC Johnson.
Through his career in SAP, he plays different roles, such as senior developer, project lead, architect, and even as a consultant to provide solutions, mainly, for high-tech companies like Intel, AMD, and Motorola. The solutions cover the areas of supply chain management / optimization, production planning, and RosettaNet-enabling. He was also a project lead (in US) to prototype SAP's next generation manufacturing execution solution which uses a brand new service oriented approach. Martin has tremendous amount experiences of large-scale software developments in distributed development environments.
Martin earned his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University with industrial engineering (IE) major. He also holds two master degrees (IE and EE) from Purdue. His research areas are using artificial intelligent approaches to solve semiconductor production scheduling problems as well as data mining in various business applications. Martin is the president of NATEA Silicon Valley, 2007.
Shinn Lee is Staff Software Architect of Software and Solution Group at Intel Corp. Shinn leads a research and development team in Russia to develop high performance computational intensive algorithms. The area of focus ranges from audio, video, image processing, media compression technology, video mining and analysis, speech recognition, and computer vision. Shinn is the Chief Architect for the Intel Integrated Performance Library and audio/video codec development.
Shinn graduated from National Taiwan University with the BS degree in Civil Engineering. Shinn served two years in Sinotech Consulting, developing underground tunnel structures for hydraulic power plant, before coming to US. He received masters degree from UCLA in Structural Engineering, and masters degree from UC Davis in Computer Science. Shinn has been actively involved in the community services for Taiwanese American affairs. Shinn is involved in the creation of the Taiwanese America Center for Northern California, a founding member of TAITA and NATEA, and the president of NATEA Silicon Valley, 2004.
In spare time, Shinn is applying his expertise in building his own Future Digital Home. Shinn lives in Fremont, CA.
- Leadership and Entrepreneurship Panel
Sponsored by Northern American Taiwanese Engineers' Association (NATEA)
Moderator: Dr. John Yu
Panelists: Debra Kuo, Ching Lai, Kuang ChiuJohn Yu came to the United States in late 1960s for pursuing his graduate studies after completing his undergraduate college education and two-year Air Force military service in Taiwan. Subsequently, John Yu earned his Master and Doctor Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Kansas State University, Kansas and The University of Connecticut, Connecticut, USA respectively. Dr. Yu has been a high-tech engineering consultant specializing and focusing on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Digital Content and Video Conferencing, Data Communication and Computer Networking System Engineering Design and Management since 2003. From 1975 through 2002, Dr. Yu had been working for several start-up engineering departments at major corporations such as AT&T Bell Laboratories, Electro Sound Corp., NEC Technology Research Center, Intel Corp., and most recently Lucent Technologies. Dr. Yu assumed different engineering design and management positions ranging from System Design Engineer through Vice President of Engineering responsible for designing, developing and manufacturing video / computer graphics products, color notebook computers, computer telephony integration (CTI) data telecom products, video multimedia conferencing, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), digital content over IP, high-speed computing networks and multimedia communication systems. Dr. Yu has been granted ten (10) US and corresponding foreign patents related to home communication systems, and published numerous technical papers on Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, digital signal processing, and telecom and data communications.
Dr. Yu has received many distinguished awards on technical and community services as speakers and rookie award for outstanding hiring activity for major corporations. He has been actively involved with several key Taiwanese American and Mainstream community and engineering professional organizations serving as:
1. Commissioner, Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission (OCAC), the Executive Yuan, Taiwan;
2. Strategic partnership liaison works between universities in Silicon Valley and the universities in Taiwan;
3. Commissioner and Vice-Chair of Santa Clara County / Hsinchu Sister-County Commission;
4. President of Taiwanese Hakka Association of Northern California;
5. Founding President (1991-1992) and the current Advisor of the North America Taiwanese Engineers’ Association (NATEA);
6. Two-term of Chapter President and Central Committee Member of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA) Northern California Chapter;
7. Board member of IEEE-Engineering Management Society; member of IEEE-Computer Society;
8. Competent Toastmaster Member (CTM) Certificate of Toastmaster International Club;
9. Active tennis player of West Valley Tennis Club, Silicon Valley, CA since 1990.Dr. Ching Lai is a research engineer at University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working on engineering system development and management for various national defense application projects. He received his Doctor of Science degree from MIT in 1973. Socially, he founded MIT's Taiwanese Student Association in 1970 and was elected as President of Boston Taiwanese Association in 1971. Over the years in the Bay Area, he participated in earlier activities of North America Taiwanese Engineer’s Association and as its President in 1995. Most recently, he was President of Taiwanese American Federation of Northern California in 2004.
Debra Kuo, Managing Director of CJ International, has been in executive search business with a focus on Greater China since 1999. Prior to starting CJ in 2003, Debra had worked for Hall Kinion Asia Pacific and Heidrick & Struggles Singapore and was a top performer and award winner. Debra specializes searches in semiconductor, telecommunication, IT and manufacturing industries. Debra's dedication to providing hiring companies with solutions for their human capital needs is well recognized by her clients. Debra served as a NATEA Board member in early 2000s.
Debra has a Bachelor's degree in English from National Central University, Taiwan and a Master's degree in Adult Education and Human Resource Development from University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Kuang-Yi Chiu is currently Chairman of Winbond Electronics Corporation America (WECA) in San Jose, California. From 2000 to 2006, he served as the President of Winbond WECA. He has more than 30 years experience in the semiconductor industry and more than 20 years management experience. Dr. Chiu joined Winbond in 1995 as Assistant Vice President of Technology Development for Winbond Electronics Corporation (WEC) in Taiwan and became the Corporation's Executive Vice President and General Manager of the DRAM Business Group, overseeing that groups' manufacturing, R&D and marketing efforts. He was promoted to the President of WECA in 2000. Prior to joining Winbond, Dr. Chiu worked for 15 years at Hewlett Packard Corporation where he held a variety of management positions. Earlier in his career, he was also on the technical staff at Northrop Corporation.Dr. Chiu obtained his doctorate degree, a Ph.D. in Materials Science at the University of Southern California, U.S.A. He earned a Masters of Science Degree in Electronics from the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. He has served as a BOD member of TAITA, a technical committee member for the International Electron Devices Meetings (IEDM), the VLSI Technology Symposium, and as Chairman of the IEEE Electron Devices Society of Silicon Valley Chapter.
- Thomas Shu
Thomas Shu is a third-generation tea specialist from Taiwan, where his family has been conducting tea business for more than sixty years. He works with many major tea companies and premium tea importers from Asia, Europe, and the United States. With his proficient expertise and extensive knowledge in the industry, ThomasShu becomes one of the professional instructors for World Tea Expo as well as a popular speaker at many conventions and educational institutes throughout the United States.
In March 2007, Mr. Shu received an honorary title, “Ambassador of Taiwan Tea”, from Taiwan Tea Manufacturers' Association in recognizing his dedications and contributions for tea industry. He is one of the founding members and board directors of American Premium Tea Institute, which is now known as Specialty Tea Institute.
- Johnny Hi-Fi
One critic calls them the "Radiohead of the boy-band generation". Another reviewer created for them a new genre "Asian-Britpop". Their fans simply call them the "American Coldplay". And if you still can't visualize it, soon after breaking into the scene in Austin Texas, local TV stations in this "live music capital of the world" dubbed them a "walking fashion statement".
Johnny Hi-Fi started out as your normal teenage garage band, idolizing 80's pop music, and fueled by adolescence. After winning first place at the high school talent show, music took front seat of the band's life. They occasionally played at parties and local pubs while the bandmates struggled through college, but as soon as graduation arrived, music was put into hyper drive. For the next 2 years, the band toured around Texas, bagging over 200 regional shows and a TV spot on PBS.
In 2005, Johnny Hi-Fi released their newest album "Sad Stories", and toured Asia supporting its release. As soon as Johnny Hi-Fi returned to America, they hosted 2 premiere episodes of "Live From" and "Top 10 Chi Countdown" for MTV Chi, and is one of the very first artists to be featured on MTV Chi. Johnny Hi-Fi is also scheduled to start their very own US tour in 2006, reaching out to fans who've only seen the band on television or heard them on the radio. Check out http://www.johnnyhifi.com.
- DJ Witness
Taiwanese hip-hop artist Witness (AKA Jeremy Huang) is considered one of the forerunners in Taiwan's growing hip-hop community, as he is the only ABT signed to Join Entertainment. All of Witness' songs are inspired by personal experiences or beliefs. His first single, "Life Goes On", was released in 2002 and propelled him to the forefront of Taiwan's hip-hop community, as it was voted as one of 10 best singles of 2002. The popularity of the song also garnered respect within the music industry and among pop music fans. Witness spent the past five years in Taiwan working on his full-length album, resulting in the 2005 release of "WitnessR". Both locals and ABTs could relate to his songs because he was writing from both Taiwanese and American perspectives. Using a mixture of Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English, he expressed gripping emotions such as love, pain, and sorrow through his songs. The album was not only well received by fans, but it also entrenched Witness firmly as an artist in the Asian music scene.