Vice President Annette Lu attended the second anniversary ceremony of the National Applied Research Laboratories this morning, highlighting it with her speech.
The vice president first congratulated the National Applied Research Laboratories for their second anniversary. The National Applied Research Laboratories was established in 2003, integrating nine high-tech units in order to unify the country's technology development system by grouping the National Chip Implementation Center, National Center for High-performance Computing, National Space Organization, National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering, National Laboratory Animal Center, National Nano Device Laboratories, Instrument Technology Research Center and the Science and Technology Policy Research and Information Center. The results of the researches during the past two years are considered abundant. For example, the Formosat-2 was successfully launched on May 21 last year, the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering developed a system allowing evaluation of the damages caused by an earthquake, the National Center for High-performance Computing was launched at the Southern Taiwan Science Park... etc. These are seen as the best examples of governmental organization being re-established as a juristical person entity.
The vice president provided an article of the U.S. magazine Business Week, in which it mentioned that Taiwan is the powerhouse of the world's high-tech. It also mentioned that the world is very concerned about the situation over the Taiwan Strait and the people wish that Taiwan and China could get along peacefully because if any unstable situation happens, the entire world's information industry will be like being hit by a nuclear bomb. The article quoted a question asking U.S. information technology dealers if there is a possibility to duplicate a high-tech place like Taiwan and produce the same products. These dealers replied by saying that the importance of Taiwan's high-tech products are like crude oil being only produced in the Middle-East and cannot be replaced.
The vice president emphasized at the end of her speech that since the entire world has confidence in us, therefore we must also have confidence in ourselves. Besides that, we have to think about how to apply Taiwan's technological advancement to create wealth and peace for mankind. Therefore, besides upgrading technology industry's technique, we must also devote ourselves to fuse technology with peace, technology with national defense to making technology the instrument in giving mankind the biggest well-being.