President Ma Ying-jeou met on the morning of April 29 with Sir Keith O'Nions, Rector of Imperial College London (ICL). The president welcomed Sir Keith to Taiwan, where he has come to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on manpower training and academic exchange and cooperation with Taiwan's Top University Strategic Alliance. The president also expressed his hope that the initiative will proceed smoothly.
President Ma commented that ICL is one of England's, and indeed the world's, elite institutions of higher learning, having graduated 14 Nobel Prize recipients, and excels in science, engineering, and other fields. The president mentioned ICL's Railway and Transport Strategy Centre, which administers CoMET (Community of Metros), an international alliance of subway systems with annual ridership of over 500 million, and Nova, a similar alliance for systems with annual ridership of less than 500 million trips. These organizations offer platforms for the world's urban railway systems to learn from each other, he said. The Taipei Mass Rapid Transit System was ranked first by the centre from 2005 to 2008 for reliability, the president noted. Meanwhile, the Taipei metro system had ridership in excess of 500 million in 2010, and can therefore look forward to becoming a CoMET member in September of this year, which will help it to provide even more outstanding service quality to its riders.
The president noted that Taiwan is putting enormous emphasis on the internationalization of its universities. Besides signing cooperative agreements with top universities overseas, Taiwan also provides students from neighboring countries with opportunities to come here to study. He said he hopes that overseas students will come to make up 10% of Taiwan's university student population within the next decade, up from a current 3.3%. The president explained that this will help make Taiwan an educational hub in the Asia-Pacific.
Sir Keith, Christofer Toumazou, Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at ICL, and Tom Miller, Director of Communications and Development, were accompanied to the Presidential Office by Political Deputy Minister of Education Lin Tsong-ming and Dr. Winston Wong, Chairman of the GRACE T.H.W. Group and a trustee of ICL, to meet President Ma. Also attending the meeting was National Security Council Deputy Secretary-General Chih-kung Liu.