Edited by Rainee Cheng.Image Credit to NCKU News Center.
 

National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) held the fourth session of its “Forum on the Role and Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Industry-Academia Collaboration and Startup Value Creation” on October 15th at the Macronix Building on its Shengli Campus. As the grand finale of the 2026 NCKU AI Forum series, this session approached the topic from the perspectives of industry-academia collaboration and industrial applications. The speakers invited were Jeffrey Chen, Assistant Vice President of Product Marketing at Kneron; Tien-Hao Chang, Chief Technology Officer of SinoPac Financial Holdings and Head of its Digital Technology Division; and Steve Shih, Head of Digital Transformation at Bizlink Group. Drawing on three areas, namely AI technology development, financial technology, and smart manufacturing, they shared practical experience and development trends in bringing artificial intelligence (AI) from technical research and development into real-world industry settings.
 

The finale session of the NCKU AI Forum series took place on October 15, examining industrial applications of AI from the perspective of industry-academia collaboration and drawing together participants from industry, government, academia, and research institutions.
 

AI’s rapid development is continuing to transform higher education, academic research, and industrial applications. Since 2023, National Cheng Kung University has continued to hold a series of AI forums that explore in depth the trends in AI technology and its applications in higher education and industry. The forum opened with remarks from NCKU Vice President Yung-Chun Lee, who said that President Meng-Ru Shen places great importance on forward-looking planning for AI in teaching, research, and industrial development, and hopes the university will hold an AI-themed forum regularly every year. To this end, the Office of Academic Affairs, the Office of Research and Development, the Miin Wu School of Computing, and Innovation Headquarters have co-organized the series, each planning sessions according to its own area of expertise and operational focus.
 

The finale session was hosted by Innovation Headquarters, which invited three industry experts to share how AI is being put into practice and applied across a range of industries, covering AI chips and hardware-software system integration, financial technology, and digital transformation in manufacturing. In his remarks, Vice President Lee also spoke of the enormous impact AI has had on higher education. He noted that how to respond to the rapid rise of AI has become an important issue that the higher education community must continue to confront and reflect on. “Students are submitting reports that are increasingly flawless. Assignments that used to take one to two months to complete can now be answered in just two days with the help of AI,” he said. Facing the dramatic changes brought by AI, universities must take seriously AI’s far-reaching effects on learning models, daily life, and industrial development, and continue to analyze them in depth and develop forward-looking responses.
 

NCKU Vice President Yung-Chun Lee delivered opening remarks to kick off the finale session of the NCKU AI Forum series.
 

Jeffrey Chen, Assistant Vice President of Product Marketing at Kneron, has a career spanning semiconductor research and development, product development, and business strategy, and he has long been dedicated to turning AI technology into real-world applications and products. In his talk, titled “From Academic Innovation to Industrial Deployment,” he examined how academic research can move toward industrial application, drawing on the development of edge AI and AI chips. He pointed out that “top-tier research does not equal industrial value.” Bringing research results from the lab to the market requires overcoming three breakpoints: deployment, product, and market. A model that runs on a server cannot necessarily be deployed directly on end devices; a successful proof of concept (PoC) does not mean the product can balance power consumption, cost, and reliability; and technological innovation is not the same as meeting the conditions for mass production and commercialization.
 

Chen said that edge AI offers real-time inference, low power consumption, privacy, and offline operation, which moves AI from a cloud “service” to a tangible “product” and gives research results from universities and colleges a chance to go directly into real devices and application settings. On industry-academia collaboration, he believes that cooperation should not stop at a single research project. Instead, it can link industry-defined challenges, university research and development, AI deployment, on-site PoCs, startup products, and the mass-production market, and combine coursework, capstone projects, internships, startup acceleration, and technology licensing, so that research results can travel all the way from models and algorithms to products and markets.
 

Jeffrey Chen, Assistant Vice President of Product Marketing at Kneron, explored how academic research can move toward industrial application, drawing on the development of edge AI and AI chips.
 

Tien-Hao Chang, Chief Technology Officer of SinoPac Financial Holdings and Head of its Digital Technology Division, spoke on “From Industry-Academia Differences to AI Transformation in Practice in the Financial Industry,” discussing how AI technology moves from academic research into real-world financial applications. Chang holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University and previously served as a professor in NCKU’s Department of Electrical Engineering, where he began AI industry-academia collaboration with SinoPac Financial Holdings before joining the company. He described the actual process of promoting AI in an enterprise as “building the plane while flying it,” noting that it is difficult to plan a complete path in advance for adopting AI and then succeed simply by following a set roadmap. Using SinoPac Financial Holdings as an example, he said the company also started with pilot projects. Through hands-on implementation, it gradually built up results and earned the trust of business units in the technology and the team, then expanded the application scenarios while progressively building up talent, systems, and infrastructure.
 

Chang shared several real-world cases of AI in finance. These include using “customer genes” to analyze clients’ investment preferences, financial goals, and risk tolerance in order to provide personalized product recommendations. In risk management, a credit card fraud detection model can reduce the manual processing workload for abnormal and fraudulent cases by 60%. After AI scoring models were introduced into credit loan telemarketing, the loan disbursement success rate rose by 47% compared with manual screening. On defining “success” in AI transformation, he said frankly that if, a few years from now, people still think of SinoPac Financial Holdings only as a “very impressive tech team” or a group of professional AI scientists, it would actually mean AI has not yet truly been integrated into the company. He hopes AI will eventually become part of everyone’s daily work, like office software such as Word and PowerPoint, no longer relying solely on a dedicated AI team, but allowing everyone to use AI naturally in their work.
 

Tien-Hao Chang, Chief Technology Officer of SinoPac Financial Holdings and Head of its Digital Technology Division, described the actual process of promoting AI in an enterprise as “building the plane while flying it.”
 

Steve Shih, who has a background in information technology and enterprise consulting, previously worked at IBM, Accenture, TSMC, and PwC before joining Bizlink Group in 2020 as Head of Digital Transformation. In his talk, titled “Trends in the Application and Development of Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing,” he analyzed the opportunities and challenges of AI adoption from a manufacturing perspective. He shared four AI applications that Bizlink is currently deploying: using computer vision for product defect detection; applying machine learning to optimize production and develop digital twins; extracting bills of materials (BOMs) through natural language processing (NLP); and using generative AI to build chatbots and SAP data retrieval tools.
 

Drawing on his experience in bringing AI into the enterprise, Shih also spoke about talent development in higher education in the AI era. He stressed that “developing in-house AI” is the path companies must take. For enterprises, developing AI independently not only provides customized solutions and lowers operating costs, but also helps them meet the audit requirements of international customers. For higher education, the priority should be to cultivate, as early as possible, talent with both AI development and practical application skills, narrowing the gap between what students learn and what industry needs, and responding to industry’s future demand for talent.
 

Steve Shih, Head of Digital Transformation at Bizlink Group, analyzed the opportunities and challenges of AI adoption from a manufacturing perspective.
 

The NCKU AI Forum was first held in 2023, and its themes have gradually deepened from early discussions of how to respond to AI and guidelines for using AI tools to cross-disciplinary practice and application. The 2026 forum series was co-organized by several university units across four sessions. The Office of Academic Affairs opened the year with “Teaching: AI Leading the Way, Teaching and Learning Thriving Together.” In March, the Miin Wu School of Computing presented “Practice and Innovation in Cross-Disciplinary Integration,” and in May the Office of Research and Development followed with a focus on “AI Manufacturing.” Finally, Innovation Headquarters closed the series with “Industry-Academia Collaboration and Startup Value Creation.” Together, the sessions covered teaching, cross-disciplinary work, research, and industry-academia practice, exploring the development and application of AI in higher education and industry from different angles.
 

NCKU’s 95th anniversary celebration week in 2026 will also continue the focus on AI and industry-academia topics, with the “INNOVATION DEMO DAY” and the “NCKU FORUM.” Innovation Demo Day will showcase a range of research results from the university and its industry-academia partner teams, presenting industrial applications of AI and other innovative technologies. The NCKU Forum will bring together industry leaders to discuss the talent challenges of the AI wave from the perspective of corporate needs and talent demand, and how universities can cultivate the talent that future industries require.