Computing: Direction of Research and Development for Thailand

Prabhas Chongstitvatana
Panutpat Nanthanavoot
Sunisa Rimcharoen

Department of computer engineering
Chulalongkorn university

Prabhas cv
Prabhas publication list

Talk to students of computer and information technology at Radchapat, Nakorn Pathom. 18 June 2005.

Outline

Overview

Information technology, the always changing field
From technology industries to service industries
Integration to create new business
e-business

case study: change at IBM
-- IBM has changed through 1990-2000 from computer manufacturer to solution provider
-- in 2002 IBM buy KPMG the accounting service
-- IT outsourcing, Deutch bank to IBM
-- Thai farmer bank to IBM for all IT services, amouting 10,000 million baths for 10 years in 2003.
-- In March 2005, IBM sold off the entire PC section to Lenovo, a giant Chinese company, a 1.2 billion us dollars deal.
-- IBM's earning from software is larger than Microsoft

Research in Thailand

from National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT)

Comparative study of Thai research with the World 2001 (2544)

The spending on research and development versus Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2001 is 0.22%
This figure is lower than many countries in Asia, USA and Europe. For example:

Sweden, Finland, Japan 3%
South Korea, USA, Taiwan, Singapore 2%
Canada, UK, China 1%
Hongkong 0.55%
Malaysia 0.48%

figure research spending

The full-time equivalent (FTE) of personel in research in Thailand is 3.9 per 10,000 citizen.
This figure is lower than many countries in Asia, USA, and Europe

Sweden, Finland, Japan 70-100
Taiwan, Singapore, Canada 40-60
South Korea, UK 15-30
China 7.5
Malaysia 4.3

Figure researh personel

The total government budget for research in Thailand during 2001-2003 is as follows:

2001 8,780 million baths
2002 9,722 million baths
2003 10,218 million baths

Figure budget-research

The budget is partly managed through 4 institutes:

National council of research
Thailand research fund
Thailand institute for development of science and technology
Research institute for health

National Policy and Research Direction Plan 6 (2001-2005) (2545-2549)

NRCT annual report 2004 (2547)

Aim to achieve the research's target and realise the result at the same time, support the objective and strategy of the national economic and social development plan 9 2001-2005 (2545-2549)
Emphasise the research which Thailand has potential and advantage in the competition.
Emphasise the research management and evaluation to achieve an efficiency.
Emphasise dynamic policy and direction of research which can adapt to the actual situation.
Emphasise national research programs which are aimed to have a short term applications.
Emphasise applied research to solve national problems for both short and long term.
Emphasise basic research to create new knowledge towards the world's trend to knowledge based society.
The ratio of supporting for national research programs-applied research-basic research is 50:20:30.
Aim to develop researchers, research networks, research invesment, building the research teams and research systems in all research activities.
Aim to create synergy between government, business, and Thai citizen to determine policy and direction of research and the application of the research's results.

Conclusion for overview of research in Thailand

We need to develop more research personel if we are to be competitive with our neibouring nations. The research budget should also be increased. It is important to find a strategy to channel research budget from the private sector. National research budget alone cannot sustain Thailand to be competitive.

Research in Computing in Thailand

from "Thailand: vision towards a knowledge based society"
Policy of information technology for Thailand 2000-2010
by National Electronics, Communication Technology Centre, ISBN 974-229-226-4, 2002.
<2005-2-25-235789-IT2001.pdf>

IT industry is defined as:

Hardware industry
Software industry
Telecommunication services industry

For hardware, there are four target industries:

Wafer fabrication
IC design
Optic fiber
Telecommunication switch

Software industry

The value of application software in Thailand in 2000 is 4.5 billion baths and over 70% is imported. The export value for software of the same year is around 1 billion baths. The trend of value of software is increasing at the rate of 33% per year.

We are not going to discuss the telecommunication services industry.

NECTEC has laid down four policies:

Support and develop the manufacturer of IT goods to produce and integrate components and products in the country with the lower cost than the imported goods.
Develop Thai software industry to achieve international standard to strengten Thai software
Develop basic infrastructure for telecommunication to support government policy of equal IT access to the people. Supporting the consumption of local goods.
Government, Education institutes and industry must collaborate to develop curriculum in information technology including training to produce scholars and professionals in IT and to increase the skill of IT workers.

Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA)

<www.sipa.or.th>

SIPA was founded in 2002 as a non-profit public organisation. Its mission is to

-- Promote the software industry by pushing on the skill practice enhancement.
-- Promote the software industry by pushing on the employment increasing.
-- Promote the software industry by stimulating the varying channels of marketing both in domestic and international.

<SIPA annual report 2004 http://www.sipa.or.th/en/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=47>

Presently (June 2005), SIPA has many projects running, for example:

Java development cluster, aims to develop more Java certified programmers
Digital contents co-production
Collaboration of SIPA and BOI (board of investment)
Animation projects, provide training and curriculum development with educational institutes to produce personels.
ICT city, prepare Thai society for knowledge based society in the future.
Large enterprise, promote the use of wireless broadband
Software for SMEs, promote the use of ICT to increase productivity of SMEs
Techno tourism, attract investors and software specialists to come to Thailand to conduct software business.

SIPA is an active promoter of open source software.

Software Park Thailand

<www.swpark.or.th>

Software Park Thailand, a government agency under National Science and Technology Development Agency was established to stimulate the development of Thai software industry, push it towards a sustainable level and provide it the means to survive in rapidly changing global digital economy. Its mission includes:

-- offer state-of-the-art infrastructures and investor-friendly environment that nurture young software entrepreneurs during the start-up period;
-- broaden knowledge and enhance skills of Thai IT professionals through various kind of educational activities and;
-- establish a business-to-business exchange from both national and international basis

Software park has incubation centres to help programmers to start their own business.

Conclusion

NECTEC, Software park and SIPA are government inititatives to sustain and develop Thai electronics and computers industry. There are clear and definite policies to guide research and development of IT activities in Thailand.

Nature of Software

Software industry is moving away from CD-based software business model towards web-based. The internet enables fast connection to a large number of potential customers. With frequent and easy updates to software, the software market is expanding at a faster rate than ever. Business model for software is changing, for example "application service provider" becomes a new way to sell software. XML becomes a standard for data interchange.

To realise "software factory" software creation must be able to scale-up. This can be achieved through raising the level of abstraction, from "objects" to "components" and "interface" level. To industrialised software creation, there must be a standard way to compose many parts of software from different sources.
<links to software architecture resource cites>

Software is very different kind of goods. Most products will have a large part of effort in production whereas software effort is mostly in development. Production is at a much lower cost than other kind of goods. Wear and tear associated with normal goods whereas for software the concern is in correctness.

Software can have both economy of scale and economy of scope. In economy of scale, the larger volume of production will bring the cost down. In economy of scope, instead of having one kind of software for a large number of customers, there is fewer customer which need different kind of software, however, those software have many parts in common. This fact enables one part to be used in many end-products.

Examples of research work in Thailand

Hardware

<presentation>

Developing a circuit for a processor that enable the executable code to be compressed and execute in real-time.

motivation for chip design

To increase the upstream development so as to balance the benefit in value-chain. Chip design also poses many interesting problems and offers many opportunity to develop valuable special skills.

Benefit of this work

Reduce the cost and size of embedded processor chip. This chip is suitable for small embedded systems. Embeded systems are becoming the mainstream market and are expanding very rapidly. This work also supports the development of chip fabrication in Thailand. (TMEC is located in Chacherngsao). <http://www.tidi.nectec.or.th/thaichip/history.htm>

Embeded system is an active area for a near term global business opportunity. Link to Thai Embeded Systems Association, the organisation to promote embeded systems. <www.tesa.or.th>

Software

Developing an algorithm to solve symbolic regression problems
<presentation>
<fig 1   forecasting the bath/dollar exchange rate>
<fig 2   the error rate of testing data>
<fig 3   forecasting the SET index>
<fig 4   the error rate of SET index testing data>

examples of foreign exchange forecasting and SET index forecasting for Thai market

motivation

To find a better formula for forcasting.

Benefit of this work

The proposed method generates formulas for forcasting that have lower error than a normal regression method. The method is based on probabilistic search which employed modification operators to generate-and-test new formulas. It also posses the ability to discover new relationships in the data.

Conclusion

Thailand needs to develop her capacity for IT industry. The urgent need is to develop more personel and trains the present IT personel to have uptodate skill for the changing IT industry. This can be accomplished not by the government alone but educational institutes and IT industry must work together. We need to be more flexible and yield to change. It is a challenge to find a suitable focus and strategy to channel the budget and effort in a novel way to create knowlegde workers for the near future.

END

last update 21 June 2005