National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology
Established July 1st, 1995 as the National Institute of Technology of Kaohsiung, The National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, often called First Tech and abbreviated as NKFUST, is Taiwan’s leading institution of higher education and is committed to academic excellence.
In 1998, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education instituted NKFUST as the first technological university in the southern part of the country, and it was renamed as it is now known. This coeducational university, located in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, has a 750,000 square meter campus.
Currently, the university has the colleges of Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Management, Finance and Banking, and Foreign Languages, which consists of 15 departments and 27 graduate schools.
17 years after its foundation, the university is still as committed as it was before in developing its teaching, learning environment and global stance.
To further improve their level of competence, the university put up graduate programs and various research centers. It continues to distinguish itself as a major research and training center, providing its graduates the knowledge to arm them in the real world.
Among these is the university’s College of Engineering’s Mechanical and Automation Engineering, which together with the Graduate Institute of System Information and Control have developed the country’s first robot that can scale walls. It won the National Microcomputer Applied Systems Design Contest back in 2008.
The technologies which they used are comparable to what other countries are applying today. This robot, which weighs 1.3 kilograms, can climb smooth walls. Its developers said that this prototype can be further enhanced by adding solar panels and robotic arms, and eventually be put to actual use replacing humans to clean the windows of tall buildings.
With the intensive research and pursuit for academic excellence, coupled with its quests to scale new heights, it won’t be long before the National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology achieves its goals.
