劉智弘 Chih-Hung Liu
Dr. Chih-Hung Liu is a new associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University. In mid-2009, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Electronics Engineering from National Taiwan University under the supervision of Prof. Sy-Yen Kuo. After the military service, in mid-2010, he turned to Theoretical Computer Science and started his postdoctoral life. Since then, he has worked as a postdoc in Academia Sinica with Prof. Der-Tsai Lee, in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with Prof. DorotheaWagner and in University of Bonn with Prof. Rolf Klein. From mid-2016 till mid-2022, he was a senior researcher in ETH Zürich with Prof. Peter Widmayer, Prof. Emo Welzl and Prof. David Steurer.
While doing research at ETH Zürich, in October 2020, Dr. Liu has completed his habilitation in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The habilitation degree is the highest academic qualification in Germany, and allows one to directly apply a tenured professorship in Germany. In tradition, there was no tenure-track system of assistant, associate and full professorships in Germany. To be a professor, after getting a Ph.D. degree, one had to complete the habilitation, for which he/she needs to first do research and teach lectures in a university for several years, write a habilitation thesis, and passes a habilitation defense. Generally speaking, a Ph.D. degree requires the expertise in a single scientific topic, while a habilitation degree requires the expertise in a whole scientific field in the same depth as for a Ph.D. degree.