Yuen Poovarawan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yuen Poovarawan | |
|---|---|
 Yuen in 2011 | |
| Born | 5 November 1950 Bangkok, Thailand |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | Development of Thai natural language processing |
| Relatives | Yong Poovorawan (brother) |
| Awards | Outstanding Researcher Award (1996) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Kasetsart University |
Yuen Poovarawan (Thai: ยืน ภู่วรวรรณ, born 5 November 1950) is a Thai computer scientist. He worked at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand until his retirement, where his last positions were associate professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Vice President for Information Technology. Among his noted contributions are the development of natural language processing for the Thai language, and the advancement of information technology services in Thailand, particularly the implementation of networking infrastructure at Kasetsart.
Yuen Poovarawan was born on 5 November 1950 in Bangkok, Thailand. The third out of six children, he is the elder twin brother of Yong Poovorawan, medical professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University. As a child, his family moved to Nakhon Pathom, where he attended Phrapathom Witthayalai School. He graduated Bachelor of Engineering in electrical engineering from Chulalongkorn University in 1972, and completed two engineering master's degrees, also in electrical engineering at Chulalongkorn University, and in industrial engineering at the Asian Institute of Technology, in 1974.[1][2]
Work
Yuen began his career in 1973 as an instructor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Kasetsart University, where he has since continued working. He began working on software development for microcomputers in 1978, and worked on natural language processing algorithms from 1980. He and his team demonstrated the first interactive text editor for the Thai language in 1981, and released Thai Easy Writer, the first Thai word processing application, the following year.[3][4]
Yuen was among the proponents for the creation of a standard Thai language system for computers (over twenty had become available by 1984), and vice-chaired the committee for the development of the TIS 620-2529 character set and its subsequent version, TIS 620-2533.[5]
The Microcomputer Research Laboratory, which Yuen was head of, also developed the Thai Kernel System, a hardware-independent system designed to promote system-intercompatibility for Thai-language application development, in 1990, but this failed to gain a user base as it lost ground to the expanding Microsoft Windows systems.[6]
In his research, Yuen pioneered the utilization of dictionary databases for Thai word splitting and machine translation, created the first Thai language thesaurus[7] and developed word and sentence reconstruction methods for use in spell checking applications, among other things. Much of his work was presented at various national and international conferences.[8]
He also played a pivotal role in the development of Kasetsart University's computer network infrastructure, beginning in 1990 and leading to the implementation of Thailand's first fiber-optic university network, and by 2003, wireless LAN coverage throughout the university's campus, the largest such network in Southeast Asia.[9] Kasetsart has long been an early adopter of information technology services; its Computer Center, for which Yuen previously served as director, has enjoyed faculty-level status since 1985. He currently serves as the university's vice president for information technology.
Yuen is author of over sixty computer-related textbooks, as well as other academic titles, and has long been regarded as one of the leading computer science experts in Thailand.
