Researchers at MGM and National Central University in Taiwan coauthored augmented reality navigation studies together across several years, a research link rather than a signed partnership.
In 2015, a study on augmented reality bus navigation connected two computer science labs on opposite sides of the South China Sea: MGM at Universitas Brawijaya in Indonesia and National Central University in Taiwan.
The link ran through two researchers. MGM's Komang Candra Brata and National Central University's Deron Liang coauthored "Location-Based Augmented Reality Information for Bus Route Planning System" together with Sholeh Hadi Pramono. It was published in the International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, volume 5, issue 1, pages 142 to 149. The paper described an Android application that overlays a live camera view with directional markers, guiding a rider on foot toward the nearest bus stop and helping them judge which route to take in an unfamiliar part of a city.
This was not a one time exchange. According to MGM's own publication record, Brata and Liang went on to coauthor further papers together in 2019 and 2020, extending the same line of location based augmented reality research across several years. It is worth being precise about what this means. No institutional memorandum of understanding between MGM and National Central University is on file here, and what the record actually shows is a recurring coauthorship between two individual researchers, not a formal partnership agreement signed between the two universities.
National Central University is a public research university based in Jhongli, a district of Taoyuan City, tracing its roots to a school founded in Nanjing in 1915 before reestablishing itself in Taiwan in the 1960s. It is known today for strengths in electrical engineering, atmospheric science, and space and remote sensing, the kind of engineering department that gave Liang the background to work on a location based mobile application with a partner in Indonesia.
For MGM, the tie to National Central University is a reminder that a lab's international footprint is often built one coauthored paper at a time, through individual researchers finding common ground on a shared technical problem, well before, or entirely apart from, any formal agreement between their institutions.
