Yuen Poovarawan ( th, ยืน ภู่วรวรรณ, born 5 November 1950) is a Thai

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

. He worked at

Kasetsart University Kasetsart University ( th, มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์; ), commonly known and referred to as Kaset or KU, is a public research university in Bangkok, Thailand. It is the largest university in Thailand. It ...

Bangkok Bangkok, officially known in Thai language, Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon and colloquially as Krung Thep, is the capital and most populous city of Thailand. The city occupies in the Chao Phraya River delta in central Thailand and has an estima ...

Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is bo ...

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 Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

for the Thai language, and the advancement of information technology services in Thailand, particularly the implementation of networking infrastructure at Kasetsart.

Early life and education

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 Yong Poovorawan ( th, ยง ภู่วรวรรณ; born 5 November 1950) is a professor of pediatrics at the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Faculty of Medicine of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He is known f ...

, medical professor at the

Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University The Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, the second oldest medical school in Thailand, was established in 1947 in accordance with the wishes of King Ananda Mahidol to educate a sufficient number of medical doctors to satisfy the publ ...

. As a child, his family moved to

Nakhon Pathom Nakhon Pathom ( th, นครปฐม, ) is a city (''thesaban nakhon'') in central Thailand, the former capital of Nakhon Pathom province. One of the most important landmarks is the giant Phra Pathommachedi. The city is also home to Thailand's ...

, where he attended

Phrapathom Witthayalai School Phrapathom Wittayalai School( th, โรงเรียนพระปฐมวิทยาลัย, link=no, also known as Pra-pa-thom) which the earliest name was The Model School of Nakhonchaisri District. It was opened on 23 January 1909. In ...

. He graduated

Bachelor of Engineering A Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) or a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) is an academic undergraduate degree awarded to a student after three to five years of studying engineering at an accredited college or university. In the UK, a Ba ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Chulalongkorn University Chulalongkorn University (CU, th, จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย, ), nicknamed Chula ( th, จุฬาฯ), is a public and autonomous research university in Bangkok, Thailand. The university was originally fo ...

in 1972, and completed two engineering master's degrees, also in electrical engineering at Chulalongkorn University, and in

industrial engineering Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex process (engineering), processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, kno ...

at the Asian Institute of Technology, in 1974.

Work

Yuen began his career in 1973 as an instructor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at

, 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 A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

application, the following year. 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 Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533, commonly referred to as TIS-620, is the most common character set and character encoding for the Thai language. The standard is published by the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI), an organ of the Mini ...

-2529 character set and its subsequent version, TIS 620-2533. The Microcomputer Research Laboratory, which Yuen was head of, also developed the Thai

Kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learn ...

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 Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

systems. In his research, Yuen pioneered the utilization of dictionary databases for Thai word splitting and

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

, created the first Thai language thesaurus and developed word and sentence reconstruction methods for use in

spell check In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic di ...

ing applications, among other things. Much of his work was presented at various national and international conferences. 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 A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network that links two or more devices using wireless communication to form a local area network (LAN) within a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, campus, or office buildi ...

coverage throughout the university's campus, the largest such network in Southeast Asia. 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.

Personal life

Yuen is married to Wanna Poovarawan, with two daughters and one son, Nawan, Nanjana and Nutch Poovarawan, respectively. An early adopter of the technology, Yuen began communicating with his children via email in 1994, reaching out when they were abroad and teaching life lessons through analogies often taken from nature. For this,

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

named him one of its "web heroes" for its "the web is what you make of it" campaign promoting the Google Chrome browser.

Awards and recognition

As recognition of his continued work in natural language processing and applied uses of the computer, the National Research Council of Thailand granted Yuen the Outstanding Researcher Award in physical sciences and mathematics in 1996. He had also received the National Research Council Award for innovation in 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990 and 1992.. He holds positions on the boards of the Computer Association of Thailand and the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, and is a member of the National Research Council. He also provides honorary consultative services to other organizations, including the Bureau of the Budget and the Revenue Department. He works with the Institute for the Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology in curricula development for computer teaching, and is Thailand's coordinator for the

International Olympiad in Informatics The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming and one of the International Science Olympiads for secondary school students. It is the second largest science olympiad, after International Mathematical Olympi ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Poovarawan, Yuen

Yuen Poovarawan Yuen Poovarawan ( th, 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 th ...

Living people 1950 births Natural language processing researchers