Suspended Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao sentenced for 'malicious accusation'

Taipei, Aug. 21 (CNA) Ann Kao Hung-an (高虹安), the currently suspended Hsinchu mayor, was sentenced to a 10-month jail term Wednesday for making malicious accusations against a U.S.-based scholar who said she had committed plagiarism in her Ph.D. thesis.

The Taipei District Court ruled that Kao "clearly knew" that her thesis, completed in April 2018 at the University of Cincinnati, was "extensively" plagiarized, yet still filed suit against Chen Shih-fen (陳時奮) for aggravated defamation in Aug. 26, 2022.

After prosecutors decided not to indict Chen on March 23, 2023, Chen then brought a private prosecution the following month against Kao for the offense of "malicious accusation," and the court ruled in Chen's favor on Wednesday.

"I deeply regret the verdict, which runs counter to the requirement of establishing the crime of malicious accusation," Kao said after the court ruled on her case. "I will appeal."

Between September 2021 and July 2022, Chen repeatedly accused Kao of plagiarizing a research paper she co-authored with two of her colleagues and her academic supervisor, Jay Lee (李傑), while she worked at the Institute for Information Industry (III), an institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA).

Under the pseudonym Weng Ta-rui (翁達瑞), Chen posted on Facebook such statements as "Kao Hung-an didn't research her own Ph.D." and "Kao Hung-an was removed from the list [of Ph.D. candidates] on Jay Lee's resume."

In response, Kao sued Chen for aggravated defamation.

Investigators from the Taiwan Taipei District Prosecutor's Office concluded, however, that Chen had expressed his views on Kao's dissertation after "reasonable and careful" examination, and therefore found no cause to indict Chen.

On the other hand, investigators discovered 18 instances of plagiarism in Kao's doctoral thesis, titled "Quality Prediction Modeling for Multistage Manufacturing using Classification and Association Rule Mining Techniques."

That thesis was completed while she was working at the III.

In her defense, Kao said she was merely "plagiarizing herself" since her name was the first among those listed as authors on the research paper she did for the III used in her thesis.

The court did not accept Kao's argument, finding instead that she did not have the right to use the findings of the paper under her own name because it had been co-authored.

Aside from the multiple similarities identified by investigators between Kao's thesis and the co-authored research paper, the court found that Kao had also "extensively" plagiarized another published paper she co-authored but whose authorship rights belonged to the III titled "Sparse Coding for Manufacturing Quality Prediction."

The court concluded that the lack of bibliographical references in her work were sufficient to rule that Kao had "deliberately" tried to prevent others from discovering that her thesis violated academic ethics.

According to the court, Kao had cited as evidence in her defense an email written by Jane Strasser, the senior associate VP for research at the University of Cincinnati's Office of Research Integrity on Aug. 22, 2022, which expressed the view that Kao's work did not have any problems related to intellectual property rights.

The court found, however, that the email merely represented an individual opinion and that Strasser had not considered the issue of the multiple authorship of the plagiarized paper.

The ruling comes at a difficult time for Kao, who last month was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for corruption.

The Taiwan People's Party (TPP) mayor was automatically suspended from her position for violations of the Anti-Corruption Act and falsifying documents under the criminal code. Kao, 40, is currently appealing the corruption case.