Entrusted by the Board of International Association for Computerized Adaptive Testing（IACAT）, I’m very much delighted to announce that IACAT2013 will be held on campus of Jiaxing University, Zhejiang Province, P.R.China from August 17-18, 2013 with pre-conference workshops scheduled on 15-16 August, 2013 and post-conference self-arranged events scheduled on 19 August, 2013. a[=B?Bd 
    Over the past years, IACAT has been hosted in the Netherlands, the United States of America, and Australia, which has greatly promoted the research of and contributed to the development of CAT in one way or another. IACAT’s first conference in Asia will be in Jiaxing, China Mainland. The College of Foreign Studies at Jiaxing University is proud of this honor and is looking forward to a successful conference of fruitful collaboration and leading-edge research.  W"~"R 
    As early as in 1980s, the ideas and concepts regarding IRT and CAT was first introduced into China by Prof. Gui Shichun, my Ph.D supervisor, and it is Prof. Gui who first conducted with great success the ten-year long (1990-1999) Equating Project for Matriculation English Test (MET) in China. MET is the most influential entrance examination for higher education administered annually to over 3.3 million candidates then. The Equating Project won recognition by Charles Alderson and other foreign counterparts during 1990s. Academically, those were Good Old Days for Chinese testing experts and psychometricians. Then for certain reasons, the equating practice abruptly discontinued. Therefore, in China nowadays, the application of the IRT-based software like BILOG, Parscale, Xcalibre 4, Winsteps and others to real issues in testing and psychometrics is confined within an extremely small ‘band’ of people. Apart from this, there are important English language tests on large scale, none of which is implemented in the form of CAT. And the concepts of IRT, test equating and CAT merely remain as research topics for M.A. and Ph.D. candidates of applied linguistics programs. tnX W7ej^ 
    In this sense, I should say IACAT2013 thus meets an important need in that it provides an excellent introduction of IRT/CAT and its application. And anyone who is seriously interested in research and development in the field of psychometrics or language testing will find such a conference and related workshops to be an excellent source of information about the application of CAT. +,ld;NM{ 
    IACAT2013 will follow the practice of the previous IACAT, focusing on recent advances in objective measurement and providing an international forum on both the latest research in IRT/CAT practice. I’m sure the pre-conference workshops, parallel sessions, distinguished researchers and practitioners and post-conference self-arranged events will greatly encourage participation and all our participants would definitely share the benefits from it. In particular, I should mention that the venue of IACAT2013 Jiaxing, China will be located in a ★★★★★hotel of traditional Chinese architecture in the downtown area of Jiaxing. We carefully chose it and hope our participants will like it. > JTf 0/ 
    Finally, Jiaxing is a beautiful city in the Southern part of China Mainland. Here the lake, the bridge, the pavilion, the pagoda, the food, the people are inviting! T
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    We look forward to meeting you on our campus! =*?XZA)c

哇塞~~~直接翻译出来了。。。