T he Ocean University of China is a comprehensive university with a long history. Its curricula are focused on the marine and aquatic sciences and it is located in the beautiful seashore city of Qingdao, China (Figure 1). The Information Engineering Centre of the Ocean University of China (OUC) is an important research institute which was established in 1992. Research interests of the Centre are mainly on application technology and engineering such as rapid quality determination, development of cloud computing platforms and internet products for medicine and health. It contains four laboratories which are responsible for the development of software technology, computer-aided design (CAD), Intelligent Technology and Application Service Providers (ASPs). During recent years, partnerships have been established between our institute and various industries, e.g. Haier, Hisense, Tsingtao Beer, CETC and China Tobacco. Using neural networks, the Intelligent Technology Group began research in 1998 on analytical methods to evaluate the relationship between chemical components and product quality. After Dr Ning Yang took over the leadership of the institute, we gradually began to work on CAD systems for industrial formulations. Since then, this group has filed a number of patents in intelligent data analysis. In the past five years, because of the demands for rapid product quality inspection demanded by industry, this group has been focused on the development of near infrared (NIR) reflectance spectroscopic applications. The first application studied involved determination of the influential factors in NIR modelling techniques and NIR model performance; this was followed by research on NIR network management and control platforms. Nowadays, the group consists of the following staff (Figure 2): ■ A chief research senior in NIR network platform architecture design: Dr Ning Yang. ■ An international NIR spectral analysis expert: consultant: Dr Wei G. Hansen. ■ Two experts in chemical analysis and application technology: Mr XieZhong Xiao, Mrs JiLing Zhong, research senior. ■ Four experts in NIR modelling methods and data analysis algorithms: Dr Huili Gong and Dr Ying He, Dr YuHua Qing, Mr Lei Zhang. ■ Six computer system development experts: Dr Ting Liu, Dr Shuo Shi, Dr YuZhong Ding, Dr Dianhu Chen, Mr GuoQiang Liu and Mr XueTao Yu. This group carries out basic and applied research on NIR, and we would like to highlight the following achievements of the group.