Yuichiro Anzai Dean,Faculty of Engineering Keio University

Information Integration and Technology Development in the 21st Century

The Real World Computing technology is a system for information processing technology which is able to handle various types of informationin the real world in the same or a more "flexible" way humans actually employ for their daily activities.

Most human activities are manifested as "overlaps" of information processing capabilities such as emotion, senses, perception, memory, thought, language and physical motion. Our "flexible information processing" is the result that various types of information processing consistently arranged and integrated in terms of space and time.

If so, Real World Computing technology must ultimately deal with a problem how to integrate a whole range of types of information.

As to integration of information, a number of approaches are being employed and tested in many areas. For instance, the common basis for "multimedia" is that information in various modalities is expressed digitally, transferred in packets, and thus being integrated. Sensor fusion is another effort to integrate information in different modalities. The "Binding Problem," one of the most discussed subjects in cognitive neurology, is also an example of where and how information of different modalities are integrated in the human brain.
What is more, a number of researchers are engaged in one of the most fundamental issues in information integration: how to process using a reasonable amount of calculation such problems that their possible context cannot be previously identified (i.e. issues in the real world). In the Real World Computing Program, an "Information Integration Workshop" has been established and they are very active in discussing the subject on a periodical basis.

For discussion, if I expand the information integration issue, we need to face another aspect of the matter, exceeding information we usually handle, in relation to spatially extensive objects such as buildings, automobiles, roads and urban communities. If an urban community is compared to the human body, roads and buildings are bones and muscles, water, power and gas supply networks are blood vessels, and information networks including the Internet are nervous systems. Most modern communities, however, have no sensing/perceptive capability to find out their real-time status, such as the remaining serviceable time of lifelines and roads or building status against earthquakes nor immune capability to reject bacterial invasion. In addition, Japanese society does not have full capability for risk control necessary in emergencies.

Our vision therefore includes the construction of communities where safety and security are established by combining, on networks, information directly obtained from urban communities and other infrastructure with other types of information that people usually handle and control.

"After the long, deep darkness of a tunnel, I suddenly found the train was in the snow country. The bottom edge of the sky was dawning gray. The train stopped at a signal station ...." This is the beginning of "Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata. Around 1935 when he started writing this novel, the actual tunnels, trains, signal stations and communication lines between the both ends of the tunnel to warn the occurrence of avalanches were designed and built by people who were engaged in the most advanced engineering at that time. I then wonder how technology development will be done 100 years later; already in the 21st century.

Just like the construction of the tunnel to the "Snow Country," technology improvements will be made by enthusiastic people who want to build a safer world. And a very important role will be given to information technology which can integrate and process sensor, linguistic and many other types of information. Because the purpose of the technology development in the 21st century is to build a safer world in which all people can live more comfortably and the feature of human beings is that they can process only a very limited amount of information at a time to determine their future activities.

To this end, I sincerely hope that the Real World Computing Program will take the leader in technology development in the 21st century.