Tamotsu Nomakuchi Director Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Chairperson of the Management Committee and the RWC'97 Executive Committee)

"Development of Research"

Almost five years have passed since the inception of the Real World Computing Project (RWCP). This project was geared to create leading-edge information processing technologies with a far-sighted view of future science and technology development so that Japan will be able to contribute to the evolution of an advanced information-oriented society. As the project enters the second half of its term, I would like to describe some comments and expectations on the project.

The objective of the RWC Project is to develop an intelligence that is useful and practical in the real world and technologies that will lead to the next-generation information infrastructure on which such intelligence can be implemented. The project is therefore working on subjects on which a single institute or a single company cannot afford to make significant progress; including innovative hardware improvements exemplified by the photoelectronic element and optical interconnections; software solutions such as parallel computing technology to fill the gap between the capabilities of hardware and the large computation demands of applications; and programming languages and system software which give a realistic form to these technological quests.

One of the characteristics of this area of technology is that many layers are required to achieve a solution of practical value. Not only is the goal of each layer development to be achieved, but also other aspects of the project are needed in order to disperse the achievements of the individual layer technology development as standardized infrastructure under a long-range and broad-sighted policy.

Also, real world intelligence includes themes of great interest to increase the possibility of information processing such as a function for finding acceptable solutions even from incomplete information and learning and adapting capabilities for collecting/compiling information in autonomously. There are other interesting research themes concerning the linkage of subsystems such as agent technology and multimodal information integration technology leading to a fundamental framework for future information exchange. The RWC Project will surely play an important role in theoretical studies to integrate and put into practical use these leading-edge technologies, steadily evolving as an international initiative and producing beneficial results for society.

In national projects like the RWC Project, what highly motivates researchers is challenging subjects which require a great deal of efforts and breakthroughs. Competition is getting harsher day by day in the information industry throughout the world. So, national projects provide researchers with a good opportunity to face problems which are risky in a sense. However, the longer the project and the more innovative the objective, the greater the difficulty of practical application of the results. In order to overcome such difficulties, we have to develop our research activities by accurately predicting the ever-changing needs of the near future, adjusting the course of research activities and developing research.

One of the key elements which allow the development of research activities in information processing may be the communication abilities of research results themselves. The terminology does not only mean communications between equipment and systems, but also indicates that we need some device, including share and diversion of data and interactive relations between people and the environment, to adapt research results to the real world.

Another key element is "contents." "We have created a new vessel, we just need new contents." Have you ever heard such a comment? This is found not only in the field of multimedia; similar comments were made by researchers engaged in the development of machine translation dictionaries.

As long as you are involved in the development of information devices, you will inevitably face the need for development, maintenance and management of contents in relation with databases. It should be noted that even an entirely new technology often must make the use of existing infrastructure and data in order to be quickly accepted by society. It is very important to develop research.