Greetings from the New President

Tsutomu Kanai President of the Real World Computing Partnership

I was elected president of the Real World Computing Partnership (RWCP) at the RWCP Ordinary General Meeting held in May 1997, succeeding Mr. Takashi Kitaoka, president of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. I would like to request your continued support and cooperation for our current activities.

As you fully understand, information technology is necessary to promote the structural economic reforms and build a fundamental industrial development in this field in Japan. Under such circumstances, I will restate my conviction as the head of a partnership which plays an important role in shaping Japanese national policy, to develop information technology.

Since its inception in July 1992, RWCP has been leading the "Real World Computing (RWC) Project," a 10-year project sponsored by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. This grand-scale project is designed to create an innovative information processing technology system capable of recognizing and processing various types of information, as they exist, in the real world. For the first five years, this project produced a number of successful results under the research theme of a "Flexible Information Processing System." In many areas, our achievements have been excellent, including: the worldｹs first PC and workstation high-speed parallel processing system using cluster technology; a prototype PC controlled by human gestures and speech, and an optical interconnection between processors.

Based on the notable achievements from the first half of this project, we will take over the existing framework and develop new plans for the second half of the project. Starting this year, to build a next-generation information processing system we will actively promote technology development and invest our research resources into two main project ields; real world intelligence technology and parallel and distributed computing technology.

The Real World Computing Partnership, as the organizer of this important national project, has established a comprehensive research environment including; industries, universities, and government agencies, of which 20 domestic and overseas partners play key roles. We will continue to strengthen its cooperative relationship with the MITI Electrotechnical Laboratory.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere hope that our worldwide research environment will successfully result in next-generation fundamental information processing technology. These technological improvements will in turn contribute to the evolution of science and technology. They will also improve economies and societies throughout the world, as well as help create an information society, which is healthy and wealthy in its truest meaning.