AITEC started offering contract research projects in FY 1995 under the support of The Mechanical Social Systems Foundation, with the aim of supporting the research and development of software resources in the field of parallel processing and knowledge processing. This aim is an extension of the work at ICOT in the Fifth Generation Computer Systems FGCS project started in 1982. Technologies developed in the projectare still contributing to current research and development, and are available as ICOT Free Software (IFS) on the Internet.
However, it is essential to continue to foster the growth of research communities, and cultivate software resources in these fields. Under an AITEC contract research projects, researchers submit a research proposal and receive funds to enable them to develop software based on IFS.
In FY1995, we issued a call for proposals to researchers who had been working closely with ICOT, and received 27 proposals. We asked 48 peers to review the proposals, and 22 of these were selsected by the Refereeing Committee. Those selected included one-year and two-year projects.
Since FY1996, we called proposals from any Japan domestic researchers and research groups for our contract research. Including research continued since FY1995, 27 research were selected. Copyright of software developed on these projects remains with the principal investigators, or persons they designate. AITEC makes an agreement with the principal investigators to distribute the programs under terms and conditions similar to those for IFS.
We intend the software to stimulate the growth of research communities, as well as to help individual researchers with their projects.
Some of the software developed under two-year projects may not be fully-fungtional. As projects progress, comments will be fed back to the software developer.