March in Japan usually sees the beginning of spring, but this year winter was colder than normal, and there is still heavy snow fall in many parts of northern Japan. In Tokyo, there has been a long spell of fine, dry days, which could cause a water shortage this summer.As we announced in ICOT TODAY No.13 (apologies to English readers--we did not publish an English version), the laboratory and management department of ICOT was disbanded in June 1995 and the necessary financial and legal procedures were started after it moved office near JR Hamamatsucho station. These were completed in December 1995 and ICOT was then no more.
To take over the business of ICOT, especially the distribution, maintenance and further development of ICOT Free Software (IFS) and related activities, a new research institute was established at the Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) on October 1.
This new organization is called the Research Institute of Advanced Information Technology (AITEC), and it started business on July 1. The IFS programs, especially the KLIC system, have thus been maintained.
"Will ICOT really vanish?" "Who will maintain IFS?" We received many questions of this kind. Fortunately, AITEC's IFS-related activities have grown sufficiently for the group to publish AITEC NEWS, which we are pleased to bring you.
We welcome your comments and opinions. Please send your mail to: aitec-news@icot.or.jp (Ms. Makiko Sato)
[AITEC NEWS HEADLINE]
1. Greetings from Director Dr. Shunichi Uchida, Director of AITEC
Dr. Uchida gives you his greetings upon the opening of the new research institute and introduces its roles.
2. IFS Dissemination and Further Development Projects in FY'95
AITEC has taken over the ICOT's project of dissemination and further development of IFS. AITEC solicited research proposals to carry out improvement, extension, new development and interesting uses of IFS programs from major universities in Japan. In FY'95, we received 27 proposals and accepted 22 of those. A presentation and evaluation workshop on the progress of these research studies will be held on March 11 and 12 at the Tokyo Grand Hotel. The proposed programs for development will be open to the public as an extension of IFS if they prove to be beneficial to IFS users.As we plan to solicit similar proposals in the next fiscal year, anyone who is interested in this AITEC project is welcome to attend this workshop.
3. KLIC and IFS Seminars Held at Two Universities
AITEC organized two seminars at the University of Electro-Communications on September 26 and 27, and at Tokyo Science University on December 14.In the seminar held at the University of Electro-Communication, 32 students attended even though the dates overlapped with the examination period. At the Tokyo Science University, 28 students attended. In these seminars, each student was assigned an X-terminal and requested to solve typical problems using parallel processing.
Parallel demonstrations of genetic information processing and theorem proving using AITEC's parallel Unix machine were also given, which impressed the audience greatly.
We plan to continue similar seminars, so please let us know if you wish to host this seminar at your university.
Greetings by Dr. Shunichi Uchida, Director of AITEC
The Research Institute for Advanced Information Technology (AITEC) was established on October 1, 1995. Since then, it has got going sufficiently for us to bring you this short report of its main activities, AITEC NEWS.AITEC will have two main roles: one is to disseminate and accelerate commercialization of ICOT Free Software (IFS) which is one of the main products of the FGCS Project. This is called the IFS Dissemination and Further Development project. The other is to investigate the future direction of information technology in order to provide reliable information to enable the Japanese government and companies to make long term policy decisions on information technology.
As AITEC was setting up its office and equipment, the number of users of KLIC and other IFS programs increased, and these users requested us to iron out bugs, port KLIC to new machines, and provide advice on using IFS. AITEC was able to meet such requests, and is now in a position to respond to these requests even better than before.
Special interest groups for specific IFS programs are gradually starting up. One example is the KLIC TG led by Dr. Takashi Chikayama, who is now a professor of Tokyo University. AITEC provides these groups with meeting rooms, some man power and computer facilities.
This work of setting up AITEC is supported by 15 AITEC regular members and about 20 part-time staff from software houses with the support and guidance of ICOT OBs (Old Boys) who are now at universities and parent companies.
The plan to establish a virtual laboratory on FGCS technology on the Internet is now proceeding steadily. AITEC is the heart of this laboratory and will play a key role for this virtual laboratory.
As a part of the IFS Dissemination and Further Development project, we decided to initiate the IFS extension and development project for 4 years. This project funds academic researchers to undertake research which may improve, extend or use any IFS programs and thus develop the current IFS.
In this fiscal year, we solicited research proposals for this project mainly from ICOT OBs and academics who had worked with ICOT. In the next fiscal year, we hope to extend the scope of the people to solicite the proposals.
To select appropriate research proposals, we asked about 40 referees to evaluate the proposals, and the final decision was made by the evaluation committee of 10 members headed by Professor Kazuhiro Fuchi.
In the evaluation of the research proposals, the potential research results were considered important, so the proposals were assessed as to whether they could produce practical programs used by many other people, whether they will have appropriate manuals, and so on.
The research period is one or two years. Each research project supported by AITEC is presented at the end of every fiscal year at a symposium held to evaluate the state of progress. If a project has not made sufficient progress, support may be withdrawn.
In FY'95, we received 27 proposals and accepted 22 of those. The contents can be found on the AITEC Home Page on the Internet (http://www.icot.or.jp). In FY'96, we plan to call for new research proposals, although this will depend on the budget given in the next year. If you are interested in funding and projects, you are recommended to attend the symposium or take a look at our Home Page on the Internet in order to see what kind of proposals are required. Please send in your proposal.
Another event we are planning is a KL-1 programming contest using the KLIC system. We hope that fast KL-1 programs running on parallel machines will be received as answers to the problems that we set for applicants of the contest.
However, most KLIC systems are currently used on sequential workstations. Thus, the applicants will have difficulty in debugging their programs on Unix-based parallel machines. Parallel Unix-based machines have not yet become popular enough to use them for such a purpose. We hope that the event will stimulate general-purpose parallel programming in the future.
As described above, the IFS Dissemination and Further Development project has begun to run as intended. We plan to hold various meetings for WGs with special interest groups and symposiums. Most of these meetings are open to everyone, and we hope to build closer relations with you through these meetings and events. Please come along and join us with your colleagues.
The other role of AITEC is to investigate the future direction of information technology to enable Japanese government and companies to make long-term policy decisions. MITI staff and relevant manufacturers are setting up the details of this project. To begin with, we will have a small team to investiate basic research topics which may have a great impact on society in the future. Examples such as parallel processing, networking as well as their uses such as digital libraries will be investigated.
Recently, use of the Internet has boomed, and this is having various impacts on other technologies such as multi-media technologies, which will change the social structure to varying degrees.
The structure of information systems is also changing. For example, massively parallel machines used only to be considered a special purpose machine for number crunching. However, recently, such machines are being used as a central server called a data warehouse to act as a large data storage system with a very fast data retrieval function.
It is common knowledge that main frames used to be the center of information technology. The information technologies requiring our attention are extending very quickly. Even if we try to monitor only the hardware area, we must still consider everything from small personal computers to large massively parallel machines in addition to network systems.
As described above, it is difficult to forecast the future direction of new information technologies. We are starting out by collecting interesting research topics in government-sponsored projects in advanced countries. Recently, these research topics and information are being made available to the public and are readily available on the Internet.
Accumulating such information and using it for our database, we are trying to detect the important research items and assess them in order to draw some scenarios for the future.
We hope that the various information we provide will help the government and companies make their policies and long term plans. Our role of disseminating IFS will enable us to gather valuable information to help us draw up these scenarios.
As described, AITEC's work is not easy, and we are a new and small laboratory. Thus, we need various contributions and help from ICOT OBs, researchers who are interested in IFS, and related people in government, companies, and so on.
We plan to continue disseminating IFS and making its newly-built extensions and other valuable information available in the future, including information on the direction of information technology summarized from the information given to us with the kind help of people such as yourself and many other people.
In the United States, the research results of many government-sponsored projects have been made available to the public as common resource information on the Internet. These have begun to have a impact not only on areas of natural science but also on all the areas of society.
AITEC is a small laboratory, but it has many relationships with people related to the FGCS project overseas. By promoting the exchange of research information with these international researchers, AITEC hopes to have several strong areas of information science and provide many people with valuable information on the future of these areas.
AITEC NEWS is a new forum for communication. We strongly hope that you will read it and respond to our articles.
2. IFS Dissemination and Further Development Projects in FY'95
In FY'95, AITEC has started to solicit research proposals for improving, extending, developing and using IFS programs in interesting ways from major universities in Japan under its project "IFS Dissemination and Further Development." This project aims to extend and develop the use of IFS in the public domain.This year's project was announced mainly to the professors and students who had worked in the former FGCS project.
The 48 referees finished evaluating the 27 research proposals that were submitted, then the ten members of the evaluation committee headed by Director Fuchi (Professor of University of Tokyo) selected the following 22 proposals. Please refer to the AITEC Home Page for the abstracts of the themes.
1. Improving the Runtime System of KLIC
Takashi Chikayama (University of Tokyo)2. An Optimization Technique of Efficient Goal Scheduling for KL1 Programs
Hiroshi Nakashima (Kyoto University)3. KL1 Programming Support System
Kazunori Ueda (Waseda University)4. A System for Evaluating Linguistic Resources
Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)5. A Study on Parallel Robust Parsing System based on GLR Algorithm
Susumu Kunifuji (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)6. Parallelization of PROGOL in KL1
Kouichi Furukawa (Keio University)7. Fast Hypothetical Reasoning System
Mitsuru Ishizuka (University of Tokyo)8. Design of Multi-Agent Type Robot Language/System
Fumio Mizoguchi (Science University of Tokyo)9. A Programming Environment for Concurrent Inductive Symbol Processing
Taisuke Sato (Tokyo Institute of Technology)10. Set Constraint Solvers
Yousuke Sato (Ritsumeikan University)11. A Parallel Computing Silicon Compiler for Low Power LSI Design
Kazuo Taki (Kobe University)12. Development of Protein Structure Prediction System: Secondary Structure Prediction of Membrane Proteins
Shigeki Mitaku (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology)13. Application of Parallel Logic Programming for Reconstruction of Molecular Phylogenetic Trees using the Maximum Likelihood Method
Susumu Kunifuji (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)14. Extended Features of a Deductive Object-Oriented Database Language QUIXOTE for Practical Use
Kazumasa Yokota (Kyoto University)15. Development of an MGTP System on KLIC
Ryuzo Hasegawa (Kyushu University)16. Development of Abductive Logic Programming Systems
Katsumi Inoue (Toyohashi University of Technology)17. Constraint MGTP and its Application to Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Processing
Makoto Amamiya (Kyushu University)18. An Implementation of a Parallel Active Database System in KLIC
Haruo Yokota (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)19. Application of Heterogeneous Distributed Cooperative Problem Solver Helios to Computer Supported Cooperative Works
Kazumasa Yokota (Kyoto University)20. An Analysis Tool for Japanese using EDR Dictionary
Hozumi Tanaka (Tokyo Institute of Technology)21. A Study on Legal Reasoning Based on Goal-dependent Abstraction
Makoto Haraguchi (Hokkaido University)22. Research on Visual Interface of KLIC
Jiro Tanaka (University of Tsukuba)There are two research courses in this project: 1-year and 2-year. We are planning to hold workshops to report on the state of progress at the end of each fiscal year as we do on March 11 and 12, 1996. We also plan to outline the state of progress and results of the research studies on the AITEC Home Page on the Internet. Please take a look as we publish the results!
Details of the progress report workshop on March 11 and 12 will be introduced in the next AITEC NEWS.
We will continue to solicit more research proposals for this project in 1996. Please contact us if you are interested.
Some 32 students on the first day and 17 on the second day participated in the seminar--both rainy days in the middle of the examination period--thanks to the tremendous efforts of Professor Watanabe of the graduate school of the University.
A demonstration and lecture on IFS were given to the participants on the first day. On the second day, they practiced solving typical problems on the X-terminal in the given time.
Contents:
9/26
Some 28 graduate students of the University participated, including some students of the Department of Physics; all were very enthusiastic and the seminar was a success.
The contents of the seminar were nearly the same as the seminar held at the University of Electro-Communications, and again, you can find the details on AITEC's Home Page:
http://www.icot.or.jp/ AITEC welcomes your requests for holding the IFS seminar at your campus. If you are interested, please contact the following:
You probably wondered where we've gone or what we were up to after such a long silence. Thank you for your concern (if indeed you were). All of the staff at AITEC are fine (fortunately) and very proud to finally send you the first edition of this AITEC NEWS.
Your comments and requests on how to make AITEC NEWS much more efficient and useful to you are most welcome.
Please write to: aitec-news@icot.or.jp This news is being sent to the same e-mail addresses to which we delivered ICOT TODAY. Please let us know if you have changed your e-mail address, if you don't wish to receive it from the next edition, or if you know a new reader who wishes to subscribe.
Please drop in to see us at our new office close to JR Hamamatsucho station. The view is not as good as we had from the Mita-Kokusai Building, but the present office is very convenient and comfortable. We are looking forward to seeing you.
You can find the location of our office on our Home Page: http://www.icot.or.jp AITEC NEWS, Issue No.2 is now being prepared, so see you soon.
********************************************************************** * * * A I T E C N E W S Issue #1 * * AITEC NEWS Editorial Team: * * Makiko Sato, Chie Takahashi, Akira Aiba * * Hiroshi Sato, Shunichi Uchida * * Issued: April 5, 1996 * * By: Research Institute for Advanced Information * * Technology (AITEC), a subcenter of * * Japan Information Processing Development * * Center (JIPDEC) * * 2-3-3, Minato-ku, Shiba, Tokyo 105, Japan * * Tel: 03-3456-3191 FAX: 03-3455-4877 * * E-mail: aitec-news@icot.or.jp * * * **********************************************************************