AITEC NEWS No.14

	January 14, 1998
	Issue #14 (issued on Nov.26, 1997 in Japanese)

Introduction
AITEC NEWS Headlines
Articles in This Issue
- Report of the Success of ICOT OBs and Related Researchers in Recent Government Sponsored Programs
- Message from the Editorial Desk
Introduction
Now, we are right in autumn in Japan. Japanese has many expressions about autumn; the season of appetite, reading, colored leaves, and recreation are often used. Among many other expressions, the season of harvest is specially impressive.

Witnessing the sowing of the seeds in spring, growing of crops through hot summer, and the harvesting in autumn can bring a great joy to people.

Recently, we have been excited with the news that some ICOT OB projects have been adopted into some R&D programs sponsored by the government. I believe the success of these ICOT OB projects means that FGCS is now producing a significant harvest.

In this issue, we would like to introduce the projects and achievements of ICOT OBs adopted to government sponsored programs, and share our joy of this "FGCS harvest " with you.

Let's start with the headlines of No. 14.

(Chie Takahashi)

AITEC NEWS Headlines
1. "KLIC Programming Contest" Report

We have closed the program submission for the KLIC Programming Contest and are now on the final stage of evaluation. Some comments from applicants indicated that this year's subjects were more difficult than last year's.

The Contest Committee had decided to make the subject matter more sophisticated than last year so applicants could use unique KLIC functions more essentially. However, subjects were a little difficult and we had less applicants than last year. Considering KLIC dissemination, it is more meaningful to have more participants; we will have to rethink the direction of the contest next year.

We are going to introduce the award nominees in the "KLIC Programming Contest CYBER Ceremony" on the AITEC Homepage as soon as they are decided. We hope you enjoy it.(http://www.icot.or.jp)

(Kiyoshi Kaneda)
(No Referenced Article)
2. ICOT OB Researchers Received Adoption in Governmental Sponsored Programs

Recently, the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry along with other related agencies have increased the number of open R&D programs. The budget for each program is enlarging from around 100 million to 300 million yen, which is considered larger than average for a usual project budget for a university-level project. The project term is 2 to 3 years, relatively short, and the themes can be chosen by researchers, which is why this kind of program is getting popular. The qualification for admittance depends on the programs. Some programs call for projects from only university and national institute researchers, others from groups of such researchers, and still others from groups of corporate manufacturer researchers. Each program is highly competitive, with an acceptance ratio usually around 10 percent.

In such competitive programs, several proposed projects from some groups including ICOT OBs, ICOT related researchers of manufacturers and/or ICOT related overseas researchers have been adopted. So far, we have been informed that four projects were adopted for government sponsored programs. The following is the project lineup in order of date to be adopted:
```
1) Prof. Kazuo Taki Group (Kobe University)
   From: New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO)
   Title: A VLSI Design Automation Software for Low Energy Consumption 
          VLSI's Utilizing Parallel Processing
   Term: November, 1995 - March, 1997 
                                         (Article No. 14-1)

2) Prof. Kazumasa Yokota Group (Okayama Prefectural University)
   (Prof. Kazumasa Yokota moved from Kyoto University in April, 1997)
   From: Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture
   Title: Research and Development on Agent-Based Database Systems 
          for Integration of Media and User Environments 
          in Scientific Research on Priority Areas
   Term: April, 1996 - 
                                         (No Referenced Article)

3) Prof. Takashi Chikayama Group (University of Tokyo)
   From: The Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA)
   Title:  Development of Integrated Parallel Processing Technologies
   Term: October, 1996 - February, 1998
                                          (Article No. 14-2)

4) Prof. Ryuzo Hasegawa Group (Kyushu University)
   From: The Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA)
   Title: Advanced Argumentation System Based on Theorem Proving Technologies
   Term: October, 1997 - January, 1999 (tentative)

                                          (Article No. 14-3)
```
These project themes are based mainly on products of the FGCS project and further developed products. We at AITEC, who are disseminating FGCS technology, are especially delighted with the success of ICOT OBs and related researchers. We strongly hope that their success further increases and contributes to the development of IT R&D and the IT industry.

In this issue, three researchers will introduce their projects.

(Edited by Shunichi Uchida)
3. The Second IFS Seminar at Keio University

On October 22 and 23, 1997, the second IFS Seminar for this fiscal year was held at the Department of Science and Technology at the Yagami Campus of Keio University. The seminar concentrated on KLIC, and had about 30 participants from the university and outside.

We demonstrated the "multiple sequence alignment using a parallel iterative aligner" by accessing a parallel machine at AITEC from notebook PCs through a portable phone. In the demonstration, from time-to-time we indicated the computed results returned from the parallel machine at AITEC which was responding to the commands from the notebook PCs.

Since it was our first time to demonstrate in this way, we carefully prepared and rehearsed for the demonstration.

At the seminar, we proved that we could do the demonstration with a narrow bandline of a portable phone, and we had a lively discussion with the participants.

The seminar schedule was as follows:
```
October 22 (Wednesday)

	 13:30  Explanation about IFS
		Dr. Akira Aiba (AITEC)

	 13:50  IFS Demonstration of genetic information processing 
		Ms. Reiko Tanaka (IMS)

		< break >

	 14:45  Introduction to KL1
		Dr. Takashi Chikayama (Univ. of Tokyo)

		< break >

	 16:45  KLIC Seminar
		Mr. Yasuyuki Shirai (MRI)
 
October 23 (Thursday)

	 13:00  KLIC Programming (1)
		Mr. Miyuki Koshimura (Kyushu Univ.)

		< break >

	 14:30  KLIC Programming (2)
		Mr. Tetsuro Fujise (MRI)

	 15:30  Exercise

	 16:30  Closing
```
If you are interested in the IFS seminar, or in hosting the seminar, please send mail to:kaneda@icot.or.jp, or fax to: +81-3-3456-1618 (Kaneda)

(No Referenced Article)
4. The Research Funding Program in FY'97

The projects for the AITEC research funding program in FY'97 for parallel/knowledge processing software have been decided.

For the FY'97 program, we extended our call for proposals to overseas universities hoping more researchers than last year would use this opportunity to conduct software R&D.

As a result, we received 37 proposals from 35 researchers from 6 countries including Japan. The projects were judged, as in the FY'96 program, by review from an outside refereeing committee. It was very competitive, and the committee members had careful discussions to decide the projects.

Finally, 19 projects were adopted from 6 countries: Japan, USA, UK, France, Austria and Australia. We are delighted with such a variety of countries participating in this program, and we are looking forward to their achievements.

Also, 3 projects were selected as continuing projects from FY'96. In total, 22 projects have started as funded projects for FY'97.

For details of each project, please look at the AITEC Homepage.
(http://www.icot.or.jp)

(Akira Aiba)
(No Referenced Article)
5. KLIC-3.001 Released and Mirror Site Opened at University of Tokyo

KLIC-3.002 was released. This is essentially the bug fixed version of KLIC-3.001.
```
The file is available at the following URL:

    ftp://klic.icot.or.jp/pub/klic/v3.0/klic-3.002.tgz (primary site)
                                        klic.tgz
    ftp://ftp.logos.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/klic/klic-3.002.tgz(mirror site)
                                         klic.tgz
    /pub/klic/v3.0/klic-3.002.tgz (mirror site)
                                       klic.tgz
```
It is noted that the distribution sites increased and changed from the previous distribution sites. For people affiliated with Japanese universities, it is recommended to get the file from the second site (ftp.logos.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp) via SINET.

Please enjoy it.

Caution: Some serious bugs were STILL found in a shared memory parallel version. The bugs will be fixed in the next version. Thus, if you are using the previous (2.00x) version of shared memory implementation, DO NOT update your program.

(Daigo Sekita - Mitsubishi Research Inst., Inc., KLIC task group)
(No Referenced Article)
6. AITEC Homepage Renewal

We have renewed the layout and structure of the AITEC Homepage. Because the old AITEC Homepage had become very complicated and consequently had a long URL, we revised the whole structure and improved some English pages. Most URLs of the AITEC Homepage have been changed in this renewal, so please renew your bookmarks of our homepage. We are sorry for this inconvenience, and if you have any questions about URLs please contact us at:www-admin@icot.or.jp

(Akira Aiba)
(No Referenced Article)

Articles In This Issue
Report of the Success of ICOT OBs and Related Researchers in Recent
Government Sponsored Programs

Recently, besides the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture; the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and other related agencies have started more R&D funding programs. The recently most attractive ones have been programs based on national supplementary budget, especially the ones with budgets over 100 million yen and are open to both universities and private companies.

Regarding fields receiving funding, an Information Technology (IT) field is considered more important and replaced the public works field. Funding for universities and national institutes has higher priority than before, and a part of the fund was utilized for IT R&D programs, a number of researchers and engineers of universities and manufacturers had applied to them.

Although such open and competitive programs have been widely made in the US and Europe, they had not been common in Japan. So those programs mentioned above are kind of experimental programs in Japan which may change the fundamentals of government sponsored R&D systems.

Several groups of ICOT OBs and related researchers applied for the programs. As far as AITEC knows, 4 projects have been adopted including research effort on the "Scientific Research on Priority Areas" as we mentioned in the headline.

Here, we introduce the projects' outlines and comments written by the project researchers. We hope their experience will be useful to you.

We have asked 3 researchers to outline their projects as follows:
1) Prof. Kazuo Taki Group Project (Kobe University)
1. Theme: A VLSI Design Automation Software for the Low Energy Consumption VLSIs with a Utilization of Parallel Processing
2. Research Members: Kazuo Taki, Masahiro Numa, Hironori Nakajo, Masahiro Yasugi (Kobe University)
3. Term: November, 1995 -- March, 1997
4. Outline:
It is necessary to develop VLSI chips of low energy consumption for quickly advancing portable IT devices of which market is rapidly growing. In order to develop such VLSI chips, a new logic circuit structure for very low energy consumption and relevant technology on highly advanced design automation software are essential.

The objective of our project is to research and develop highly advanced design automation software to create digital LSI for a level of low energy consumption which current CMOS technology has never achieved. The project features two points of technical innovation.

The first innovative point is to make it possible to design LSI featuring low energy consumption (power reduction ratio: 75% - 90% of present energy consumption). We have proven that a new logic circuit (SPHL), revised path-transistor logic, could nearly achieve our targeted low energy feature. However, as we could not get sufficient results with the manual design, we needed highly advanced design automation software systems.

In this project, to get the best results for our low energy consumption feature, we tried to develop design automation software based upon the new design method. The software unifies logic composition and layout to achieve the first technical resolution.

The second innovative point is to develop the above mentioned design automation software as parallel software in order to greatly shorten the duration of LSI design. So far, it has been pointed out that a parallel computer can hardly make the run-time of this type of software shorter. However, in this project, we could successfully apply the FGCS technology to achieve a rapid parallel processing ability, scheduling characteristic and load balancing improvement for achievement of the second technical resolution.

This software outputs the results of LSI design, including all the information necessary for producing it, and enables simple evaluation and technology transfer.

The experimental LSI for evaluation was so far fully compatible with the external specification with a market standard built-in 8-bit micro-processor (Zilog-Z80), and the internal architecture was newly designed for low energy consumption. We could design over 60% of the VLSI with this new design automation software, and confirm its operation and performance. Although the clock speed of the experimental LSI was just as fast as the other on the market,the energy consumption was approximately one forth of the other commercial product. This LSI is now being redesigned using the most advanced process, and scheduled to be commercialized for portable IT devices, such as portable phones, etc., from the Sharp Co.

For both low energy consumption LSI technology and design automation software, we had to start from the very beginning. The pioneering spirits we gained at ICOT moved us toward this challenge to develop this significant opportunity on a new frontier. This challenge is regarded as a mini-ICOT project for me, and as a result we have advanced hardware technology and parallel software technology to support the hardware design in this project because we did the same at ICOT.

2) Prof. Takashi Chikayama Group Project (University of Tokyo)
1. Theme: Development of Integrated Parallel Processing Technologies
2. Research Members: Takashi Chikayama, Hirokazu Murao (Univ. of Tokyo), Hidetsune Kobayashi (Nihon Univ.) Kazunori Ueda (Waseda Univ.), Naoto Niki (Science Univ. of Tokyo), Yu Inamura (NEC Information Systems), Tetsuro Fujise (Mitsubishi Research Institute) Steve Gregory, Rong Yang (Univ. of Bristol)
3. Term: October, 1996 - February, 1998
4. Outline:
Most of the parallel computer systems so far in practical use have been designed based upon both data parallel technology, and task parallel systems have been limited only to experimental systems. For high performance parallel processing, it is necessary to integrate both kinds of parallel processing, complementing deficiencies and making synergy effects. This project is proposing for streamlined integration of both data and task parallel processing, providing design and implementation of language constructs for synchronization and data passing.

To put it more concretely, the project uses a concurrent and parallel logic programming language, KL1, developed in the FGCS project as a coordination language, making data-parallel programs written in other languages such as Fortran or C cooperate in a task-parallel way.

To develop this, we will extend KLIC, an implementation of KL1 for general purpose computers developed in the FGCS follow-on project, with features to handle arrays with distributed elements as a single array, to make automatic redistribution of elements on demand, to call foreign language routines in parallel, and to distribute such processing loads automatically. Upon this implementation, we will construct experimental application software for large-scale combinatorial optimization and large-scale symbolic formula manipulation, so as to evaluate appropriateness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism.

Many of the technologies developed in the FGCS project are useful not only to knowledge information processing systems which were the primary objectives of the project, but also to wider areas of applications. This project aims at making use of an advantage of KL1 in flexibly describing concurrent processing and further extending it. Researchers who engaged in the design and implementation of KL1 and KLIC joined the project together with others who recognized the possibilities of the technology.

FGCS technologies have a little different basis from conventional computer technologies which are apt to be looked on as something peculiar and inconsistent with conventional computer technologies. In proposing this project, we had difficulties in persuading people that FGCS technologies can be a key in constructing truly general-purpose large scale computation technology.

We, who had taken part in the FGCS project, felt very happy that this proposal was accepted, as the FGCS technologies were recognized to have possibilities of having high values in liaison with large-scale numerical processing technologies. We expect that, as parallel processing and knowledge information processing technologies get higher importance in future computer technologies, tangible and intangible bequests of the FGCS will continue to grow up in synergy with technologies of other areas of computer science.
3) Prof. Ryuzo Hasegawa Group Project (Kyushu University)
1. Theme: Advanced Argumentation System Based on Theorem Proving Technologies
2. Research Members: Ryuzo Hasegawa (Kyushu Univ.), Katsumi Nitta (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Hiroshi Fujita (Kyushu Univ.), Katsumi Inoue (Kobe Univ.) Yasuyuki Shirai (Mitsubishi Research Institute) Reiner Haehnle (Karlsruhe Univ.), Hiroshi Komatsu (Law Offices of Homma & Komatsu)
3. October, 1997 - January, 1999 (tentative)
4. Outline:
The new HELIC-II developed at ICOT has been highly rated by many researchers involved in the argumentation system for legal reasoning. However the project has also revealed hurdles which have to be dealt with in order to make practical use of the system. The issue concerns such aspects as theoretical bases for reasoning, the relation to law theory, the extension of inference models, user interfaces and so on.

MGTP, also developed at ICOT, has successfully achieved a high level of performance, including parallel execution which is not only for solving mathematical problems, but also for some constraint satisfaction problems. However one of the great achievements of the system is its success in solving open problems in the field of finite algebra. However, insufficiency in the area of actual applications has lead the MGTP to be appreciated only by the people involved in theorem proving research.

This proposal is aiming at achieving the following two items:
1. Combining the two technologies and the know-how which was acquired through the development process to improve its capability in real situations.
2. Developing a legal knowledge-base and some new techniques, such as a rule preference module, heuristic search module, search control module, and constraint solving module, which are needed to formalize practical legal reasoning.
Theorem proving technology provides the argumentation system with not only the theoretical bases for advanced functions used in legal reasoning, but also makes large scale argumentation possible, thanks to its great efficiency.
We are very glad to know that the technology of the argumentation system for legal reasoning and theorem proving, the theme of the long committed project at ICOT, have been publicly recognized as a promising technological basis.

However in order to develop those technologies to a level where they can bear realistic usage and be promoted; the combining of element technologies in the development process and showing the public its ability in real situations is absolutely vital.

We would like to augment the appeal of the usefulness of ICOT products through this project.

The proposal emphasizes the following points:
1. The technology of argumentation systems for legal reasoning and theorem proving developed at ICOT, is undoubtedly at the top level in the world and has also been rewarded with a high reputation.
2. Argumentation systems are equipped with a multi-agent negotiation function, thus it can be applied to broad areas in industries.
3. Theorem proving systems are a useful problem solving tool for not just solving mathematical problems.
4. The project should not only deal with theoretical toy problems, but should also have a good vision of what would be necessary for the technology to be applicable in the real world.
The members of this project have been maintaining a close cooperative relationship which was established through working together at ICOT. We are hoping to make this project fruitful with excellent teamwork.

(Edited by Shunichi Uchida)

Message From the Editorial Desk
We hope you enjoyed AITEC NEWS No. 14.

Did you find our report of ICOT OBs' research projects for government sponsored programs useful? We hope so.

We would like to keep reporting a variety of activities, research, and achievements relating to AITEC on AITEC NEWS. If you have any news and information you would like to introduce in this publication, please send it to us: aitec-news@icot.or.jp

All the AITEC staff wish you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!
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*                                                                    *
*       A I T E C  N E W S      Issue #14                            *
*          AITEC NEWS Editorial Team:                                *
*            Makiko Sato, Chie Takahashi, Akira Aiba                 *
*            Kazumi Kasai, Kouichi Takeda, Yoshiharu Torii           *
*            Hiroshi Sato, Shunichi Uchida                           *
*          AITEC NEWS English Version Team                           *
*            Masayo Fukushima, Shunichi Uchida                       *
*          Issued on: November 26, 1997(Japanese Version)            *
*                     January  14, 1998(English Version)             *
*          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: +81-3-3456-3191 Fax: +81-3-3455-4877             *
*              E-mail: aitec-news@icot.or.jp                         *
*              http://www.icot.or.jp                                 *
*                                                                    *
**********************************************************************
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