Embracing Information Science and Technology—Decoding, Exploring, and Designing the World

1. Introduction

The recent era is one in which human beings have faced off against “machines” (computers or artificial intelligence), so to speak. This era is coming to an end. From this point on, we will embrace information science and technology as part of ourselves. This means that we will need to be able to decode, explore, and design everything in the entire world, including us human beings. Consequently, we must think about what the basic research will be that will form the compass of the future as we envision the year 2030, fifteen years from now, while still keeping in mind the drastic changes in the information environment that we have so far experienced in the twenty-first century. Thanks to the development of information science and technology, the real world in which we embrace information science and technology and are in turn embraced by it, is changing greatly in the following three ways.

2. Communication science as the compass for the future

The research topics being tackled by NTT Communication Science Laboratories today can be placed in the flow of decoding, exploring, and designing the world. If we classify the technologies introduced in these Feature Articles into these three categories, we can consider the technologies introduced in “Biological Measures that Reflect Auditory Perception” [1] and “Deep Learning Based Distant-talking Speech Processing in Real-world Sound Environments” [2] to be technologies for decoding the real world. We can consider the technology described in “Combinatorial Optimization Using Binary Decision Diagrams” [3] to be technology for searching in the real world, and those in the articles “Generative Modeling of Voice Fundamental Frequency Contours for Prosody Analysis, Synthesis, and Conversion” [4] and “Yu bi Yomu: A New Text Display System Using Tracing Behavior” [5] to be technologies for designing the real world. Another technology for designing the real world is described in “‘Hen-Gen-Tou (Deformation Lamps)’—Amazing Illumination to Make Static Objects Dynamic” [6].

The information environment that permeates our lives has dramatically changed since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the intensity of the transformation is continuing to grow. Even in the field of basic research, we are now in an era in which we must choose the challenges to tackle and we must contribute to introducing new technologies to the market with a sense of urgency of the times. As NTT seeks to create new markets by exploiting Co-Innovation through collaboration with companies in other industries, it can be said that, in fact, the expectation placed on the value of basic research and its fruits is becoming even greater. Each of the fruits born from basic research is a valuable seed of innovation. They are waiting for the arrival of the right time to blossom [7, 8].

Just when and where are technologies with the potential for innovation born? Understanding and exploiting this insight quickly is the key to winning the competition to create services, even in the field of research and development. The mission of private basic research is to diligently refine technologies that blossom a few years or a decade from now as we respond to the demands of the times. It is also to resolutely continue the intellectual challenge of creating a new world that others have not arrived at yet by creating new knowledge and patiently verifying it to build it up [9]. The research achievements of NTT Communication Science Laboratories are posted on our website as the occasion arises. We also introduce our efforts at the open house held in June every year [10].

References

Eisaku Maeda Vice President, Head of NTT Communication Science Laboratories. He received a B.E. and M.E. in biological science and a Ph.D. in mathematical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1984, 1986, and 1993. He joined NTT in 1986. He was a guest researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1996–1997. He was awarded IPSJ’s 45th anniversary best paper on the next 50 years of information science and technology for his paper “Resurgence of Fairies and Goblins—A Proposal for the New Vision of “Ambient Intelligence.” His research interests are statistical machine learning, intelligence integration, and bioinformatics. He is a fellow of IEICE (Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan) and a senior member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan).