• Organization of the NIPT Institute, which will be set up in Japan and will be the core body for the NIPT program. • Research and development (R&D) infrastructure in Japan for NIPT, such as computer networks, etc. MITI will set up a feasibility study committee as the executive body of the feasibility study beginning in July 1991. Observers are welcome as representatives of the U.S./EC. MITI intends to hold workshops organized around each of the eight projects. These will run from September 1991 through March 1992. Participation in these workshops is limited to U.S./EC companies or universities if they have the intention of participating in the consortium at the R&D stage (although there is no commitment), and they are requested to inform MITI of their interest by the end of July. (Government officials will be allowed to participate as observers.) Workshop participants are obliged to make a report jointly on the feasibility of each R&D project. International cooperation, which is an important part of NIPT, will proceed in one of two ways, facilitated by an Advanced Information Technology Forum established between MITI and the U.S. Government and between MITI and the EC Commission. (a) The NIPT program will provide funding to the international consortia consisting of Japanese companies and or universities and U.S./ EC companies and or universities. (b) For R&D projects other than those in (a) that are conducted by the Japanese consortium, cooperation through exchange of R&D results and exchange of researchers will Occur. (c) In addition, the feasibility of joint The undergraduate curriculum is almost Assuming that the actual NIPT Ownership of patent rights will be UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO Background The University of Tokyo (Todai) is Japan's most prestigious university. Its graduates go into the best government and university positions, including most of the new hires into Todai's own faculty. The buildings are quite old, solid reinforced concrete, and hard to modernize. Budgets are tight. Almost all the students are self-supporting, including graduate students. Tuition is high but apparently not nearly as high as at private U.S. universities. The typical course of study is 4 years for a bachelor's degree, 2 more for a master's degree, and 3 more for a Ph.D. Mechanical engineering (ME) used to be split into three subdepartments called Mechanical Engineering, Production Engineering, and Marine Engineering. The latter came into being about 20 to 30 years ago as Japan became a prime shipbuilding country. Since Japan no longer leads in shipbuilding, this department has been totally eliminated in the new structure. When it existed, it dealt primarily with engines and other ship machinery, not with ship structure or other traditional naval architecture. Three years ago the ME Department decided that it was losing students or would soon, with the defectors going into more modern technologies based on computers and information sciences. The response was to “restructure" and modernize the curriculum, adapting to recent progress in mechanical engineering technology in general and enhancing computer-intensive ME in particular. The pressure to restructure came not only from trends visible in student registrations but also in general from the rush of technological change in society and industry. Japan identified information-intensive products as strategically important as early as 1970 with the launching of the PIPS (Pattern Information Processing Systems) national project and has pursued this area intensely since. Obviously mechatronic* products will proliferate 5. Material Physics and Tribology and engineers will be needed to design them. A departmental report in Japanese lists financial contributions from many companies. This is an indication of industry interest/pressure. As can be well imagined, this restructuring was "painful," with several chairs being eliminated. Some faculty apparently left, others changed specialties (!), and several new hires are on the way or being sought. The prime source for new hires is the department's own graduates as well as those from other Todai departments, but several are being sought from the outside. The restructuring began 3 years ago and the Ministry of Education took until this January to give final approval. Todai is a national university subject to the Ministry's governance. I do not know if there is an equivalent of ABET other than the Ministry, but I doubt it. All the debate, curriculum creation, and course design occurred during this time, according to Prof. Inoue, head of the new Mechano-Informatics Department, so the big fights are over and the new structure is fully in effect. Department and Curricular Structure The new department structure recognizes "traditional deep" ME, broad ME, and mechano-informatics (new ME): 6. Energy Conversion, Combustion Physics 7. Heat and Mass Transfer 8. Mechanical Science, Measurement Instrumentation Dept of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (Broad ME) 1. Production Systems, Manufacturing Systems 2. Machine Creation and Manufacturing 3. Systems Engineering, Security 3. Systems Engineering, Security Engineering 4. Design Engineering 5. Human Systems Engineering 5. Computational Mechanical Engineering (computational mechanics, simulation, finite element method analysis, computer-aided engineering) 6. Bio-Mechanical Engineering (biomechanics, neuro engineering, cognitive engineering) 7. Information Systems Engineering (robotics, artificial intelligence, information systems) Broad ME includes industrial engineering and production engineering. Both design and computing appear in all three subdivisions. Students majoring in any one of these three take courses from the various chairs, with 50% recommended from the home department and 25% each from the other two. There are no required subjects. I do not presently know what the requirements are for what we call "humanities" subjects. This way of setting up the curriculum 6. Industrial Systems, Transportation may have been adopted in order to Systems 7. Humanware Systems Engineering reduce conflict between the advocates of the new curriculum and those of the old who usually ask in such debates what mechanical engineering really is. Dept of Mechano-Informatics (New The new structure actually moots this 1. Electronics and Computer in Machinery (digital systems, microcomputer, interface, micro-machine) Dept of Mechanical Engineering (Deep 2. Mechanism and Control (mechaME) question in a very realistic way, acknowledging the fact that the old curricular and disciplinary boundaries have long since been destroyed by external events and it is necessary to build new ones. The three new subdepartments complement each others' research and education and respond to the challenge to form the "new discipline of mechanical engineering." According to Prof. Inoue, the purpose of the Department of MechanoInformatics is to enhance the research and education of computer-intensive mechanical engineering. Primary research fields include: * "Mechatronic" means combining mechanical and electronic or other technologies. A CD player is an excellent example. ⚫ creation of intelligent machinery such as robotics and mechatronics • computer-intensive design and analysis of mechanical systems ⚫ introducing new functions or approaches into machinery such as bionic functions, neuro science, and micro-machines advanced human-machine interface, virtual reality, cognitive engineering, etc. On subsequent visits I hope to delve deeper into such questions as the relation between university training and company training and whether the university thinks any one student can really learn all the things that are offered. What should a competent design engineer know in a world of mechatronics? Since there are no required subjects, only "strongly recommended" ones, the department has not taken a rigid stand on these points. I raised the question of the place of algorithms in this curriculum. It may seem odd to relate algorithms to mechanical design, but Inoue agreed immediately that this is an essential ingredient. Many complex products are algorithmdriven by their embedded microprocessors. Many have complex user interfaces and multiple internal states, both mechanical and electronic. Thus a sense of algorithms is essential for a comprehensive design approach. A related question is why algorithmaware students don't go into computer science (CS). The simple answer is that there is no CS department in Todai's engineering school! There is a CS department in the School of Science, however. I did not learn much about what it teaches. The electrical engineering (EE) department in the School of Engineering deals mostly with power and information systems, including signal processing and vision. Most U.S. universities have CS departments or CS divisions of EE departments. At Todai such competition does not exist, leaving a clear path to ME for such students who also have a mechanical bent. Discussion Many universities in the United States have trouble changing their curricula radically, in spite of obvious reasons to do so. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) I saw leading professors introduce new material at the graduate level and prove it out before trickling it down to the undergraduate curriculum. This can take undergraduate curriculum. This can take many years and lacks a departmentwide strategic approach. It also lacks a methodology for removing outdated material, leading to crowding in the undergraduate syllabus. At Todai the graduate curriculum has so few classes that this method may not be available. The MIT ME Department is currently engaged in a long-term redesign of its curriculum. The methodology at Todai is not totally clear to me, except that the pressure came from within the department, apparently, and not from the dean. The methodology for selecting elements of the new curriculum is also not clear, except that the chairs focus on areas that are related to their research. This creates expertise but does not guarantee that generic material will be taught or that the students will obtain a balanced education. I will try to find out during subsequent visits if industry reviews or advice was involved, or whether departments have visiting committees as do U.S. universities. What is clear is that the change was quite radical and has defined “mechanical engineering" in a way that would be almost unrecognizable at many schools in the United States.--Daniel E. Whitney, ONRASIA PROPOSAL FOR JOINT The Database Promotion Center (DPC), Japan is planning a 2-year research project with interested foreign partners in order to develop a system for retrieval of Japanese database information by use of English (or other nonJapanese) language queries [see also D.K. Kahaner, "Japanese Database Activities," Scientific Information Bulletin 16(1), 65-68 (1991)]. As of 1990, there were over 650 original databases created and available in Japan. Eighty-eight percent are described using Japanese (kanji). This makes them essentially inaccessible to non-Japanese speakers and adds to the sense that Japanese information is closed to Westerners. Providing databases in English within Japan is expensive and the market within Japan is seen as small. The eventual solution to this is to employ intelligent machine translation, and this is an active research area. There are also some commercialized systems, but their performance has thus far been limited. DPC would like to improve this situation in the short run by allowing non-Japanese speakers to query Japanese databases in English or other languages. The plan is for a 2-year project, 1991-93, which will: Accepting Japanese researchers within the participating organization. • Attending committee meetings (international transportation to be provided by DPC). • Using and evaluating the prototype system for about 3 months. Readers should note that this proposal relates to the query language. It does NOT imply that response from the English queries will be in English and thus does not appear to me to provide much additional access. However, the Japanese research assistant in my office felt it would help somewhat in that one level of translation would be eliminated. This is a very small step forward, but perhaps it can be achieved within 2 years. For further information, contact either Mr. Keisuke Okuzumi or Mr. Hiroyuki Endo at DPC: Database Promotion Center, Japan Fax: +81-3-3432-7558 --David K. Kahaner, ONRASIA SECOND NTT SCIENCE FORUM Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is the "Ma Bell" of Japan and is the major player in Japan's telecommunications industry. Until April 1985 it was a public (government) corporation solely responsible for the industry. However, like AT&T earlier, it was privatized in 1985, allowing competitors to enter the field. Nevertheless, it remains the largest of the companies which operate Japan's telecommunications network, the large size of which is evidenced by the fact that, with the exception of the United States, Japan has more telephones than any other nation in the world. As part of its effort to raise and enhance its image as a leader in science and technology, NTT in 1990 initiated a science forum program in which distinguished scientists in a particular field are invited to present lectures and discuss their work. The second of these forums was held on 10 April 1991 and its theme was "Marine Biotechnology -Ocean as a Source of Life." Two speakers from the United States, Professor Andrew A. Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Professor Harlyn O. Halvorson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, were the invited lecturers. The formal lectures were followed by a panel discussion with Benson and Halvorson, who were joined by Professor Shigetoh Miyachi, Executive Managing Director of the Marine Biotechnology Institute (MBI), and Professor Isao Karube of Tokyo University. The moderator was Mr. Akio Etori, the Executive Director and Editor of Mita Press. Before the discussions began, Professors Miyachi and Karube gave brief presentations of their work. Professors Benson and Halvorson each reviewed past work in the field of marine biotechnology and discussed contributions that can be expected. Benson reviewed the field in terms of marine products, health, and environment. Among the topics he discussed were the Manzanar Project to develop mariculture in the Red Sea, regulation of calcium by calcitonin from salmon, and the ability of some marine organisms to detoxify arsenic by synthesis of nontoxic arsenic compounds. The work at Woods Hole was the subject of Halvorson's presentation and included a discussion of novel resistance mechanisms to infectious diseases displayed by some marine organisms and the novel processes employed by certain marine bacteria (archaebacteria) to withstand extreme environments. Professor Miyachi described MBI, which was established last year in two locations, Shizuoka and Kamaishi. The institute is financed by government (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) and industry. Currently 24 companies provide funds and two-thirds of the researchers. Biodegradation of oil, bio-antifouling agents, and CO2 extraction with marine algae are some of their projects. Professor Karube discussed studies related to the problem of global warming; among them were solar bioreactor experiments in Okinawa and CO, removal with coral. 2 Although the lectures presented "big picture" overviews rather than detailed discussions of specific research programs, the forum provided a good medium for people working in the field to get together.--Sachio Yamamoto, ONRASIA |