NII Open House 2013

We present the Big Data Public Private Forum (BIG) funded by the European Commission that is working towards strategies for providing a major boost for technology adoption and the successful implementation of a Big Data economy. Building an industrial community around Big Data in Europe is the priority of this project, together with setting up the necessary collaboration and dissemination infrastructure to link technology suppliers, integrators and leading user organizations. In the large German future project Industry 4.0 cyber-physical production systems generate petabytes of data in smart factories and in the planned second future project on smart services Big Data analytics is used for innovative repair and maintenance services, optimization, resource-efficiency and added-value services for hybrid products based on the concept of semantic product memories. We discuss the role of real-time analytics of Big Data using the in-memory computing platforms HANA and TERRACOTTA by the German companies SAP AG and SOFTWARE AG. We show that information extraction methods for getting structured information from unstructured multimodal documents are key components of a platform providing Big Data as a Service. Finally, we will illustrate the innovation potential by recent service innovations of various German companies like DHL. The talk will focus on technological enablers for Big Data applications in smart grids, advanced manufacturing, intelligent retail, and precision farming.

High-performance network infrastructures have been crucial for high-performance cloud computing and big data challenges. Japanese academic backbone network, SINET, is directly connected to a lot of data centers and aims to provide more flexible and higher performance cloud computing services along with advanced multi-layer network services. This talk provides an overview and future direction of SINET.

Maria Martinez heads the teams that are actively engaged with salesforce.com's customers, focused on the company's critically important value of customer success. Martinez's teams are responsible for on-boarding, product usage, best practices, training, customer support, professional services, partner certification, and developing long-term relationships withsalesforce.comcustomers.
Martinez has more than 30 years of experience in business and technology leadership roles. Prior to joining salesforce.com, Martinez managed Microsoft's global services business, including professional services and customer support for all products. In her six-year tenure, Martinez led the business to outperform revenue targets and to significantly increase Microsoft's customer satisfaction rating.
Prior to Microsoft, Martinez was president and CEO of Embrace Networks. She has also held senior leadership roles at Motorola and AT&T.
Martinez has a Master's degree in computer engineering from Ohio State University and a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico.

クラウドコンピューティングはバズワードを越えて、普及が進んでいます。しかし、クラウドコンピューティングの内側はあまり知られていません。クラウドコンピューティングは世界各所に設置された多数のコンピュータから構成された巨大な分散システムとなっており、従来の情報システムとは違う発想、違う技術となっています。本講演では、クラウドコンピューティングを支える分散システム技術について、一般向けに解説するとともに、最新のクラウドコンピューティングで利用される最新技術動向を紹介していきます。

Today we often faced with a problem which leads to combinatorial explosion, such as electric/communication/traffic network control, large-scale system diagnosis, and gene data analysis. This talk presents recent research results on "discrete structure manipulation systems" for tackling such hard problems.

We can obtain many interesting aspects only by watching televinsion, e.g., what's going on in Japan and world, what is the current trends, how is economic activities, and so on. This talk will introduce couple of trials to automatically analyze such information by computers.

For: Faculties of college-related institutions, IT vendors operating academic information infrastructure
The move toward controlling academic information on cloud systems has been active since the major earthquake in 2011. This session reports on the latest trends in cloud services offered via SINET and the Academic Access Management Federation (GakuNin).

For: Library staff at college-related institutions
How do we manage electronic journals, books and other resources and offer them to users in the form of a service? This is an issue all university libraries face today. Among the various ways in which NII has long been involved in this issue, this session will offer a talk on the Electronic Resource Database (ERDB) project that NII began last year and on its application to CiNii. The session will offer a lecture as well as a demonstration of the system and time for panel discussions.

We will begin by explaining what the least squares problem is. Then, we will touch on its discovery by the great mathematician Gauss. Then, we will introduce its modern applications, such as obtaining clear images of stars in astronomy, and reconstructing images in electron microscopes in cell biology. Finally, we will explain our new algorithm based on inner-iteration preconditioning.

Graph data structures can be obtained by adding upward connections to the organizational charts. Graphs are used as plans (models) for systematic development of computer programs. Models are conveniently used, for example, to automatically generate computer programs. This presentation introduces the mechanism to bidirectionalize the data flow through the transformation, attempts towards new applications including synthetic biology and process verification, as well as issues for such applications.

I will introduce our research project (design interface project) aiming at the development of various design tools for end-users. We live in a mass-production society today and everyone buy and use same things all over the world. This is cheap, but not necessarily ideal for individual persons. We envision that computer tools that help people to design things by themselves can enrich their lives. To that end, we develop innovative interaction techniques for end users to (1) create rich graphics such as three-dimensional models and animations by simple sketching (2) design their own real-world, everyday objects such as clothing and furniture with realtime physical simulation integrated in a simple geometry editor, and (3) design the behavior of their personal robots and give instructions to them to satisfy their particular needs.

This project has an interdisciplinary research framework involving scholars in linguistics, cognitive science, information science, sociology, and robotics. In this keynote speech, we introduce methodologies for interaction studies and conversation analysis, which are essential to our project.
(*) Ido-bata kaigi (congregate at the side of a well) is a Japanese concept that reflects how Japanese women living in a village used to chat, circulate gossip, and exchange community information as they gathered beside a well and washed clothes and pumped water from the well. Now, the phrase refers to spontaneous congregations that serve as hubs for the communicative, intellectual, and political life of Japanese people.

The Hikari & Tsubasa's information 3 choice question series is an FLASH made interactive educational material to learn the precise knowledge about information security. In this material, 4 university student characters talk each other to find an correct answer. There are 2 materials released by now. "The Information Security 3 choice Class" helps you learn the university's security policy. In "the Information Survival 3 choice Class", you can experience the IT volunteer work where you can hardly find an exact answer. With this material you can learn how to become resilient under the situation of huge disaster.　

Required time resource to solve computationally difficult problems such as NP complete problems grows exponentially according to the problem size. We recently proposed new computational scheme which is a "coherent computer" for solving NP complete Ising models using laser network. In a presentation, we show some basic properties of a coherent computer by the comparison with a quantum computer and a recent research progress of coherent computer.

Autostereoscopy or glasses-free 3D is the method of displaying 3D images without using any viewing gears. Autostereoscopy is often realized by associating an optical element such as parallax barrier or micro-lens array with a flat panel display. In this presentation, a different approach to autostereoscopy is introduced. In a multilayer display, multiple liquid crystal panels are stacked on top of a light source. These panels are tailored so that a stereoscopic view of a 3D scene is always observable from the display. After a brief explanation on the role of computers in a multilayer display, we will present a handy method to enjoy 3D images at home.