Report of the meeting of the International Advisory Board of NII
October 29, 2007
The International Advisory Board met on October 29, 2007 at the NII in Tokyo. At the
end of the meeting, the IAB presented some observations and recommendations.
This report is an elaboration of that presentation and has been approved by all
members of the Board.
1. Progress with respect to previous meeting
Two members of the IAB (prof. Zadeh and prof. Van Oortmerssen) were also present
during the meeting in June 2005. They observed that significant progress has been
made during the past two years and complimented the institute and the general
director. More specifically the following remarks are made with regard to the three
recommendations made in 2005:
- Sharpen the profile and strategy of the institute. Good progress has been made, butthe IAB encourages the management of NII to further clarify the strategy andpositioning of the institute.
- NII is encouraged to explore means to attract top students and post docs fromabroad. Clearly good progress has been made on this topic. There is a specialprogramme with 40 visiting students per year. The Advisory Board recommendsincreasing the number further.
- Increase co-operation with industry and not-for-profit organisations. Some progresswas made in this field, but the IAB did not fully understand the strategy with respectto co-operation with industry and apparently there are fiscal barriers which hinderfinancial participation of industry in research projects of NII. Nevertheless, the IAB
encourages NII to strive for more interaction with industry and other organisations in
society. This will serve as a source of inspiration for new research topics, give
valuable feed-back to researchers during a project, and create value in society. In
this respect, it is suggested to also look for co-operation outside the ICT industry, for
instance with the car industry, on intelligent cars and intelligent traffic systems.
2. General observations
The IAB was much impressed by the great enthusiasm and ability of individual
researchers.
Some high profile projects are clearly emerging, such as for example the Quantum
Computing project, which could be world-beating eventually. Another positive
development is the incubator where new projects are started. These are
developments towards more mature portfolio management as was recommended by
the previous Advisory Board in 2005.
Progress and drive can be observed in many small groups. The IAB got the
impression, however, that all projects take place in small groups. The culture within
NII does not seem to stimulate co-operation in larger teams, while this could really
contribute to breakthroughs in spearhead projects.
The Board was very much impressed by SINET3, the ambitious project for the New
Japanese Academic Backbone Network.
3. Strategic positioning
As mentioned before, the Board should like to encourage the management of NII to
further sharpen the strategy of the institute. What are the strategic goals, and what is
the added value of NII to the Japanese innovation system in general and the
university systems more in particular? A clear answer is considered very important
for the long term future of NII. Among the issues to be addressed are:
- is NII aiming at being primarily a national center of excellence or does it have
international ambitions (the board conjectured the latter, but encourages NII to be
explicit about this).
- the dual mission of NII: being both a center of excellence in ICT research as well as
a "service institute" for supporting the national research with an e-science
infrastructure, involving both hardware (backbone network) as well as content. The
dual mission clearly provides opportunities for synergy, but at the same time could
lead to ambiguity and conflicts between research- and operational requirements.
NII could have an agenda setting role, in defining the national priorities and focus of
long term ICT research in Japan.
The Board recommends to define strategic goals as SMART (Specific, Measurable,
Attainable, Realistic and Relevant, and Time-based) as possible and to implement a
mechanism for monitoring the impact of research projects. Examples of criteria that
could serve to measure impact include
- number of internationally refereed papers
- number of patents
- number of spin-off companies
- number of international projects
- number of visiting researchers and visiting professors (from abroad)
- number of projects with industry
- use of research results by the general public
- percentage of competitive or external funding
4. Research management
The Board complements the Managing Director with respect to his role in leading the
research of the institute. The Board was impressed in particular by his knowledge of
all the projects. The review interviews that he and the Deputy Director have with all
research leaders on a regular basis are a valuable instrument and can be
instrumental in scouting potential synergy between projects and stimulating cooperation.
The Board suggests contemplating other complementary mechanisms or
incentives to achieve co-operation. ICT research is more and more driven by
demands from a variety of application fields, and such research very often requires a
multidisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinarity cannot be achieved without co-operation
of several researchers within larger groups.
The board got the impression that in choosing what research to do, NII leaves a
great deal of freedom to individual researchers in choosing their research topics. If
this is the intent, then this makes recruitment the crucial mechanism in research
management: great emphasis is then placed on selection of expertise that fits the
strategic research goals, as well as on recruitment of top-class researchers.
The Board congratulates the institute with the increasing success in attracting
competitive funding. This is a positive development, since the competitive element
stimulates research quality while growing income also enhances the volume of
research and therefore the Board encourages NII to strive for further increase of this
type of funding.
With regard to the positioning of individual research projects, the Board saw that for
some projects a clear competitive analysis was made. The board recommends a
more systematic approach to this aspect: achieving world class requires knowledge
of the competition in other parts of the world.
In addition, the Board would like to encourage further increase in international
collaboration as a way to achieve international status. In this respect other models for
external engagement and international visitors could be considered.
The Board recognises that NII has many different demands, inherent to the unique
dual mission NII has: a combination of research and operational support. The unique
potential synergy which can stimulate new breakthroughs in e-science is recognised
by the board. Nevertheless the Board recommends separating the management and
evaluation of the two activities as clearly as possible.
5. Research programme
With respect to the overall research programme, the Board recommends to make a
strategic research plan which provides a coherent programme that relates all
projects.
A selection of research projects was presented to the board. This leads to some
general observations which are mentioned in section 2. With respect to a quality
judgment of individual projects the Board suggests that the evalutation of the
individual projects be carried out by (external) domain experts.
The Board was much impressed by the Quantum Computing project. This is a verychallenging topic and the research that is carried out is of excellent quality.BioCaster is a great project with challenging research questions (multi-lingual textmining) as well as social relevance. The Global Health Monitor holds the promise ofsignificant impact, but the path towards reaching such impact was not clear to theBoard. I-explosion is addressing a huge emerging problem: that of handling immensequantities of information. The amount of information on the World Wide Web isgrowing exponentially, and this growth will further be enhanced by the intelligentsensor networks that are now being added to the internetwork infrastructure. It is a
difficult task to extract useful information from an overload of data. It is recommended
to investigate more practical cases, such as ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems),
where a lot of data will be created in the near future.
This recommendation can be extended to the more general case: introducing
practical applications as examples and test cases in research projects can help to
decrease the gap that exists between the academic research and society. Other
examples of such applications besides ITS are ICT for the ageing society, public
healthcare, education.
The Cyber Science Infrastructure is a valuable idea. The establishment of a commonplatform for many sciences and engineering disciplines, including knowledge,literature, computational methods etc. can be a significant contribution to intellectualprogress. At this stage, concrete breakthroughs thanks to such e-science
infrastructure are not yet obvious. Success stories are needed to really underline the
need for this kind of research. NetCommons is a very nice project with clear social contribution and the impressivenumber of users of the platform is evidence of high impact. Also, the user experienceis used by the researchers to improve the platform. Such feedback loops areimportant and should be built in all projects aiming at public good. The research
challenges involved in this project were, however, not quite clear to the Board.
6. Possibilities for new research topics and technical focus
The board should like to suggest the following research topics for consideration.
Fundamental principles in informatics. Examples are:
- decision making based on incomplete or uncertain data;
- a framework for data fusion; quite a few approaches exist such as data mining,
Kalman filtering, pattern recognition etc., but a framework suitable for general
applications is still to be developed.
Performance analysis and application to complex systems.
7. Suggestions for the format of future Advisory Board meetings
The meeting also produced many suggestions on the format of future Advisory Board meetings.
Members of the International Advisory Board
Prof. Michel Cosnard
Prof. Takeo Kanade
Dr. Michael A. Keller
Prof. Gerard van Oortmerssen
Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster
Prof. Bob Williamson
Prof. Lofti A. Zadeh
Prof. Yi Zhang
