1.Introduction

As the 21st century is about to advance to the 2010s, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), which boasts 92 years of history this year, is confronting a great turning point. While I feel it a great honor to be elected its 86th President at this juncture, I am acutely aware of the heavy responsibility that accompanies this. Today I would like to share with you what I think about daily concerning the future of the IEICE, in the hope that this will help me cooperate closely with other members for the further development of the institute.

2. 40th anniversary of the information society In 1969, forty years ago, or five years after the Tokyo Olympics, virtually every household in Japan had an assortment of home appliances, including a color television, and the number of people driving their own cars was steadily increasing. In fact, in that year, as I graduated from university and began to work, I bought a car to realize a dream I had had as a student, and could not wait to drive it on weekends. A quarter of a century after World Ward II, there seemed to be a culmination of the advanced industrial society as advanced countries in America and Europe, and, to a lesser degree, Japan, which was still trying to catch up with them, rolled out industrial products at prices affordable to the general public. In the following year, EXPO70 was held in Osaka, a spectacular event designed to demonstrate how bright the future of the advanced industrial society would be. In 1969, two persons appeared who foresaw the arrival of new society succeeding the advanced industrial society. Alan Touraine(1), a Frenchman, called it the �gpost-industrial society�h. Yujiro Hayashi(2), a Japanese, expounded what the next society would be like and named it the �ginformation society�h. In those days, mainframe computing was predominant, and of course, no PCs or mini-computers existed. In that year, Japan marked the beginning of the move to a digital telephone network with the introduction of a 1.5-Mbit/s PCM transmission system. This year also witnessed two crucial events related to technologies that underlie the information society.
The first experiment of packet transfer on ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, was conducted between computers in UCLA and Stanford Research Institute (SRI). A well-known anecdote says that they wanted to transfer packets for the five characters �gLOGIN�h but packet transfer was disrupted after �gL-O�h were sent successfully(3). Secondly, on July 20 of that year, the video of the scene of Apollo 11 touching down on the Moon was transmitted from outer space to the earth and broadcast live to televisions at home. It was about noon in Japan. I clearly remember how I, though a new recruit, forgot about work and gazed intently at the television as Astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous first words upon touchdown on the moon. These events symbolized the genesis of the information communication technologies (ICT) that underlie today�fs information society, such as the Internet, wireless broadband transmission, and the broadcasting of live video from outer space. All told, 1969 was Year One of the era of the information society. So, 2009 celebrates the 40th anniversary of this era. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the rapid progress ICT made, and the tremendous impact it exerted on modern society thereafter, underlines the unmistakable advance towards the fulfillment of the information society. The IEICE has made an enormous contribution to the progress of the information society over these 40 years. The 2010s will be a decade when we move to an advanced information society and signs of the next era emerge. I believe that we ought to revisit the role of the IEICE if we are to contribute to society in the 2010s as much as or more than we have done over the past 40 years.