Essay

Paradigm shift from two to four dimensional
space in ICT evolution

Useful Remarks

Technical Committee successfully held at ‘Yakushima’ island with the world level natural heritages in Japan

Technical Committee on Non-linear Problems is one of Technical Committees in Non-linear Problem and its Applications Sub-society under IEICE Engineering and Sciences Society. It is managed by Chair, Prof. Kiyotaka Yamamura / Chuo University, two Secretaries, Prof. Yoshihiko Horio / Tokyo Denki University and Prof. Isao Tokuda / Japan Advance Institute of Science and Technology. It provides monthly workshops for the members to mutually exchange opinions and encourage their relevant research activities. This committee has a long history of research activities and it is one of the representative Committees, while its management has been taken over by younger generation members so far. Thus, they　organized a workshop from 11-th to 14-th　in November 2009, at Yakushima island which has been well-known through a lot of world level natural heritages.
Most of the monthly Technical Committee meetings/workshops/symposiums have been normally held at academic institutions in urban area or local cities in Japan, so far. Therefore, the workshop at the remote island enabled the drastic change of the Committee environment in the long history of the Committee. The author coordinated the planning and management of the workshop as the local conference manager. Many participants over 60 persons joined the workshop and it was successfully held through quite many discussions and communications after each presentation. Though the island is far from any urban area in Japan, it rather promoted the participants to know each other. It was very unique in comparison with the other normal Committees from the following viewpoints:
(1) The number of participants in the special field of non-linear physics was major and above all, they had presentations by many outstanding researchers leading the research activities in the special field but without membership yet. The workshop will encourage them to join the Committee with the membership.

Fig.1　Enjoying the mutual human relations development between Technical Committee participants through recreation

(2) Most of the workshop participants joined an excursion in the island and they could recover their power in the natural heritages. Furthermore, they enjoyed the final social with acquaintance cultivated through the workshop. Many workshop participants replied their satisfaction to the workshop and planned events, to the questionnaires given by the Committee. It is expected to extend the fundamental idea of the workshop to the other workshops/symposiums/conferences.

Hot Topics Language Grid: Multilingual Service Platform for Intercultural Collaboration

Yohei Murakami, Dr. National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

　The Internet allows people to be linked together regardless of location, however language remains the biggest barrier. In fact, it is not possible for anyone to learn the languages needed to access all possible information from the Internet. Though there are many successful language resources (both data and software) on the Internet, difficulties often arise when people try to use those language resources in their own intercultural activities. Intellectual property rights, and non-standard application interfaces make it difficult for users to create customized language services that support their activities.
To address this kind of issues, collective intelligence might be a promising solution like Wikipedia, which deals with how to connect people and computers so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individuals or computers. Applying this approach to the language service domain, we have developed the Language Grid, which would be a multilingual service platform. In the Language Grid, end-users can combine existing language services provided by researchers and professionals, and create new language services for their own purposes by adding their own language services.
The Language Grid is built on the P2P Grid Infrastructure, which connects two kinds of servers (core nodes and service nodes). Core nodes manage all requests to language services, while service nodes actually invoke atomic services. If the requested service is a composite one, core nodes invoke several atomic services according to a corresponding Web service workflow. All the language resources and language services can be managed by using the Language Grid Service Manager.
Different types of collaboration tools have been developed using the language services provided by the Language Grid. We have also provided Language Grid Toolbox, a customizable framework for collection of modules to support multilingual communication in a community. Language Grid Toolbox enables users to start their own services, such as multilingual BBS and multilingual Web page creation. Moreover, since Language Grid Toolbox is provided as an open-source software, users can easily extend it by developing modules by user communities to meet different requirements for intercultural collaboration.
IEICE-TFIPP will employ Language Grid Toolbox to construct Language-Barrier Free Cyberspace (LFCS). In this system, volunteer participants from each section in Asia will multilingualize IEICE announcements by creating multilingual dictionaries specific to IEICE and ICT domain and modifying translation results produced by language services on the Language Grid.

International Conference Calendar in 2010

IEICE Symposium　ー　IEICE “Rejuvenating the ICT industry - How can Industry, Academia, Government and IEICE contribute to it? ” .

At University of Tokyo, Bldg.2-1F-213, on May 8, free of charge, capacity holding 300 seats, http://www.ieice.org/jpn/sympo-ict/index.html
IMQA 2010 - IEICE Engineering Sciences Soc.
The 4th International Workshop on Image Media Quality and its Applications, at Tokyo in Japan, on May 13-14, http://www.imqa.jp/IMQA2010/.
ISOME 2010 - IEICE Electronics Soc.
The 6th International Symposium on Organic Molecular Electronics, at Chiba in Japan, on Jun. 10-11, http://www.ieice.org/~ome/ISOME/Welcome.html/.
APSITT 2010 - IEICE Communications Soc.
The 8th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Information and Telecommunication Technologies, at Kuching in Malaysia, on Jun. 15-18, http://www.ieice.org/cs/in/APSITT/2010/.
OECC 2010 - IEICE Communications Soc. & Electronics Soc.
The 15th OptoElectronics and Communications Conference, at Sapporo in Japan, on Jul. 5-9, http://www.oecc2010.org/.
NOLTA 2010 - IEICE Engineering Sciences Soc.
2010 International Symposium on Non-linear Theory and Its Applications, at Krakow in Poland, on Sept. 5-8, http://nolta10.is.tokushima-u.ac.jp/.
SISA 2010 - IEICE Engineering Sciences Soc.
2010 International Workshop on Smart Info-Media Systems in Asia, at Manila in Philippines, on Sept. 8-9,
http://splab.cs.kitami-it.ac.jp/sisa2010/.
GJS2010 - IEICE Communications Soc.
The 13th German Japanese Symposium, at Osaka in Japan, on Sept. 13-14, http://www.ieice.org/cs/conf/calendar.html.
ICCE 2010 - IEICE Electronics Soc.& Communications Soc.
The 3rd International Conference on Communications and Electronics, at Nha Trang in Vietnam, on Sept. 15-17, http://www.hut-icce.org/2010/.
AP-RASC’10 - IEICE
2010 Asia Pacific Radio Science Conference, at Toyama in Japan, on Sep. 22-25, http://www.ap.ide.titech.ac.jp/ap-rasc10/.
IWSEC 2010 - IEICE Engineering Sciences Soc.
2010 International Workshop on Security, at Kobe in Japan, on Nov. 22-24, http://www.iwsec.org/2010/
APARM 2010 - IEICE Engineering Sciences Soc.
The 4th Asia-Pacific International Symposium on Advanced Reliability and Maintenance Modeling, at Wellington in New Zealand, on Dec. 2-4,　
http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Events/APARM2010/.

Message from TFIPP Secretariat

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