sitemapProject †
Overview †
This is a project in collaboration with the FuturICT <http://www.futurict.eu> initiated by European researchers and the EU, which is a multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. Japanese researchers in economics, physics, computer and information science, practitioners in public sectors, and multidisciplines are participating in the project.
- see members for the core team
- see
List of national representatives
(October 5, 2011)
Agenda †
We brief a character of our modern technology: In the previous time, it was normal for the industrial technologies to embody a stable technology of fixed proportion as efficient as possible, and manage it for a longer period, since it took much time to process a basic principle into a conventional engineering. The modern technology, on the contrary, is likely to have much closer links directed to achievements from basic science. Nanotech is a typical one. In other words, it rather takes much more time to generate a new basic principle than a new engineering process. In general, basic science always provides us with a huge number of possibilities. This then accompanies with a result that we are permitted to entertain potentially much higher numbers of combinations of technologies, i.e., much more flexible combinations of production. So detecting a feasible technology for us will be a much more difficult task. This may require a higher standard technique underlying statistical physics/mechanics. It may also apply to ICT: Information and Communication Technology.
Now we refer to the ICT characteristics as an attractive research subject for complex sciences: The ICT has a more fundamental feature for the human activities, because it gets a core engine of our society, particularly on services managements, common to our daily life activities at the terminal consumption as well as the productive activities. Specifically, the ICT can intermediate both activities, and then provide "services" bilaterally. Thus the ways ICT is committing into the societal activities/processes of services must be nonlinear, dynamical, and hierarchical over time, i.e., complex and/or synergetic. Hence the ICT naturally is an attractive research subject of complex sciences.
Next, we argue the ICT achievements to our society: It is trivial that the ICT is decisive in our future in both ways of hard and soft applications. The ICT in the future may be a key factor, which is not only penetrating each process of production at the various different stages of an economic system, but also generating new technologies as a source factor. Taking the ICT, thus, we may scan the future profile of our society with a bird's-eye. In this sense, designing the ICT will serve as a policy measure to assess a social activity.
Now, we have an agenda to monitor the future development of ICT: In the past time, first of all, Japan had a successful history of electronics, computing technologies, and satellite system, which, needless to say, are indispensable for the full development of ICT. Now we shall have as an agenda on the ICT to monitor the future development of the ICT by exploring the socio-/econo-environments surrounding the ICT development, and detecting a useful way to manage the future risks. In order to achieve these tasks, it must obviously be demanding new approaches underlying socio-/econo physics, agent-based modeling, and sociodynamics. Secondly, so far in our country, we have had some intensive studies in these fields by eminent scholars, and paid much effort to apply these analytical methods to our domestic socio-/econo-environments, and also organized international conferences/workshops on these subjects for many times in the past decade. Finally, it is noted that our influential members have already joined into a European research activity in the EU FP 7th Research Framework Programme, in particular, econophysics. In the coming opportunity of EU FP 8th Research Framework Programme, we can find an attractive scheme called "Future ICT", a broader research subject.
The future ICT must give a very complex evolution. We are keen to have an intensive international cooperation with the scholars of "Future ICT".