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Home > Policy > White Paper, Notice, Announcement > White Paper > JAPANESE GOVERNMENT POLICIES IN EDUCATION,SCIENCE AND CULTURE1991 > Part1 Chapter3 2 3

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Part 1 Promotion of Scientific Research
Chapter 3. Trends of Scientific Research in Japan
2 Trends of Scientific Research in Specific Fields
3 Information Science


It has been about half a century since the electronic computer was invented in1945. During this period, scientific research in information processing has made remarkable progress. It is now forming a scientific discipline independent of information theory which was based on information quantity.

The direct motivation of inventing the computer was to perform numerical calculations at high speed. However, through its immediate applications to business purposes, the concept of general purpose computers has been established. Almost all techniques for general purpose computers had come about by the end of the 1960's. After 1970, these techniques were practiced in commercial computers and general purpose computers have been fully matured. In this advanced period, the performance of general purpose computers was greatly improved with the progress of semiconductors and integration techniques. However, demands for faster calculations were still strong, and the super computer based on the pipe-line processing concept was developed in 1975.

On the other hand, microprocessors which were the outcome of the progress of component integration technique and first introduced in 1971, caused a big change in the development trend of computers after the l980's. The large general purpose computer for joint use has been superseded by personal computers and work stations oriented to individual use and computer networks connecting them have prevailed since the late 19S0's. These networks, making new applications such as electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards, etc. possible, resulted in "distributed processing" where special server machines provide services such as numerical calculation, file management, etc. upon the requests from individual client work stations. Such distributed processing is one of the notable trends in the recent information processing technology.

The research of super-parallel processing systems using a great number of microprocessors originated in the l98O's. They are now almost ready for practical use due to the price drop of microprocessors. Furthermore, as the computer has come to play central roles, scientific research which relies heavily on computers has become more active. Since around 1980, nonstop fault-tolerant computers have been marketed in the area of the on-line transaction processing. Looking at these trends. we can say that the l98O's was just the beginning of a new age of structural or organizational variety of computers.

Research on software engineering has been conducted aggressively since the middle of the 1970's to cope with the so?ca1led "software crisis," aiming at the improvement of software productivity and its quality.

Database machines which manage, i.e., store, edit, retrieve and extract non-numerial information when requested, appeared around 1980. Also basic research on the formal expression of logic and its logical processing has resulted in the development of programming languages which are suitable for logical inference. Experimental trials of performing logical inference by computer began in the middle of the l970's. From the beginning of the 1980's to date the developmental research of inference machines has been vigorously conducted main]y in Japan. Further, expert systems comprising a computer stored and incorporated with knowledge and inference (or judgement) mechanism of human professionals have been implemented in various fields. The construction of the knowledge base for accumulating a large amount of knowledge also began in the middle of the l980's. The studies on the semantic understanding of natural language and machine translation, which may be generally regarded as a kind of inference, became active at the beginning of the 1970's and still continue today. Semantic understanding covers the hierarchical as well as mutual relationship among meanings, and therefore deals with the entire system of concepts. Research on images and sounds is now conducted not only for the simple distinction of members in the object (set but also for their semantic understanding.

As stated above, the recent evolution of information science is featured by research on the processing of knowledge, concept, and logical thinking.

As the use of visual information increases at computer-user interfaces, the research on pattern recognition, image processing, computer graphics, etc. has become very active since the l97O's. In recent years, computer graphics as a way of artistic expression have attracted wide interest.

The evaluation of the rumor of computational works as the basis of information processing became a subject of basic research, and has now grown to the so-called computational complexity. Also, the fuzzy theory and the neural network which appeared as new approaches to information processing are expected to progress in the future. The fuzzy theory was proposed from the observation that human thinking cannot always distinguish true from false. Neural networks were modeled after neutron circuit in human beings. The research concerned with the learning capability of neural networks and their applicability to optimization problems evolved early in the 198O's.

In the above-stated progress of information science, the top-level research conducted at Japanese universities is of high quality. Some Japanese studies, in fact, compare well with the world's best in the field.

For the future development of research in this field, further promotion and enrichment of basic research is most important. Problems to be challenged will include: new architecture and structure of systems, microprocessors and networks; novel operating systems free from the existing methodology; techniques for evaluating hardware and software; new programming languages and programming methodologies; new approaches to information processing such as concept processing, knowledge base processing and neural networks; interfaces by using multi-media; the reliability and security of computer systems; biological information processing; issues related to human and social systems, and so forth.


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