Although, by predicting the number of people infected with COVID-19, the use of social simulations in government policies has been the focus of attention of late, there are many problems related to attempting to reflect complex social conditions such as the economic impact of infection control in social simulations. In that situation, conflicting factors and the fact that people do not always take rational actions have to be taken into account. On the other hand, people’s activities have been accumulated as data in cyber space through their use of smartphones and computers, and various behavioral characteristics, interests and preferences of individuals and communities are included in the information on location and movements, messages on social media, search words, information entered when using apps and online games, and information on people’s movements. Therefore, if behavioral characteristics and preferences can be derived through an analysis of such people’s activity data and included in social simulations, it should be possible to understand and visualize complex social situations and mechanisms, and innovate processes that are more effective and socially acceptable to carry out more complex policy scenarios and business strategies. This can be expected to lead to a transformation to a better society for people.
In order to draw out the behavioral characteristics and preferences of human and society from the data, analysis and verification based on the methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, which mainly target human and society, are indispensable. In addition, cooperation between the humanities / social sciences and the natural sciences is required for modeling / quantifying the characteristics of human and society and introducing them into social simulations. Furthermore, in order to make policy scenarios and business strategies effective and highly socially acceptable, it is important to incorporate the findings of the humanities and social sciences, such as a consideration of the differences in the impacts of measures and messages for each attribute, into social simulations and the social implementation process of the policy scenarios and business strategies. The fundamental technologies to analyze human and society by fusing the findings of the humanities and social sciences with the technology of the natural sciences are important as a core technologies for the realization of Society 5.0, which aims to achieve both economic development and the resolution of social issues through a highly integrated system of cyber space and physical space, and moreover will lead to the crisis management skills that Japan should have, such as damage estimates during disasters such as earthquakes and heavy rain and the derivation of evacuation scenarios as well as analysis of infection control and economic loss during pandemics. In addition, even in usual, it can be used for effective guidance for the flow of people when congestion occurs at the time, for example, of a crowded event taking place. Furthermore, it can be expected to lead to developing mutual understanding, efficient and effective social design, highly socially acceptable policymaking, and consensus building for social issues such as disparities. In addition, it is thought that further understanding of the structure and mechanism of complex societies will lead to a deeper knowledge of the humanities and social sciences in research geared towards creating the fundamental technologies to analyze human and society.
By fusing the humanities / social sciences and the natural sciences, this strategic objective aims to understand human and society from various multi-scale (individual, community and society) data of human and society, to create fundamental technologies for simulations of policy scenarios based on the understanding, and to lead to Society 5.0 that promote behavioral changes by using the technologies.
Strategic Planning, Research and Development Division