Message from IPSJ President

 

 

I am honored to have been appointed as the 33rd President of IPSJ, succeeding former President Morimoto. I will do my utmost to meet the expectations of all members of IPSJ. Until now, I have served as Chair of the Computer Science Area, Chair of the Steering Committee of SIGs, Director, Chair of the Information Processing Education Committee, and Vice President. While I believe I have a fair grasp of IPSJ’s activities, there are still divisions I am unfamiliar with, such as those related to events and branches. I humbly ask for the guidance and support of Vice Presidents, Directors of the respective divisions, and the Administrative Office.

 

When categorizing the activities an academic society should promote — not from an organizational standpoint but from the perspective of expectations from the society — they could broadly be divided into research, education, industry, and international affairs. At the university where I have long worked, the order is typically education followed by research. However, in the context of an academic society, the order tends to be research first and then education.

Regarding research, IPSJ’s main divisions are the SIGs (their Steering Committee and the three Areas) and the Journal. IPSJ’s major conferences, the National Convention and FIT, also play key roles in research, though I believe they are increasingly incorporating educational aspects — like student sessions and informatics research contests for high school students. A similar trend is observable in the Magazine as well.

As for education, the central division is the Information Processing Education Committee. Having served as its Chair for four years, I can attest that it covers a broad spectrum — from informatics education for young children through high school students, to university entrance exams, common education in universities, professional education in universities and graduate schools, as well as lifelong learning, technical education, and certification systems. During the 60th Anniversary Declaration of our Society, I proposed the subtitle “More local and more diverse for global values.” Through this process, I came to firmly recognize that addressing local issues and acting for local benefit are essential duties of local academic societies. Although education has international aspects, many of its challenges are inherently local.

While industry is driven by corporations, what is expected of an academic society includes: providing access to cutting-edge knowledge and technologies required by industry (as promoted by the Technology Application Committee); offering opportunities for research exchange including with corporate researchers and engineers; and supporting career development for human resources that industry needs. Additional areas include supporting startups and fostering entrepreneurs.

The category “international” is distinctive of local academic societies. Global societies are inherently international, so they do not need to deliberately pursue internationalization. In the direction of internationalization, initiatives such as international awards co-sponsored with ACM and IEEE have helped young researchers expand globally. In the other direction, especially from the standpoint of a local academic society, it is equally critical to consider how we can maximize Japan’s benefits amid global trends. IPSJ’s standardization division (the Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan) exemplifies this, contributing to international standardization while safeguarding Japan’s interests. Moreover, cybersecurity and its extension into cyber defense is an area IPSJ must seriously engage in as a representative organization of Japan’s information technology sector.
 

Throughout my involvement with IPSJ, numerous issues have constantly surrounded us. For example, challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic were primarily addressed under the leadership of Vice President Okabe at that time before I became Vice President. Another longstanding issue is the decline in membership numbers — particularly among regular members.

We now face several broader challenges affecting all activities of IPSJ. Among these, I believe the three most urgent and critical issues today are: fostering the next generation, diversity, and artificial intelligence. These issues cut across all activity categories I mentioned earlier. If we visualize this relationship as a two-dimensional matrix or table with activity categories and issues as rows and columns, it would look like the following:
 

I have not yet filled in the details of this matrix. However, I am convinced that considering the problems at each intersection of a row and a column and the paths to address them will shape the future of information processing. During my two-year term, I hope to explore these ideas together with the Board of Directors, the Administrative Office, and all members of IPSJ. Allow me to briefly share some of my current thoughts in the following.

While fostering the next generation may seem primarily an educational activity, growing successors is essential in all kinds of activities. Even in education, developing educators themselves is a major challenge. To address this, the Information Processing Education Committee established the Informatics Teacher Training Subcommittee, which primarily focuses on training high school teachers of informatics.

Diversity, although politically challenged in recent years (especially under the Trump administration in the U.S.), is a key to unlocking future possibilities in Japan, where declining birth rates are accelerating. Regarding the advancement of women, IPSJ’s Board of Directors is in an ideal state. We initially prioritized female candidates through policy, but today, strong female candidates are independently emerging without such policies. We also hear that the percentage of female junior members is quite high. However, this proportion declines as one progresses to student and regular membership. This suggests that increasing the proportion of women among student and regular members can also contribute to overall membership growth. Another aspect of diversity includes international students and foreign researchers/professors. At many Japanese universities, especially graduate schools, international students play a central role in research labs. How can we enable them to play more active roles in IPSJ? At the same time, we must revisit the question: What is Japan? In other words, what constitutes “locality” in a local academic society? Is it the nationality of Japan? The geographical region? Japanese people? The Japanese language? Japanese culture? Personally, I believe that a clear answer to this question is possible.

When former Director Onodera, who led long-term strategic planning, stepped down, he identified Japan’s declining birthrate as a major challenge for IPSJ. At that time, I was skeptical — but in hindsight, I now realize how right he was. I believe that addressing the above two issues — fostering the next generation and diversity — can, albeit indirectly, contribute to resolving the declining birthrate problem as well.

Artificial intelligence is an even more pressing issue than the other two, and it is by no means limited to research activities. In education, the challenge is not only how to teach AI but also how to leverage AI throughout the educational system. The same goes for its application in industry. Moreover, the rise of AI — especially neural network-based approaches — has the potential to dramatically reshape the entire field of information processing. I must admit that I have previously underestimated its importance. While the field of information processing has undergone numerous paradigm shifts in the past, AI may be ushering in multiple paradigm shifts simultaneously. For example, the automatic differentiation techniques that gained attention in neural network-based machine learning are being generalized into a new programming paradigm known as differentiable programming.
 

 

 

Apr. 18, 2025