50th Anniversary and the Beginning of a New Journey
-- Greetings from the President --

Norio Shiratori (Tohoku Univ. / IPSJ President)

It is a great pleasure to be appointed as the 25th president of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), as a successor of former President Sasaki.

The IPSJ has contributed and played a vital role among domestic and international communities as the largest academic society on INFORMATION in Japan. Thanks to the great effort of all the members since the establishment of IPSJ in 1960.

The IPSJ will mark its 50th anniversary in 2010 - a momentous point during my term. I wish to express my gratitude to all of you, the board members, including former President Anzai and Sasaki and many fervent members, for planning and arrangement of events commemorating the 50th anniversary.

In 1946, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was invented just after the end of the war. I was born around that time. Now, as I am serving as the president of the IPSJ at the time of its auspicious 50th anniversary, I feel it as an interesting coincidence of my relationship with computers.

It is my first mission, as the president, to carry out the events commemorating the 50th anniversary with great success, by carefully picking and composing the success stories. My next task is to find a new direction which would be the foundation of IPSJ for the coming 50 years.

We are earnestly making all the necessary arrangements for the golden jubilee celebration of IPSJ. Let me express my view about future direction of IPSJ. I believe that IPSJ could play a leading role in revitalizing our Society where each member and office staff of IPSJ would combine and at the same time find new opportunities in this age of Internet.

Learn from Society for the Future

In 1994, I served as the technical editor of the IPSJ research group for Multimedia Communication and Distributed Processing, which held a symposium on Multimedia Communication and High-speed Intelligent Distributed Coordination Computing. Our aim was to forecast state-of-the-art of year 2010. The next year is 2010 and I am the president of this organization - that is a nice a coincidence.

We talked passionately about orientation, dream, and proposal for 2010 with the young and experienced researchers in related fields and leading personalities in both industries and universities. There is a vast difference between the expectation and in the process of realizing or actually obtaining results. The 1994 symposium was one of the precious milestones for the progress in the related fields.
It was a great experience for me to meet a lot of people through social activities. I learnt through friendly competition and was trained through social activities. In this way, IPSJ facilitates valuable opportunities for human resources development, both academia and industry.

As we approach the crucial 50th anniversary, I look toward the first half of next 50 years with my more than past twenty years experience through close interactions with the society. Enormous social changes happened after the fall of Berlin wall in November 1989. Soviet type socialism failed. And the recent economic turmoil, whose root is in the USA, proved failure of neoliberalism. A new social model is required. We have been questioned, how we deal with the limitations of the globalization based on the efficiency-oriented policy of the American style, the influence exerted by the Information Technology (IT), and the problems of facing an aging society with a falling birthrate as happening in Japan and many other advanced countries.

The Proposal for the New Beginning

Because, the time has now come to start for the next 50 years of IPSJ, I think learning from past of the society is very important to be fresh and vibrant and at the same time be successful.

There are the basic learning points including (1) keeping humanity in perspective, which we had lost by enjoying the convenience of services provided by computers and the Internet; (2) accepting diversity in individual values in addition to efficiency-oriented rationality; (3) demanding the symbiosis by harmonizing human with artifact(information systems) and natural environment.

I think that the keywords which present the direction of IPSJ in the future are expressed by humanity, diversity, and symbiosis as mentioned above. While pursuing a dream about the way the future society should evolve, in coming 25 years or 50 years from now, one should not ignore any of the above three issues.

Road Map for Progress Toward Next 50 Years

The business community and academic society form the infrastructure of IPSJ. The human resource development is common both to business community and academic society. University's mission is to contribute to the society in education and research. On the other hand, company’s mission is contributing to the industrial society. After all, the fundamental mission is human resource development, that is human itself. To realize an energetic and spiritually rich society, the core point is the human appearing in all twists and turns.

An important future role of IPSJ should be activities related to human resource development by facilitating and providing an attractive working field for the members and extending it to the whole society in general. Specifically, emphasize should be on cooperation, collaboration, and intercommunication between industry and university through publication of magazines, journals, as well as arranging workshops, symposiums, standard committees etc. Additionally, these would lead the IPSJ to establish a qualification system and required training session, a recognition system for engineers and academics. Moreover, IPSJ should extend and helping hand to support information education in the junior high schools and high schools. In November 2006, the IPSJ expressed concern about inadequacies of high school IT curriculum. IPSJ is continuing to pursue that goal, so that schools can give more emphasize on this subject in the new school curriculum to be effective from 2013.

Humanity, diversity, and symbiosis - we believe these three core considerations would develop IPSJ for the coming 25 or 50 years from now as shown in Figure 1.

One of the recent issues, about which we as members of IPSJ hold some responsibility, is that children and senior citizens are not interested in science and technology. In particular, it is important to create activities easy to participate, useful and attractive to the seniors citizens and to set a vision for the junior high-school and high-school students.　Projects promoting older people's participation in community activities are a major issue not only for Japan but also for many developed nations as they face an aging society in long or medium terms.

The other important issue is how to emphasize local issues in global perspective. It is possible to become truly global by taking great care of local issues. In short, the slogan is “think globally and act locally”.

In particular, it is important to enhance collaboration and cooperation with neighboring countries in Asia and then to develop the transatlantic relationship based on it. These will allow innovation of novel technology from Asia, promotion of standardization activities, and expand IPSJ membership. I would also like to suggest, to reconsider sharing of duties and responsibilities between main society and local chapters. Moreover, our society needs to support renewal and development of the traditional regional culture as part of local chapter’s activity. As for the connection of the society with citizens, a local chapter in the vicinity of senior or junior high school, should involve students to play the central role. I look forward to this kind of community-based globalization.

The third perspective is diversity, cooperation, and fusion of values of diverse individuals. To this end, we need to emphasize the role of magazines, journals, workshops, research groups, information technology standards commissions, national conventions, symposiums.

Because these relate to the above relationship with the citizens, it is important to lower the entry level for business community and common citizens. To enrich the special issues and encourage dissemination of information from Japan through IPSJ journals, we need to think about editorial policy and include serious reports regarding evaluation of universities, international journals. I think that a great synergy is expected by deeper mutual cooperation among magazines, journals, and workshops and introducing the cooperative projects etc. Regarding cooperation, we can consider symposium like DICOMO by multi-study group, the national convention, FIT, and the local conventions in addition to each individual committee.

I strongly hope that we can act as a leader for cooperation and fusion in different fields, pioneering new fields and domains. We are hopeful that the information technology standards commission to evolve in cooperation with IETF. The role of the director and the auditor is important for steady evolution of new IPSJ as dreamt above.

Change in the General Aggregate Corporation

New three laws concerning the public corporations were administered by implementing institutional reforms in last December. Because an academic society will be able to act flexibly, practically unrestricted due to this reform, it is hoped that the society will provide various services which responds to the social needs and will make a huge contribution to build a secure and safe society.

IPSJ decided to become `The General Aggregate Corporation’ along with this reform, at the Special General Incorporated Association meeting on December 22, last year. We are currently undergoing a smooth transition.

I would like to make an effort to establish a stable infrastructure including a steady financial foundation with all of IPSJ memberships under the new administration for the next 50th anniversary. I would like to ask for the support and assistance of all the concerned persons as we move forward.