Laboratory Strategies
Our Privilege: Working on Research that Looks Ahead to Future Business
Shigeru Katagiri
Director of NTT Communication Science Laboratories
The dramatic progress of telecommunications technology has successfully overcome the barrier of distance in human communication. It enables people tospeak easily with anybody, anywhere, and anytime,
resulting in the globalization of human society andunforeseen benefits in industry and our daily lives.
Many barriers still remain. One is the capacity barrier, which means the inability to handle the flood ofdata created by new services. Another is the medium
barrier, which means the limits imposed by therestricted number of communication media. For
example, there is a risk that a telecommunication
channel that uses only speech (for telephony) and text
(for e-mail) could fail to reproduce the original richcontent of human communication that utilizes all of
our senses and sometimes the ambience of the communication site. Unless we can move beyond the few
media currently available, we will be stuck with asuboptimal human communication environment.
Now is the time to start a telecommunication renaissance in which the starting point of technologicaldevelopment is reset to reflect the original characteristics of human communication.
Based on the above viewpoints, we are pursuing
scientific research on the nature of human communication and technological developments that apply its
findings to the creation of a more desirable communication world. Our cognitive neuroscience researchteam has extensively studied the mechanisms ofhuman vision and auditory sensation, producing
many important discoveries such as a calibration
mechanism that yields audio-visual simultaneity. In
the area of artificial intelligence research, we havesuccessfully developed many powerful media processing methods, such as a fast fingerprinting technology called the binary area matching method.
Looking carefully at the next decade, we are pursuing
software development for quantum computers. Furthermore, we are developing a next-generation
telecommunication system that creates a virtual roomin which people who are actually separated can feelin a completely natural way as if they are sitting sideby-side and working together. The approaches andgoals of these individual research projects are different. However, all of them are carefully designed andimplemented so that we can effectively contribute toNTT’s business and eventually to the development ofa rich-communication society.
In general, the path from research to commercialization is not short. However, we believe that we cangreatly reduce the distance by advancing with carefully oriented research strategies and a strong will tocontribute to society. We think that our customers are
as varied as their requirements. Customers of the cognitive neuroscience research team will probably bepeer researchers. Customers of the technology development research team will be researchers of our sister laboratories as well as business creators in NTT
operating companies. Through the multi-layered network of our customers, our technologies will besmoothly transferred to the final customers throughout the world.
It is our privilege to work in a corporate laboratory
with its unique commercialization paths. Looking
ahead to future business, we will do our best to create
innovative technologies that can truly satisfy customers and contribute to a truly affluent and richcommunication society.