Laboratory Strategies
To Be the First into the Future
Yoshinobu Tonomura
Director of NTT Communication Science Laboratories
We are now in a technologically rich environment
with tools such as the broadband Internet, mobilephones, high-performance personal computers, anddigital televisions. It seems that we cannot live without ICT (information and communication technology). However, the rapid changes in our environment
and the underlying technologies are not without risk.
Cyberspace poses unexpected risks because ouractions become divorced from reality. With just one
click, we can trigger an unexpectedly large impact onour lives. We think that this phenomenon is the resultof the common industry-and-economy-oriented
approach to developing technology: we emphasizefunctionality and ease of use. We might have lost theperspective of providing the key benefits to society.
Hot words such as safe and secure reflect this kind ofissue. Now is the time to understand what is truly
important for humans and society and apply it whendeveloping technology.
NTT Communication Science Laboratories is tackling the issues through the research theme of seeking
the ideal communication environment. In order toproceed in the right direction, we set up a macro-tomicro research management strategy with three layers: vision, fusion, and specialty. In the vision layer,
we establish the concept of where we should be heading. The current concept is “environment of intellect,” which means that the environment around us
works in an intellectual manner. Our surroundings
should know the characteristics of humans and society, understand the current situation, maintain andrespect our humanity, utilize implicit human capabilities, expand human creativity, and keep society balanced. In the fusion layer, emergent areas are exploited by fusing expert technologies as steps toward theimplementation of the vision. The discovery of new
research issues is expected to create new expert
research areas in the specialty layer. We are currently
developing a communication environment called the“t-Room,” where we can feel a sense of sharing space
and time with others even though they actually do notshare the same location and/or time. The “s-room” isa platform for recording and scripting events in thereal world through various kinds of sensors; it allows
us to retrieve specific events that occurred in the realworld. In the project called “Mushroom,” various
species of interface agents provide us with a peacefuldaily life by helping us in the right place, at the righttime, and in the right manner. In the specialty layer,
we are conducting scientific research in expert areas
such as human information processing, computation
science, and media processing. In each area, we are
not only challenging the world leaders, but also taking up the challenge of creating innovative and robust
technologies that will contribute to the realization of
the fusion layer goals. In the area of human information processing, we have made important findings
concerning human reactions to moving scenes andinvented unique interaction devices based on humansensory organs; both have attracted worldwide attention. In the areas of computation science and media
processing, our hot topics include an original visual
data mining method for handling the huge amounts ofdata on the Internet, robust media search algorithms
usable in noisy situations, a next-generation searchengine based on semantic-oriented language analysis,an acoustic signal processing technology that separates sound sources from a mixture of signals, a very
fast and concise speech recognition algorithm with avocabulary of almost two million words, and a quantum compiler for large-scale quantum computers.
Our mission is to discover new worlds in communication and seek out new principles and new technologies in order to be the first into the future.