Vol.2 No.2 (Spring, 2005)

Special Issue: Information Utilizing Technologies for Value Creation

OKADA Takayuki
Executive General Manager, Systems Software Operations Unit

The ubiquitous networking society is being something real. For example, the number of mobile communication terminals in fiscal year 2004 is estimated by the Mobile Computing Promotion Center to have reached 84,600,000 (66.8% of population rate). Also, the number of ETC (Electronic Toll Collection System) in-vehicle machines was in excess of 5,000,000 in January 2005 (Organization for Road System Enhancement). More than 5,000,000 Suica cards with ecash function are now in use, less than 1 year from its starting service (Nikkei Shimbun). As of the end of fiscal year 2003, 11,200,000 households are connected to a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), 2,580,000 are connected to CATV and 1,140,000 to FTTH (Fiber To The Home) (White Paper “ Information and Communication in Japan ”).

TSUTSUI Kensaku

People say that the Ubiquitous Society is becoming a reality and also that the general focus is moving from the preparation of infrastructures to a positive utilization of information. The positive utilization of information in the ubiquitous society requires technologies to support real-time processing of the kinds of information that have not been handled typically by previous information systems (e.g. multimedia information including audio and video, information on the location and status of people and objects, etc.) This paper overviews the present status of commercialization and product implementation of technologies in the fields of urgent issues from the viewpoint of the positive utilization of ubiquitous information, such as the Ubiquitous Application Platforms and the Next-Generation Contact Center.

EBINO Yukio, KONISHI Koichi

The Internet and the emerging ubiquitous network are producing large bodies of information, and their growth goes readily beyond human capability to handle. This situation calls for making much advances in technology to produce high quality knowledge from a huge amount of raw data. This paper describes the growth of the bodies of information, the limit of human capability to handle them, and the current state of such technologies pursued in the large and at NEC. This paper also discusses expectations for them and their open issues.

YAMANISHI Kenji, MORINAGA Satoshi

It becomes increasingly important to automatically discover business knowledge from large databases in order to drastically reduce operators’ costs in the areas of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), knowledge management, Web marketing, etc. This paper introduces NEC’s technology concept of Knowledge Organization and data mining engines designed for it. They include text mining tool SurveyAnalyzer, key semantics mining, and topic analysis engine TopicAnalyzer. We briefly overview the principles of these engines and illustrate their applications to real domains.

Vladimir VAPNIK

This paper describes the Support Vector Machine (SVM) technology, its relation to the main ideas of Statistical Learning Theory, and shows a universal nature of SVMs. It also contains examples that show a high level of generalization ability of SVMs.

ASOGAWA Minoru, OSODA Tsutomu, FUJIWARA Yukiko, YAMASHITA Yoshiko

At the lead generation stage for drug discovery, the efficient finding of hit compounds is a key to success. In this paper, we have applied the active learning method as an effective compound screening method and have shown its effectiveness by both computer simulations using known chemical data and actual wet experiments. With regard to the computer simulations, it is shown that one fifth screening is enough for finding ninety percent of all hit compounds. Our method could lessen eighty percent of actual wet experiments. We have performed actual binding experiments, and have also shown that active learning could find almost all ‘hits’ with a reduced number of actual binding experiments.

Kai ZHAO, Hongwei QI, Min-Yu HSUEH

Using the mobile environment (as opposed to the PC environment) as the primary channel for online shopping has not been attempted. The reasons for this are many, including the “PC“ nature of the whole online shopping infrastructure and the technology limitations of the mobile environment. Nevertheless, in China, the huge number of mobile users and the large gap between the number of mobile and Internet users (340 million versus 100 million) give good market incentives to making mobile shopping a primary method for online shopping. In this paper we introduce the Information Gathering and Presenting (IGP) technology and its application in mobile shopping. The IGP technology collects and organizes relevant information, presents the precise information that the user is seeking, and helps the user avoid errors in his information search interactions with the system. These capabilities of IGP make it very suitable for information searches and interaction tasks in the mobile environment, where the interaction time is typically short, and the ability of the network to deliver large amounts of data is more constrained than in the PC-broadband case.

KUSUI Dai, TATEISHI Kenji, FUKUSHIMA Toshikazu

The Internet displays a large number of Web pages, and many email messages are sent and received. Such Internet documents are important information sources in daily life and company activities. However, since they are so large and varied it is very difficult to extract useful information for specific purposes when retrieving them. Individuals and companies themselves must acquire new added value by analyzing available Internet documents. For such purposes, automatic information extraction, analysis, and visualization technologies are needed. As concrete examples of such technologies this paper describes two systems that extract and visualize product reputation information from Internet Web pages and “who knows what” information from email messages.

HARA Yoshinori, EBINO Yukio

This paper presents the concept of symbiotic evolution which aims to provide a better individual quality of life as well as an improved standard of work. Symbiotic evolution is a co-evolution process linking human activities and ubiquitous systems. We also discuss key technical challenges explaining three research projects. We continue to develop human-centered, environmentally-adaptive ubiquitous systems in order to enhance the applicability of symbiotic evolution.

Anett SCHÜLKE, Ernö KOVACS, Heinrich STÜTTGEN, Amjad AKKAWI
Marcus KUHNEN, Arabella RIU, Florian WINKLER

Mobile Network Operators have invested massively into the roll-out of their UMTS or 3rd Generation Mobile Networks. Now they are changing their focus from infrastructure roll-out to the deployment of new attractive data and multimedia services in 3G networks. Within the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) requirements for a future Mobile Service Architecture have been defined. We describe the Service Creation Environment developed at NEC’s European Network Laboratories (NL-E) in collaboration with NEC’s Mission Critical Business Operations Unit, meeting the requirements as set forth by the OMA. Key aspects of our SCE middleware platform are policy control and security technologies, helping application developers to tie OMA service enablers efficiently into new user friendly mobile services. With this technology, service providers can develop new communication services faster and open their network for new services developed by 3rd party service providers.

Marcus BRUNNER, Juan NOGUERA, OKAZAKI Hiroyuki
Amardeo SARMA, Heinrich STÜTTGEN

Around the world, many activities exist to explore open, IP-based mobile networks. Within Europe, the European Government is sponsoring collaborative research towards end-to-end All-IP Mobile Networks. NEC’s European Network Laboratories (NL-E) are participating in two major European projects. Within the Daidalos project we are working on IP based mobility across heterogeneous access networks. Within the Ambient Networks project our focus is on Capex/Opex reduction through intelligent management techniques, including flexible on-demand composition of heterogeneous networks, realizing the vision of “Alwaysbest-connected.”

Special Story

KOBAYASHI Kazuhiko
Executive Vice President and Member of the Board, NEC Corporation

An international competitiveness ranking which evaluates a number of nations including Japan has been published by the IMD (International Institute for Management Development). The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, published annually by the IMD, is a document that evaluates and ranks the national strength of various countries according to over 300 indicators in the four areas of “Economic performance,” “Governmental efficiency,” “Corporate efficiency” and “Infrastructure status”.

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