About NII

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KITSUREGAWA Masaru
Director-General, National Institute of Informatics
Inter-University Research Institute Corporation
Research Organization of Information and Systems

Humanity is in the midst of the unprecedented threat posed by the novel coronavirus disease (CDVID-19). Lockdowns and other measures have been enforced in major cities in Europe and the United States to prevent the further spread of the virus.In Japan, a state of emergency was declared nationwide, placing considerable restrictions on social activities, especially on the movements of people. Access to facilities in universities and other educational and research institutions was limited. This had an enormous impact by forcing the suspension of education and research activities.
Under these extraordinary circumstances, the use of information technology, or more specifically remote or online communication, is serving an important role. As the only comprehensive academic research institute in the field of informatics in Japan, and as the organization tasked with the mission to build and operate the Science Information NETwork (SINEn, the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in particular has been intensively supporting both online academic conferences and online classes. The Japanese government's call to avoid the "Three Cs" (closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact se廿ings) in principle means that, in these times where people are unable to have face-to-face interaction with each other, conversations are moving into the cyberworld. In other words, we needed to shift the main core of our activities from the real world to the cyberworld.
Starting on March 26th, NII has been hosting the Cyber-Symposium for Information Sharing on Remote Teaching Efforts at Universities since April, with the goal of making sure that higher education does not stop. We have been carrying out this symposium with the belief that distance education in Japan as a whole needs to be fast-tracked, so we called on the information technology centers of seven national universities to conduct large-scale experiments on large universities Iirst, in order to learn from experiencing many failures and to bring to light the value of these experiences for other universities.All the leading universities in Europe, the United States, and China have quickly switched to remote classes, and I feel that Japan has also been able to achieve this without much delay. As a result, we have received the appreciation of many people who were helped by this symposium. At the beginning, the symposium was held every week and it was a really very busy time for us. For instance, 5,000 lectures at the University of Tokyo and 4,400 lectures at Tohoku University were turned into remote classes during that period. It is indeed a surprise that we were able to achieve such a major shift in around one to one and a half months.
For the fall semester, many universities have decided on a policy of caring more for the feelings of incoming freshmen and partially introducing face-to-face classes. We are looking forward to working on the design for this system going forward. Looking back, the Idea Committee in the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters of the Cabinet Office raised the issue in mid-March, pointing out that the copyright restrictions for online classes and on-demand lessons during the COVID-19 epidemic should be eased. After going through several processes, the use of content for remote classes was made available free of charge by the Society for the Administration of Remuneration for Public Transmission for School Lessons (SARTRAS) at the end of April. This copyright problem was the most difficult issue facing the implementation of distance learning. Making the content free made it possible for educators to design new lessons without worrying about copyrights.
In addition, we provided guidelines for creating online classes that lessen the use of communication bandwidth, for what we called a data diet These guidelines are currently adopted by many universities to prevent the amount of traffic from online lessons from exceeding the limit of communication lines. Initially, most lessons were reportedly videos taken as instructors gave lectures in front of blackboards. In principle however, screen sharing is the best way to reduce traffic because in this case the voice band, or in other words, the bitrate(amount of data that can be sent and received per second) for a telephone call, would be sufficient.
Looking back further, I believe a major trigger tor us was when we established the base for a remote symposium at NII from March 2 to 4 and successfully held the 12th Forum on Data Engineering and Information Management and 18th Annual Meeting of The Database Society of Japan (DEIM 2020) entirely online, which was a first in Japan for a large-scale conference, with about 600 participants. At the time, the rumors spread quickly and we had many visitors who came to see if it could really be possible. Later, when I asked members of the China Computer Federation (CCF), the largest computer society in China, they had never heard of such a thing being done even in China; surprisingly, it may have been a trailblazing effort at the global level. We were prepared to take the lead in showing that "We can do it!" but most of the academic conferences in March were canceled after that. Assessing the situation, we determined that it was essential not just to show but also to help, so we started the abovementioned Cyber-Symposium for Information Sharing on Remote Teaching Efforts at Un iversities Since April. Today, the symposium is still ongoing with well over 1,000 online participants.Time and again, we have stated that far from providing solutions, the symposium is merely a venue for sharing the outcome of the challenges we have undertaken. Shifting as many as 5,000 lectures to remote classes in a very short period of time is extraordinarily difficult. Thus, it was good that, to a certain extent, we felt that there will surely be some problems or some sort of failure along the way, and were mentally ready for it. Recently, we were among the first to develop an Al system to support the diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia, using numerous anonymized COVID-19 pneumonia images collected from the Japan Radiological Society on the medical imaging cloud built by NIi's Research Center for Medical Bigdata. We believe that the concept of this data platform can be applied not only to medical imaging but also to a wide range of fields in the future. CT scans are not easy to collect on slow networks, and achieving this is a demonstration of the power of SINET5.
NII has been undertaking research and development during the COVID-19 pandemic following the IT principles of fail fast, fail cheap, and fail smart.
In August, we also provided backroom assistance to the International Online Conference to Address Water-related Disaster Risk Reduction under the COVID-19 Pandemic, held by the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies and other institutions, in which Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress participated for the first time in a remote conference. Going forward, we will continue to give our utmost effort to carry out our many different initiatives, We look forward to your continued support.

September 2020