A Turning Point: Information Technology in the Service of Society

On October 1, I became Chair of the Cyber Informatics Program (department, more or less, but mostly less) of Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance, at our Shonan Fujisawa Campus. This is the chairperson's message that I wrote for our website. Someday I will step down as chair, so I am recording this here for posterity's sake. (Not that I think this blog is forever, either, but I expect it to outlast my chairmanship.)

Over the first quarter of the twenty-first century, everything – your car, your thermostat, your baby monitor, even your house plant and maybe your clothing – has been connected to the Internet and increasingly is bound to global scale artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems. And yet, within that success lies our challenge for the next quarter century: not only the next technical problem to solve, but also a crucial dialog on the impact of technology on society. Technologically, we must address the energy cost of computation and the limitations of digital computers at both the large and small scale.  Socially, we must address the ethical generation, collection and use of personal information and the personal, corporate and governmental stewardship of that information, and how to apply technology to solving society’s key problems, such as anthropogenic global warming.

The faculty, research staff and students of the Cyber Informatics Program at SFC are pushing the boundaries of IT, but always within that societal context. Our technical work spans the stack from the foundations of information technology (e.g. quantum Internet), through science fiction-like advances in what IT can do (mobile networking, Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) and databases), and on up to integrating IT into our daily lives with the goal of improving society for all (IT in agriculture, forestry and building architecture, smart cities, drones in business and entertainment, robots in society, and self-driving cars). The “cyber” in Cyber Informatics can be thought of as referring to IT in situ, in the physical world, interacting with its environment in the service of people.

Students in the CI Program are encouraged to collaborate across research groups, with faculty in other Graduate School of Media and Governance Programs, and in inter-institutional organizations both within Japan and extending abroad. They are also encouraged to acquire certificates such as the Keio Cyber Security Course, taught in part by our faculty.

The CI Program faculty all work in a combination of Japanese and English, and language skills are not a barrier to good research here. As with all of SFC’s graduate programs, students of all genders, sexual orientations, religions, nationalities and native languages are encouraged to join us.

The world is perpetually changing, and IT initiates some of that change; come join the CI Program and build, deploy, and study that change to make the world a better place.