NICT’s ICT Vision in Anticipation of the With-COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 ErasHow NICT R&D Can Underpin COVID-19 Aected SocietySince early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the world into un-precedented crisis. We have experienced many dramatic changes in our lives, including the adoption of working from home and online schooling, after the Japanese government declared a state of emergency. These lifestyle changes have caused many issues to emerge. Information and communications tech-nologies (ICT) and their services are expected to play a crucial role in resolv-ing these issues. In this issue of NICT NEWS, we asked NICT President TOKUDA Hideyuki about his vision of the post-COVID-19 society and the contribution of NICT’s R&D activities in bringing this vision into reality.──What COVID-19-related ICT issues have you noticed?TOKUDA Japan has been making steady efforts to develop its digital environment. However, the recent COVID-19 outbreak unexpectedly made us discover many ICT issues. For example, public health centers are still using fax machines to report COVID-19 testing results and a delayed medical data digitalization has been preventing medi-cal institutions from efciently sharing and searching information on various COVID-19 symptoms and effective treatments.Many businesses have adopted remote working policies to protect their employees from infection. Some issues were also found in this practice. While major corporations were largely able to shift to remote working as they had already digitalized their opera-tions, some small and medium-sized enter-prises (SMEs) are still unable to read internal documents online. In addition, many work-ers need to come to the ofce just to stamp a document with their own personal seals due to the old Japanese tradition of hanko seals.Furthermore, only 5% of public elemen-tary schools, junior high schools and high schools combined adopted online schooling; a large difference from the adoption rate by universities, Japanese colleges of technology and vocational schools combined of an av-erage of approximately 60%. This is a very serious problem, as children’s right to educa-tion has been compromised.Some problems have also been seen in public administration. When the Japanese government offered COVID-19 relief ben-ets to the citizens, some of them applied for the benets online. However, because of inadequate coordination between the system that manages certicates of residence and another system that manages social securi-ty and tax numbers, applications submitted online had to be printed out for paper-based verication.──What are the causes of these issues?TOKUDA I believe that delayed digitaliza-tion and lack of ICT literacy in Japan are the causes. Elementary school students have just begun receiving basic ICT literacy education, in which they learn information science, in-cluding computer programming. It is vital for Japan to more actively promote digital trans-formation (DX) in many areas.■ Expectations for ICT──NICT has gained considerable ICT skills and experience over the years. What kind of contribution do you expect from ICT?TOKUDA I envision that all things, name-ly objects, devices and information, will be TOKUDA HideyukiPresident of the National Institute of Information and Communications TechnologyDr. TOKUDA Hideyuki completed Ph.D. in 1983. Then, he joined School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University as Research Computer Scientist. He came back to Keio University in 1990 and became Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies in 1996. He has been Executive Vice President of Keio, Dean of Faculty of Environment and Information Studies and Dean of Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio. His research interests are ubiquitous computing systems, operating systems, distributed systems and cyber-physical systems.In 2017, he became President of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) . He is also Professor Emeritus, Keio University, a member of Science Council of Japan (SCJ), president of CCDS, IPSJ fellow, JSSST fellow and a chair of IEEE Tokyo Section.1NICT NEWS 2020 No.6
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