velopment in order to reform society (e.g., changing social rules, traditional pork-barrel politics, and people's mindsets) in ways so that new technology becomes more socially acceptable.■ Future eorts and prospects──In what direction is NICT heading to meet post-COVID-19 demand?TOKUDA While basic research is NICT’s main activity, collaborative efforts with the private and other sectors in transforming ba-sic research to technological development are also important. We then test the usability of a newly developed technology and—if prov-en to be promising for practical use—hand it over to another rm or a venture company capable of transforming it into a commercial product. Although we are accustomed to tra-ditional R&D processes, in which a series of steps proceed in a linear fashion, I will en-courage NICT researchers to attempt nonlin-ear technological development, in which they collaborate with other organizations from the early R&D stages. I believe this approach will accelerate the development and commer-cialization of new technologies.It would be a good idea for basic research-ers to envision specic forms in which their research products may put into practice 20 to 30 years ahead.──What approach are you going to take to bring the technological blueprint into reality?TOKUDA Ethics and legislation relevant to resolving social issues need to be reviewed. The 6th Science and Technology Basic Plan to be effective from FY2021 contains a new concept that science and technology innova-tion should take humanities research into ac-count. This concept is relevant, for example, to discussion about the use of AI to simulate the human brain to process information. We now need to determine the boundary be-tween human tasks and machine tasks. This issue needs to be addressed by taking into consideration advice from philosophers and ethicists and their research in addition to dis-cussion among natural scientists.The US Defense Advanced Research Proj-ects Agency (DARPA) recently proposed the explainable AI (XAI) concept, which is now being researched by many research institutes and companies around the world. I often hear the concern that the solutions generated by AI—particularly deep learning—seem to be correct but it is unclear how they were de-rived. The XAI concept promotes the cre-ation of AI capable of explaining the process by which a solution is derived. The XAI ap-proach to shaping and perfecting technology is important because machines may generate unreasonable or incomprehensible solutions.──What else would you like to achieve as an organization?TOKUDA After all, human resources are the most valuable asset we have. I am interested in adding business and project coordinators to NICT to facilitate interactions between our outstanding researchers and external or-ganizations, such as private companies. In addition to making steady efforts in basic and fundamental research, we have the ambition to develop high-impact technologies in the next medium-to-long-term framework and to put them into practice in a speedy manner.3NICT NEWS 2020 No.6
元のページ ../index.html#5