Happy New Year!Greetings for 2021TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.President of the National Institute of Information and Communications TechnologyWe pray for those who passed due to COVID-19, and we deeply respect the med-ical personnel working to treat the infected and seriously ill. We offer our condo-lences to those who passed in disasters such as the torrential rains in Japan in July 2020, we give our deepest sympathies to those affected by disasters, and we pray for a quick recovery of the affected areas.Last year, COVID-19 spread globally and caused an un-precedented crisis. In Japan, a state of emergency was issued in April last year and non-essential outgoing was refrained. Even though ICT became indispensable for remote working, online learning, and telemedicine, many issues became ap-parent, such as delays in society's digitalization. To respond to this “new normal,” people seek social and economic ac-tivities that avoid the “Three Cs,” and we must promote society’s digital transformation by developing advanced ICT infrastructure ensuring cyber security and providing non-contact, remote, and highly realistic experiences.NICT is the sole national research institute in Japan that specializes in ICT. Our mission is to address social issues and create new values through the advancement of ICT. To achieve our mission, we are doing research and development on the world's most advanced technologies and are promot-ing technology transfer and social implementation of our R&D outcomes through collaboration and open innovation projects with organizations in Japan and overseas. Looking to a post-COVID-19 society, an open symposium was held onlline last June to discuss the "What is your new normal and the Shape of Society in the Post-COVID-19 Era." To realize such society, we also discussed and demonstrated our next generation ICT such as high-strength deep ultraviolet devices, AI chatbots/multimodal voice dialogue systems, simultaneous interpretation systems, Beyond 5G / 6G and cybersecurity.Under NICT’s fourth medium- to long-term plan, there was steady progress in ve focusing R&D area: sensing fun-damentals, integrated ICT, data utilization and analytics plat-forms, cyber security, and frontier research. We created ex-cellent, world-leading technologies in space-time standards technologies, high-capacity transmission using new types of multicore optical bers, Beyond 5G / 6G, brain-inspired information processing and communications, quantum ICT, and bio-ICT, etc. We accelerated the development of secu-rity personnel through practical cyber exercises such as CY-DER, Cybercolosseo, and SecHack365.We also started NQC (NICT Quantum Camp) to develop "quantum native" human resources and IDI (Innovation Design Initiative) to support the president's thinktank functions and open innovations.The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications also announced the “Global Communication Plan 2025,” and R&D of simultaneous interpretation AI has begun, aiming for the Expo 2025 Osaka. Furthermore, both in Japan and overseas, we are promoting joint research and demonstration projects with research institutions, corporations, universities, and local governments. We also promote activities for com-panies to test and verify the various advanced technologies with NICT testbed facilities and international standardiza-tion activities at the ITU, IEEE, IETF, etc.NICT has three management motto "COC": Collabora-tion, Open and innovative mind, and Challenging spirit. We promote non-linear R&D that can accelerate open innova-tion with various stakeholders in contrast to traditional liner R&D model.We will start a new medium- to long-term plan from April this year and will continue to fulll our social responsibili-ties. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation.Lastly, I wish all of you a wonderful year in 2021.1NICT NEWS 2021 No.1
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