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The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, president: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.) is the first in the world to generate standard time referenced to an optical clock. By adjusting the time interval (the effective duration of the second) to match that generated by an intermittently operated optical lattice clock, the difference between the time generated at NICT and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is reduced to less than five billionth of a second. This is less than a quarter of the previous difference, which could reach up to 20 billionth of a second.

Japan Radio Co., Ltd. (Representative Director and President: Takeshi Koarai, hereinafter JRC), SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation (President & Chief Executive Officer: Eiichi Yonekura, hereinafter SKY Perfect JSAT), and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (President: Hideyuki Tokuda, Ph.D., hereinafter NICT) jointly worked to conduct a Japan-Europe joint experiment for connecting satellite and 5G, including Japan-Europe long-distance network. Successful transmission of 5G control-plane signal, 4K video, and IoT data was achieved in January and February of 2022 for the first time in Japan. This experiment was conducted in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, School of Engineering, Nakao Research Laboratory, the European Space Agency (ESA), Eurescom GmbH, and Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute. This joint experiment shows that 5G communications can be established over long-distance links between Japan and Europe, including satellite links, and be expected to lead to the early spread of 5G networks in places where 5G deployment has been difficult, such as in the sky, at sea, or on remote islands.

Researchers from the Network Research Institute at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.) report the world's first demonstration of more than 1 petabit per second in a multi-core fiber (MCF) with a standard diameter of 0.125 mm. The researchers, led by Benjamin J. Puttnam, constructed a transmission system that supports a record optical bandwidth exceeding 20 THz by exploiting wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology.

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) (President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.) and the Financial Services Agency of Japan (JFSA) worked together to develop a new AI-based translation engine that can translate documents between Japanese and English in both directions with high accuracy. The JFSA has collected, and provided to the NICT, a large number of translation documents owned by the JFSA and financial industry groups. The NICT has refined them into data suitable for deep learning to develop the high-precision AI-based engine.

In March 2022, National University Corporation Tokai National Higher Education and Research System, Nagoya University (President: MATSUO Seiichi) provided approximately 530,000 Japanese-English translation sentences consisting of university regulations, notifications, and correspondences, to the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (President: TOKUDA Hideyuki; hereinafter “NICT”), a National Research and Development Agency. The data will be used to help improve the accuracy of machine translation engines developed under the “Hon’yaku (Translation) Bank” scheme run by NICT and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

NICT and nine other members today extended and expanded the underlying Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the Asia-Pacific-Europe Ring (AER) in a virtual signing ceremony at the APAN53 conference held in Bangladesh, after three years of successful collaboration.

TOKYO—Nomura Holdings, Inc. (President and Group CEO, Kentaro Okuda, hereinafter Nomura HD), Nomura Securities Co., Ltd. (Representative Director and President, Kentaro Okuda, hereinafter Nomura Securities), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (President, Hideyuki Tokuda, Ph.D., hereinafter NICT), Toshiba Corporation (Representative Executive Officer and President and Chief Executive Officer, Satoshi Tsunakawa, hereinafter Toshiba), and NEC Corporation (President and CEO, Takayuki Morita, hereinafter NEC) have jointly verified the effectiveness and practicality of quantum cryptography for future social implementation using stock trading operations as a use case, where high-speed, large-volume, low-latency data transmission is strictly required.

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) is conducting research and development on Beyond 5G, a future communication system that aims to be realized after 2030. For the realization of Beyond 5G, it is necessary to deepen discussions by incorporating opinions from various fields and age groups. Therefore, referring to the future social image shown in the NICT Beyond 5G/6G White Paper published in March 2021, we’re holding an event to frankly exchange opinions with people of various fields and ages and deepen discussions. We hope that this event helps people to increase interests in Beyond 5G, and also helps to create new collaborations, new ideas, and new services. We look forward to your participation.

RaNNC (Rapid Neural Network Connector), automatic parallelization middleware for deep learning developed jointly by Data-driven Intelligent System Research Center (DIRECT), the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.), and the University of Tokyo (President: FUJII Teruo), won first place at the PyTorch Annual Hackathon 2021 (PyTorch Developer Tools & Libraries category).

Clarivate Analytics unveiled a list of "Highly Cited Researchers 2021" in London on November 16, 2021, and one researcher was selected from NICT.

Quantum Innovation 2021 (The International Symposium on Quantum Science, Technology and Innovation) will be held as a virtual conference from Tuesday, December 7th, through Thursday, December 9th.
The aim of this symposium is to introduce quantum information processing technology and its trends in practical applications through guest speeches and technical sessions of each field. We expect to share a common view on the current study status including implementation results both in Japan and abroad as well as to promote international collaborations through the meetings with key persons from each country. We look forward to your participation.

NICT proudly announces that Professor Dr. Andreas Dengel*, Executive Director of German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), awarded "the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon" of Japan in the autumn of 2021.

A study group consisting of the University of Electro-Communications (UEC), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Meiji University, National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR), and Kyushu University has devised a method to observe noctilucent clouds (NLCs) appearing at 80-85 km altitude by focusing on the rim of the Earth captured in the disk images from the geostationary meteorological satellite Himawari 8. The group has established a real-time NLCs monitoring system using the satellite data. With the new monitoring method of NLCs or “Climate Canary”, contributions to studies related to climate changes including global warming are expected.

NICT's research paper on nitride superconducting qubit, published on Monday, September 20, 2021, was selected as a featured image highlight at <i>Communications Materials</i> (an open-access journal from Nature Research), so an optical micrograph image of a nitride superconducting qubit circuit is displayed as the main screen view of the journal.