From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson)
Subject: INDUSTRY: Japan's MITI Real World Computing Program features focus on 
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1992 22:09:47 GMT
Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle



Japan's MITI Real World Computing Program, which will begin this year, is 
a new 10-year advanced computing program (formerly known as the NIPT, the New
Information Processing Technologies program, in an earlier incarnation).

Many nations are collaborating in this program.  (The U.S. is not one of
them, preferring instead to work through the Joint U.S.-Japan Science and
Technology Agreement on the single topic of a rapid prototyping optical
fabrication facility.)  

The RWCP is quite large and extensive, ranging from basic componentry to
sophisticated optical computing network design and operation.  Of parti-
cular interest to this newsgroup, "virtual reality" (the first time I
have seen this phrase used by the Japanese, although it may be an artifact
of translation) is featured several times.  For example, as part of the
program on flexible information bases and retrieval, "[a] milestone will
be the establishment of display technology including virtual reality for
representing time-variant situations created using recognition/understand-
ing results.  The milestone of flexible autonomous control [a related 
goal] is the discovery of the principle methodology to integrate sensing,
perception, planning, and action in the real-world from the viewpoint of
adaptation/learning."

For more information on the RWCP, please see Dr. David Kahaner's reports
in comp.research.japan.  These are also archived at cs.arizona.edu,
under  /rwc1-92.brf  and /rwcdraft.r-d  , a brief and a draft respectively.
The brief also follows in the next posting.

Why we in the U.S. are not a part of this project is beyond me, given that
we have almost nothing as comprehensive to offer in its place to researchers.

Bob Jacobson
Moderator