Sign of the Times
Neither the tortoise nor the hare, Japan trails in race to develop advanced technologies
Lately, I have been invited to travel to Europe fairly frequently to attend various conferences. This is because major projects are currently underway in Europe based on the understanding that the development of computer technology that is embedded in various devices and the future form of such technology, i.e. ubiquitous computing, will be crucial to EU growth, and I am deemed an expert on the matter, thus many invitations to speak at these conferences.
My involvement with European projects has resulted in several surprising discoveries on my part. At first, I was frustrated with all the lengthy discussions that took place. I thought such discussions were armchair theorizing, and longed for the Europeans to hurry up and get their hands dirty. I was convinced that all this talk was the reason Europe lagged behind the U.S. and Japan in the field of computer technology. However, as I attended more of these conferences, I was forced to change my views.
Participants' discussions were very primitive at the beginning from my perspective. However, the knowledge on the side of the participants grew more advanced in the following round of talks. The depth of the discussions continued to improve in this way, and at a certain point I realized that the discussed topics were steadily growing more profound. At one public symposium, a member of the audience asked the panel to explain the difference between a network address and a unique ID. It was a highly technical question for which the bureaucrat with a humanities background seated next to me provided a respectable answer, based on an understanding of the various ontological issues involved. I was stunned.
The Europeans could be characterized as the tortoise in the fable, "The Tortoise and the Hare." Slow, but consistently making progress.
With a large-scale project in the EU, merely initiating a preceding research project, formulating a concept, and establishing a common understanding shared by the entire EU becomes a major undertaking. Only after a thorough report that includes a plan for succeeding projects is composed and approved by all involved parties can the actual research and development project with a sizable scale begin. People finally get their hands dirty in Europe this way.
It was in late January of 2008 that CASAGRAS (Coordination and Support Action (CSA) for Global RFID-related Activities and Standardization), an EU project that seeks to establish a framework for ubiquitous computing, was launched. Nearly two years will have passed by the time its final report is presented in October 2009. This means that all this time, the EU will have been engaged in a philosophical discussion on ubiquitous computing, and only begin the actual backbreaking work on the technology next year.
In a way, the EU is entangled in more red tape than Japan. However, the EU is incredibly skilled in piecing together and digesting the big picture. I can't help but often feel that in Japan, bureaucrats, financial experts, and even so called technical experts often engage in discussion about "ubiquitous computing" with only a vague notion of what the term means. I'm often struck by the futility of my efforts when talks are forced to return to the drawing board because participants lack a thorough understanding of the concept, even though I have offered explanations to various basic questions in our earlier discussions. But one expects no such problems once the EU report comes out; a careful reading is guaranteed to provide the reader with a firm grasp of the matter at hand.
In addition, the EU has digested and interpreted the concept of ubiquitous computing in its own way and has come up with a catchy new name for it. Such re-naming has the effect of clearly defining the EU's aims, as well showing the distinctiveness of the EU's project from those being conducted in the U.S. and Japan.
The new name used by the EU is the "Internet of Things (IoT)" to connote the next-generation networking environment that links objects with each other, which differs from what we know as the "Internet" today. To me, the name sounds like a straightforward interpretation of an example I offered at earlier European conferences to explain the concept of ubiquitous computing, that of inadvertently trying to take out a pill from a wrong drug bottle, and receiving a call on our cell phones from the drug bottle itself, alerting us to the dangerous mistake and not to swallow the pill.
In the U.S., business proposals generally appear before academic papers when it comes to applying new technologies to solve real world problems, for which vast investments are mobilized very quickly. Governmental research funds from the Department of Defense are actually larger than private investment. Such funds are often invested quickly in the name of national security, again the nimble "hare" approach.
In Europe, on the other hand, all relevant parties engage in a philosophical discussion before proceeding with any action. Once they have come to share a common concept, they define the project requirements. Only then do they break down the main objective of the overall project into smaller goals and set up individual tasks, allotting appropriate portions of the budget that has been pooled from various governmental agencies and private corporations. It is indeed a time-consuming process, but once the project gets rolling in this manner, it progresses multi-dimensionally because everyone shares a common understanding. This, in other words, is the "tortoise" approach.
In the field of information and communication technology that evolves at such a rapid pace, the American approach is preferable in principle. However, I've come to think recently that the European approach may be more appropriate for topics that require institutional changes within society, and for which consensus-building at the philosophical level is crucial. In order to put ubiquitous computing technology to good use, it must be built into our social infrastructure. But this poses a challenge for Japan, which has a tendency to forego the required basic philosophical discussion in advance.
Sure, Europe moves slowly. EU reports have mentioned on numerous occasions that my research lab precedes the world's other research organizations in performing its cutting-edge studies that stand out in the field. In Japan, however, a minority may stand at the forefront of pioneering research, but the surrounding community may be very slow to move. Progress is made, for some reason, only when various "camps" are formed and compete with each other. Japan has seen new discoveries compartmentalized and closed off to further applications in this manner.
The advanced technologies Japanese researchers go to a great deal of trouble to cultivate in an insular friendly environment are ultimately crushed by the de facto standards in the U.S., which have wiped out the competition in the fiercely contested market, and the official de jure standards established by Europe through discussion and coordination among concerned parties.
In many ways, Japan's approach stands at a halfway point between those of the American hare and the European tortoise. Whether this means we encompass the best of both worlds or heaven forbid, the worst, is a thorny question. (By Ken Sakamura, Professor of Applied Computer Science at the University of Tokyo)
(Mainichi Japan) July 15, 2009