Now It's Time: Structural Reform of Campus Infrastructure | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2006.10.13
In the summer of 1988, two years before the completion of the SFC campus, we gathered in Boston with a certain mission. We spent two weeks investigating the current state of universities and companies across the United States that were among the first to build Wired Campus environments. At that time, CMU, where I worked, was one of the first universities in the US to develop ARPANET (the predecessor to the current internet) and campus information infrastructure. It had established the multi-institutional Andrew File System, providing a service that allowed for secure information sharing from anywhere. It was an era when distributed computing technology was becoming widespread, and universities across the country were competing to develop their campus networks.
That was 18 years ago, an era that was closed and without the Web. It was a time when information-sharing mechanisms were overwhelmingly produced by universities and research centers and institutes, and used within limited circles such as researcher communities.
What about the present, on the other hand? Since the advent of the Web, evolution has accelerated. New mechanisms for sharing and disseminating information are continuously being produced through services like Google, and Global Mash-ups are being implemented in a more open format.
From the perspective of campus infrastructure, we are seeing the next leap forward: starting from the Wired Campus, evolving to the Wireless Campus, and now moving toward the Smart Campus, which will realize a ubiquitous environment. Even the CNS network, which began with the 1980s model and developed into wireless, is a 20th-century network architecture. We must evolve to a 21st-century ubiquitous network, where not only information but also all kinds of things, people, and real objects are seamlessly connected, as the new campus infrastructure.
With the development of mobile communication technology, communication functions have become ubiquitous, making it possible for them to be used "anytime, anywhere, by anyone." The next challenge is "anything." The widespread adoption of communication functions with all kinds of things, as well as flexible control and collaboration functions, is yet to come.
In reality, a ubiquitous environment where not only information in cyberspace but also all kinds of things, people, and real objects are connected to a ubiquitous network to support people's activities is not yet available off-the-shelf. While this is a field where we universities have been leading research and development, I believe that we cannot realize a Smart Campus without collaboration with companies.
To avoid becoming overdue, now it's time.
(Date Published: 2006/10/13)