On the Paris Olympics, CNS, and Today's Heat | Jin Nakazawa, Deputy Director of the Information Center
2024.07.09
The Paris Olympics will be held soon. And the other day, Ken Toyoda, a fourth-year student in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, was unofficially selected to represent Japan in the men's 400-meter hurdles. His time at the Japan Championships on June 28 was the third-fastest in Japanese history, and great things are expected of him. Many students from SFC have competed in the Olympics, successfully balancing their academics and athletics. I serve as the head of the Athletic Association's track and field club, and I sometimes talk with the members about their research. It is on these occasions that I am reminded of how difficult it is to balance track and field practice with their studies at SFC. The athletic grounds are in Hiyoshi, and you have to take a bus from Shonandai Station to get to SFC, so the commute alone takes a considerable amount of time each day. Naturally, class assignments are not synchronized with their practice schedules, so without strong self-management, both their athletic and academic pursuits can suffer. I have great respect for the more than 100 members of the track and field club for living such packed days.
Amidst this, the advancement of information technology since the beginning of this century has been greatly expanding the scope of student activities. In the old days at SFC, there were special classrooms in the Kappa, Epsilon, Iota, and Omicron buildings, which housed large workstations (see figure below). With a few exceptions, there were none of those "soft" things like Mac OS or Windows; the X Window System ran on the UNIX operating system. Students used this to write reports in LaTeX (pronounced "lah-tekh"), print them out, and submit them to a box in the administration office. "Laptop computers," which you would imagine using by placing them heavily on your lap, were not very useful as they were heavy, had small screens, and were slow. Therefore, students had no choice but to write their reports using the workstations at SFC. In the first place, connecting to the internet from home only gave you speeds of about 14 Kbps. Some of you may not know what unit Kbps is. K (kilo) is one-millionth of G (giga), and bps is a unit of network speed. But these were the world's most advanced technologies at the time, and SFC was a campus where many of these cutting-edge technologies were gathered.
What about now? A smartphone has about the same performance as the fastest supercomputer from 25 years ago. Laptops are much more powerful, and for networks, G (giga) has become the norm. Since you can connect to the internet anywhere via wireless LAN or cellular networks, you can now attend university classes, write reports, and even do group work from anywhere. It might even be possible to experience "campus life" for a year without taking a leave of absence, living entirely online while traveling around the world. As a result of the world catching up to SFC in this way, this has become an ordinary campus in Shonan. Therefore, the big question is: what should SFC have to ensure that students can continue to have cutting-edge experiences? There are many things that seem possible, such as quantum computers, ultra-high-speed GPUs running large-scale AI, and a 3D virtual space incorporating the entire SFC campus, and Shonan Fujisawa KIC will begin concrete considerations. What kind of things do you think would be good to have?
Well, it's hot today. When I was driving to the university this morning, the outside temperature display in my car read 36°C. It was only around 9:30 a.m. It was hot enough to make me wonder if the temperature sensor was broken, but since a "Heatstroke Alert" has been issued by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the Ministry of the Environment today, it's not surprising on asphalt in the sun. In addition to this, a "Heatstroke Special Alert" has been introduced starting this fiscal year. According to the Heatstroke Prevention Information Site , the purpose of the Heatstroke Special Alert seems to be, "Protect not only yourself, but also the lives of those around you from the dangerous heat!!" When it gets hot enough to be life-threatening—and this isn't the song about the great king of the southern island—I feel it's rational to hold classes online, if not take the day off, on days that are too hot. Let's all imagine an environment that supports this kind of daily flexibility and allows us to unleash our new creativity.