The Power to Pioneer New Fields and Make Them a Reality!!

Naoaki Yamanaka (Professor, Department of Information and Computer Science)

World-renowned companies that you are all familiar with, such as Google, Oracle, and Apple, are all venture (startup) companies that originated from universities. It is also well known that the core of these ventures often consists of graduate students, particularly from the Faculty of Science and Technology at private universities, specializing in telecommunications, computer science, and information and computer science.

My dream is to make Keio University the source of new science and technology in Japan. To put it simply, I want to make it the Stanford University of Japan—a university that produces companies like Google. And I want to cultivate talent that will become future CTOs (Chief Technology Officers). To achieve this, we conduct innovative (revolutionary) research. We never conduct research aimed merely at incremental improvements for the sake of results. And it is crucial to always create and demonstrate a Proof-of-Concept (prototype), even if it's just a part of the whole. Now, let me introduce the content of our research. In our laboratory, we research everything from optical network devices to control technologies and applications. Our current keywords are "cloud," "smart," "energy," "access," and "green." Since we are goal-oriented, we first demand innovation that determines what to break through and what will follow. Now, let's look at a few specific examples.

What you see in the photo is a PLZT optical switch capable of switching at 10 ns, the world's fastest speed. This was developed with EpiPhotonics, a US venture company started by a student who is now in our Doctoral Programs, and the system was further developed in collaboration with the Hitachi, Ltd. Central Research Laboratory. We don't stop at ideas and simulations; we build actual devices and aim for global impact by collaborating with corporate researchers. The research funding involved is on a different scale, and we have received numerous newspaper reports and awards.

The next photo shows an algorithm and a Layer 2 switch that automatically create a network topology with minimal power consumption, which we demonstrated at the international conference iPOP2010. Simply put, it is a network that automatically powers off unnecessary parts. It is said that the energy used for communications will account for 10% or even 20% of the world's total energy in the future. In our daily lives, we turn off lights and air conditioners that are not in use, but in networks, even in an office at night, all power remains on. This research was commissioned solely to Keio University by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications as a project of utmost importance, and it has produced many significant results.

In this way, we research new theories and technologies to turn them into practically useful systems, and in addition to presenting at international conferences and publishing papers, we release them into society through prototypes and even technology transfer. And it is my dream that startups originating from Keio will grow to become as large as Sony or Canon in the future.