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Research paper : Cyber Assist project as service science (H. Nakashima et al.)−115−Synthesiology - English edition Vol.3 No.2 (2010) 6.1 Service engineeringFirstly, we have to clarify the meaning of “service engineering”. The phrase “service kogaku (service engineering)” was first used at Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering, the University of Tokyo ([21][22] p. 134). They define “service” as follows:Activity of the provider to materialize the change requested by the receiver in exchange with some payment.An English-Japanese Dictionary lists over 20 entries for “service”Note 11) including work, religious ceremony, army, maintenance, serving a ball, and so on. This means that there is no corresponding word for “service” in Japanese.However, it is possible to see the essence of the word: to provide something for use. The meaning differs depending on providing what. In the context of this article, service means to provide information systems for actual use. The target of service engineering is this “use” phase. Engineering in general is an academic discipline for constructing some system. Automobile engineering is for construction of automobiles, and information engineering is of information systems. In contrast to these engineering fields with vertical divisions, service engineering is a horizontal division of all of them in their “use” phase. It does not suffice to merely analyze the “use” phase objectively, as in science, but it is necessary to actually construct the phase, i.e., to provide service, and get new knowledge to feed it back to the system.IBM is proposing a field called service science, management and engineering (SSME), and it is referred to as service science in Japanese. However, we believe that it should be called engineering rather than science if the discipline calls for actually constructing or designing a system [23]. Since service is what we should construct rather than analyze, it is proper to call it “service engineering”. Japanese word “kogaku” fits much better because it has “gaku”, meaning study, as in “kagaku”. It is because the English word “engineering” does not fit well that the field must be called with such a long name. CARC’s activity can be classified as achievement of service engineering in the sense that it is service oriented information engineering. Until the AIST research center was established, it was practically impossible to put research results into actual service unless they were turned into products of some manufacturer. This gap between research result and products is beyond the coverage of traditional public research and development funding. It was called, therefore, the “valley of death” or the “era of nightmare” [24] where neither researchers nor manufacturing companies could become involved. AIST made it possible to provide actual service by the following reasons.1. By incorporation of AIST, it became possible to hire non-researchers with various specialties using research budget.2. Venture assisting fund became availableNote 12).3. In the case of Aichi Expo, running fund was given to AIST.4. A new category of research unit, research centers, was created, whose activities were not limited to basic research.In practice of service engineering, we believe it important to divide research units into two categories: those who primarily focus on basic research and those who primarily focus on providing services. The latter does not fit into traditional evaluation criteria of research activities.6.2 Ambient intelligenceThe research area to assist human activities through sensors and actuators located in the space of the activity is variously called as ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing. In Europe, it is often called ambient intelligenceNote 13).Cyber Assist can be viewed as an application of artificial intelligence. In fact, many researchers at CARC including the director and deputy directors are from AI. Researchers in the US and Europe have to produce many research papers due to the strict evaluation of their research activities. They say it is difficult to aim at real application systems. Therefore, there the ambient intelligence research examples are limited to their lab and meeting room environments within their universities. CARC is unique in the activity outside the research labs, and it is why we were invited to give a talk at the International Joint Conference on AI 2007[25], whose main theme was application of AI to society.6.3 Cyber physical systemNSF recently launched a research area called CPS (Cyber Physical System)[26]. The concept is very similar to Cyber Assist in the sense that they both deal with the feedback loop between physical and information systems where physical systems interact with information systems and information systems in turn control physical systems (although they call information systems cyber systems).Fig. 11 Aimulet™ LA

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