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Research paper : Cyber Assist project as service science (H. Nakashima et al.)−116−Synthesiology - English edition Vol.3 No.2 (2010) 7 Self evaluationLet us evaluate our activities.7.1 As a research projectThe Cyber Assist project was initially planned to achieve a part of “Intelligent Social Infrastructure Technology” set by the result of a pilot research program of Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, MITI. The detail is shown in the appendix. The pilot research program is conducted prior to launching a full scale national project such as the Fifth Generation Computer Program. Unfortunately, Intelligent Social Infrastructure program was never launched, partly because the plan involves many ministries and therefore it was too big to be managed by a single ministry of either MITI or METI. We were also expecting the Cyber Assist project to spread nation-wide through activities of CARC. It was a failure since we could not achieve this. We analyze the reason in the following sections.7.2 As activity of service scienceOne of the roles of AIST is to go over the “valley of death” of R&D to fill the gap between the research and products. AIST has two kinds of research units: research institutes and research centers. We believe that the role of bridging the gap should be taken by research centers.CARC tried to fulfill this role. In the IT area, the best way to fill the gap is to actually provide the service to show its effectiveness. In this sense, CARC’s activity should be evaluated in the context of achievement of service science. At the same time, it can be the subject of service engineering research to establish proper research method of service engineering. This article is a review of the activity of CARC from the viewpoint of service engineering.Services provided by CARC, e.g. event space support at conferences and exhibition guidance at Aichi Expo, can be assessed as successful when they are practically used in society. However, none of them were put into market independently. One of the reasons can be attributed to the short life span of CARC. New technologies need at least a decade before it is widely accepted by society. Three years was too short for this. If CARC remained in its form and continued on to the current Center for Service Research, some of CARC’s results could have been sent out to the world.7.3 On namingNaming of projects, research papers, research themes and constructed systems plays a significant role in their success. Some of research themes became popular by its good naming (e.g., “Chaos”) and many did not because of their bad naming. In this sense, our naming of Cyber Assist was a failure. We are proud that we have had a large influence on fellow researchers in close fields, but we could not reach further out toward manufacturing companies or planners of national projects as “ubiquitous” used by Ministry of General Affairs or “service engineering” used by Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Use of “cyber” was somewhat problematic. We used the term in the precise sense of Wiener’s Cybernetics. But popular image was differently coined by the “Cyber world” of the movie “Matrix”, where it is used to refer to the digitally rendered world to which people “jack in”. “Cyber terrorism” is used for terrorism on the Internet. Therefore, our research may have been mistaken for activities on the Internet with no connection to the physical world. We had to repeat our definition: Cyber = Digital + Real [27].However, the very fact that we had to repeatedly explain it signifies our failure. What we aimed at is Cyber-physical system (section 6.3), which is recently getting attention in the US. We should have added some word that clearly designates the real world.The second failure is that we did not use the phrase “ubiquitous”. At the time of the establishment of the research center, the phrase “ubiquitous” existed but was not commonly accepted. It is reported that the prime minister at the time said it was incomprehensible and thus we could not project that it would become a common term as it is these days. It must be noted though that the current use of “ubiquitous” is along the line of Ministry of General Affairs which is in charge of communication infrastructure and hence has emphasized ubiquitous communication. It does not exactly reflect the original use by Marc Weiser. The use is limited to connectivity to the Internet “whenever, wherever and whoever”. We agree that connectivity is a necessary condition but the most important part is services on top of it. It must also be noted that there are many other misuses such as “ubiquitous society”.We still think the inclusion of “assist” was a success, which puts emphasis on human support. It should be highly evaluated because it refers to the goal rather than the elemental technology or field.If we can rename the project now, what would be the appropriate name then? Candidates are “ubiquitous assist”, “cyber assist real” or “ambient intelligence”.7.4 On design issuesAt CARC, we have been putting emphasis on design from the beginning, such as hiring an industrial designer Shunji Yamanaka as a research advisor. If we want our technology to be used in society, design is important. There are two kinds

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