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Research paper : Cyber Assist project as service science (H. Nakashima et al.)−108−Synthesiology - English edition Vol.3 No.2 (2010) But at the same time, we engineers must prepare tools and technologies for such new design of society.The above article was written prior to the establishment of the Cyber Assist Research Center (CARC, hereafter) and covers wider topics such as digital city [3]. It conceptually covers all human daily life (potentially) related to information processing, such as transportation infrastructure and systems, which is exemplified by ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems), for ground (and possibly air and marine) transportation, urban information systems as well as systems for city design, systems for governments and public services, telemedicine, and information infrastructure for tourism. The concept also includes providing a nervous system to a city by implanting sensors like stress gauges into structural materials of buildings and bridges, and use it for real-time sensing of damages caused by earthquakes. Since the concept is too wide-spread and vast, we later focused our attention on personal information systems and the related technologies [4]:The aim of the Cyber Assist project is to establish a society where all people can enjoy situated support of information technology in all situations of their lives. Traditional information technology was available only through computers sitting on the users’ desks. Recent spread of mobile devices increased the opportunity to use them, but still only a small portion of the people use them only in limited scenes of their lives.The society as a whole can be animated by providing an environment for live information usable “here and now”, which is accessible by anyone anytime through mobile and/or ubiquitous information technology. We want to implement technical support for not only convenient but also rich (not limited to material) life with deep human to human relationship in the physical world by providing services such as automatically buying tickets according to the user’s schedule, guiding through a shopping mall, or informing that the person next to you happens to be your old-time school mate. The widely used key phrase at the time of CARC’s activity was “anytime, anywhere and anyone” (we expressed this as WWW, i.e. “whenever, wherever and whoever”). This phrase refers to accessibility and usability of information communication devices in all situations. But we were foresighted and didn’t stop there. We emphasized situated service and used the phrase “here and now”. Both phrases are used currently to put value on context-aware services at all times and in all situations.In the early stage of development, the application area of information technology (IT hereafter) was limited to the digital world accessible from computers. On the other hand, activities of our lives are carried out in the physical world. Therefore, extending the IT support to all living situations of all people involves grounding digital information to the real world. The real world, which is meaningful to human beings, is the integral of realities of goods, individuals, and society woven together. Grounding consists of sharing meanings and situations between the digital world and the real world. The goal of Cyber Assist is to enhance ties between humans and goods by implementing grounding through information communication infrastructures for measuring physical locations and semantic structuring of information content (Fig. 1) [4].Without tight coupling of the digital and the real world, IT cannot be effectively used. As we saw in the crash of the “net bubble” in the USA, the digital world alone cannot produce any new value. A world closed under the Internet is analogous to a world closed under finance which excludes production of goods. Information has value only because there are human beings on both sides of the information communication channel. To produce many kinds of sound IT-based business models, and to increase values in many aspects of our daily life, it is essential to use IT to integrate the digital and the real worlds.2.2 Concrete research goals and approach toward themTo carry out the Cyber Assist project, we have to consider various supports in a wide variety of situations of human daily life including transport, medical care and emergency situations. There is no doubt that a single research center cannot handle all of this. A proper set of sub-problems must be isolated. A research organization must be managed considering both the top-down requirements described above and the bottom-up constraints of research resources including research specialization of researchers, research facilities and funding. As a result, we set the following goals (quoted from the proposal document for the establishment of the center):Fig. 1 The Goal of Cyber Assist Research CenterSemantic webUbiquitous computingHumanGoodsReal worldDigital worldInformationThe Goal of Cyber Assist Project: Grounding the digital world to the real worldfor “here, now, and to me” serviceCyber world

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