Communications of the ACM
Activities of National Institute of Informatics in Japan
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The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is a national-level research and services institute focusing on informatics in Japan. NII was formally established in 2000 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). Located in downtown Tokyo, approximately 80 permanent researchers conduct computer science research in various fields. In addition, NII provides networking and information services for more than 1,000 research and educational institutions in Japan. This article describes NII's activities in these two complementary missions: research and services that support research (as illustrated in Figure 1). The service mission of NII has been fulfilled through three widely deployed academic services: the SINET family of high-performance and availability networks; the Gakunin Research Data Management (RDM) Platform, which supports open access to, and secure sharing of, data-driven research results; and cybersecurity services to protect SINET, RDM, and other services such as secure computation. The research mission of NII can be represented by four fundamental computer science projects and two applied research projects. The fundamental research projects are: graph algorithms, formal verification and their applications, machine vision using fluorescence, and engineerable AI. The applied research projects are: detection of fake videos, audio clips, and documents; and CT image AI-based analytics for the COVID-19 pandemic. The three groups of projects, services in support of research, fundamental research, and applied research, will be briefly described in this article.
Figure 1. NII organizational structure.
Academic Services in Support of Research
SINET backbone network service. One of the most impactful IT services provided by NII is SINET6,6 which has a fully redundant 400Gbps backbone network from Hokkaido to Kyushu, as well as a 200Gbps connection to Okinawa. SINET6 provides high-reliability and high-performance backbone network service to more than 1,000 research and educational institutions in Japan. SINET5 was the previous-generation network, which had a 100Gbps backbone, with an automated, very fast (less than 50msec) switch over when needed. Since SINET5 became operational, NII has provided reliable network services through many natural disasters that have hit Japan over the years.
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