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Speaker:        Prof. Toru Ishida
                Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University
                JST CREST

Topic:          "Digital City: Bridging Technologies and Humans"

Date:           Monday, 17 December 2001

Time:           3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:          Room 3501 (via lift nos. 25/26)
                HKUST


ABSTRACT:

This talk presents future technologies for digital cities as a social
information infrastructure for urban life (including shopping, business,
transportation, education, welfare and so on). We propose the three layer
architecture for digital cities: a) the information layer integrates both
WWW archives and real-time sensory information related to the city, b) the
interface layer provides 2D and 3D views of the city, and c) the
interaction layer assists social interaction among people who are
living/visiting in/at the city.

We recently started the research project of "the Universal Design of
Digital City," a five year project established in 2000, under the Core
Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) of the Japan
Science and Technology Corporation (JST). The objective of this project is
"to construct digital cities as an infrastructure used and participated by
all people, including the disabled and the aged." The universal design -
useable for all people - for digital city is indispensable to create the
information space for daily life. In this project, we will develop basic
technologies for the universal design, subject to 'sending information,'
'receiving information,' and 'participation.'

This talk introduces various experiments including security, learning
about the natural environment by experience, and crisis management, based
on the future technologies including 3D, animation, agents, distributed
vision and mobile computing.



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Biography:

Professor Ishida is a Professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto
University, Kyoto, Japan. He obtained B.E., M.Eng. and D.Eng. from Kyoto
University, in 1976, 1978 and 1989, respectively. He served as Associate
editor of IEEE PAMI from 1996-1999, and general co-chair of the First
International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
Systems, AAMAS2002. He was a research scientist of NTT Laboratories from
1978 to 1993, Visiting research scientist at Columbia University, Guest
Professor of Technische Universitaet Muenchen and Invited Professor of de
Paris 6, Pierre et Marie Curie. He has been working on community computing
from 1995, and edited two books: Community Computing: Collaboration over
Global Information Networks (John Wiley and Sons, 1998), and Community
Computing and Support Systems (Springer-Verlag, 1998). He is currently
working on Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future
Perspectives (Springer-Verlag, 2000) and initiated Digital City Kyoto with
his colleagues.


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