Overview

The Campuswide Computing Research Division designs and builds the educational computing infrastructure throughout the university campus. The division also conducts research on important information infrastructure topics.

Information Infrastructures that Empower Users

To enable everyone to utilize the power of computers to the maximum of their abilities, the University of Tokyo provides rich computer education and a large-scale information processing infrastructure on campus since the early 1970s. Currently, the Educational Campuswide Computing System (ECCS) comprises more than 1,300 personal computers distributed across the Hongo, Komaba, and Kashiwa campuses, which are also accessible to registered users from anywhere. The computers comprising the ECCS are used not only during programming and computer science classes, but also for computer-aided design and numerical processing applications, and by students studying on their own. The ECCS also provides web, e-mail, and DNS hosting services for publishing and exchanging academic information via the campus intranet.

With the ECCS providing computing power for a wide range of academic projects and a student body and faculty of over 30,000 individuals covering five campuses, maintaining an efficient, solid platform in a dynamically changing information technology environment provides various unique challenges. Therefore, one of the ongoing missions of the division is to review and assess solutions to these challenges and then share our findings with the general public. We also conduct research into various aspects of information infrastructure with the goal of providing enhanced computing performance with a more user-friendly interface.

Research Subjects

Programming Languages

This division conducts research on how to design and implement software programming languages and on programming environments to improve the reliability, security and availability of programmed software. Developing testing and verification methods to confirm the completeness and correctness of secure networking communication protocols, is also another important area of our research.

Game Programming

Games that have a concrete set of rules, such as chess and shogi (Japanese chess), are ideal study topics for data processing. By trying to solve these games, we have contributed to improvements in algorithm design, search logic, and machine learning. In 2013, through a joint research project into computer shogi software, we produced GPS Shogi, which subsequently beat a human master-level shogi player in a tournament setting.

System Software

BitVisor is a hypervisor (computer software that creates and controls virtual machines between a computer’s operating system and its hardware) that has been developed under the system software research group. In addition to Secure VM, a virtual machine that provides system security, additional research on fundamental VM technologies in building a cloud platform environment has recently been initiated.

Education Support Systems

The division is currently developing learning management systems and various other education support systems. Our unique developments include systems that use machine learning methodologies to automatically extract the abstracts of what students can expect to learn in a specific division or major from the list of individual course syllabuses provided for that division.

Network Technologies for Edge Computing

This division conducts research on networking technologies for Edge Computing. Edge Computing aims to provide multiple services on the edge of mobile networks to improve user experiences.