Overview

The Campus-wide 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 has been providing rich computer education and a large-scale information processing infrastructure on campus since the early 1970s. Currently, the Educational Campus-wide 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.
In addition to programming and computer science classes, these computers are also used for computer-aided design and numerical processing applications, and by students studying on their own. Our division also provides a learning management system (LMS), 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 presents 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 on various aspects of information infrastructure, aiming to provide enhanced computing with a more user-friendly interface.

Research Subjects

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.

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.

Virtual Reality Technology

This division researches VR-related technologies such as human-computer interaction,avatar psychology, and social VR for education and identifies issues that need tobe addressed for more effective educational applications.