Director’s greeting

IT “Infrastructure” Center

I often refer to the Information Technology Center as the “Infrastructure Center” in Japanese because the direct translation of its Japanese name is the Information Infrastructure Center. Not a few people around me do the same. Note that I do not shorten it to the Information Center or the II Center. I call it the Infrastructure Center because that name sounds well in Japanese. But I also like the meaning.

Decades ago, if I said that the Information Technology Center is a center providing the “Infrastructure” for the university, you would say that I was exaggerating. But what do you say today? Our information systems are now indispensable for our educational and research activities at The University of Tokyo. If the information systems stop for one day, the activities in UTokyo will also be suspended on that day.

The Information Technology Center is, as its name tells us, an organization that aims at actively conducting research and development to ensure that our information systems are always state-of-the-art. The Center is also actively engaged in providing a stable foundation for information in the university. The methodology for achieving this stability is also a research topic in the Center.

The Center consists of five divisions and one initiative: the Campus-wide Computing Research Division, Data Science Research Division, Network Research Division, Supercomputing Research Division, Inter-disciplinary Information Science Research Division, and the Security Informatics Initiative. To offer a state-of-the-art “infrastructure” for our digital activities, these divisions and initiative collaborate with each other and also other institutions inside and outside the university. Furthermore, the Center acts as the core institute of the Joint Usage/Research Center for Interdisciplinary Large-scale Information Infrastructure (JHPCN), a network of eight leading university IT centers in Japan.

Today everyone must have access to information systems. Just offering the infrastructure related to information is not adequate for the Center’s mission. The Center must provide a user experience that will be compatible for users who have different academic and/or social backgrounds. Creating new information systems and developing human resources for those digital technologies is also the Center’s responsibility. In these ways, the Center contributes to the university’s digital transformation.

Professor Shigeru Chiba
Director of Information Technology Center
The University of Tokyo