About NICT

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and its predecessor, the Collaborative Research Laboratory (CRL), have cooperated and contributed to the activities of APAN since its establishment in 1997.
As the only public research institution in Japan that specializes in the field of information and communications technology, the NICT promotes ICT R&D, from the foundational to the implementation. We have developed the "Beyond 5G/IoT Testbed with High-reliability and High-elasticity", in addition to the " High speed R&D Network Testbed (JGN) (since 1999) and "Large-Scale Computer Environment (StarBED)" (since 2002), in order to contribute to the realization of Beyond 5G systems. Cf. https://www.nict.go.jp/en/index.html
This article introduces three current activities of NICT in APAN.

The Himawari Satellite Project

The Himawari Satellite Project, led by the NICT, is based on an MoU with the Japanese Meteorological Agency. Many attempts so far have been carried out in NICT regarding a GIS platform based on the STARS (SpatioTemporal data Analytic and Reciprocal Synchronization) techniques, which could be the foundation of a digital data-oriented society. The STARS-GIS is a big-data platform for realizing the CyberEarth on the cloud, with help of ecosystems and applications such as data transmission technologies, data crawling technologies, data management technologies, data processing technologies, and data visualization technologies for large-scale digital data. By providing both ecosystems and applications and then by mashing them up, users get easy environments to develop GIS applications for spatiotemporal data according to their own purposes on the platform.

With the cooperation of the ASTI of the Philippine, the ASGC of Taiwan, and the NECTEC of Thailand, data-distribution sites have been set up at these three locations to distribute data from Japan through the APAN network. The data-distribution site in Japan and these sites are accessible through https://himawari.asia/. We have also contributed to APAN's Agriculture Working Group and Disaster Mitigation Working Group based on the results of this project.

Fig1. Himawari Web site https://himawari.asia/

APAN IoT Working Group

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key technology for deepening the digitalization of society and is of great interest in the Asia-Pacific region, and it is very important to promote the research, development, and diffusion of the IoT for future social growth.
This WG stared in 2018, and since then, Dr. KAWAI Eiji of NICT and Dr. OWADA Yasunori have been working as chair.

Fig. 2 Dr. OWADA at IoW WG/APAN55

APAN AI-Driven Networks Working Group

Dr. NAGANO Hidehisa has been Co-Chairing this working group. This WG is relatively new, having started at APAN 50 in 2020. It aims to share experience to design, manage, maintain, and protect the network using artificial intelligence (AI) and escalate collaboration for AI driven networks in the APAN community. At APAN 55, this WG held two sessions and eight speakers had presentations. Especially, managements and operations of networks using AI technologies were discussed.

Fig. 3 Dr. NAGANO at APAN55