The sponsors and projects for 2018 include:
Project 1: Toyota – Design for the next generation energy and mobility platform
Project 2: NEC – Reliable Wireless Networking Systems for Industrial Internet-of-Things
Toyota will lead the way to the future of mobility, enriching lives around the world with the safest and most responsible ways of moving people. In the near future, cars are expected to connect with people and communities and take on new roles as part of the social infrastructure. New areas, such as AI, automated driving, robotics, and connected cars, are becoming especially important. We aim to reach the ultimate goal of sustainable mobility, creating a mobile future society full of smiles.
Rapid suburban sprawl in metropolitan areas in Japan has led to the rapid development of peripheral satellite cities. High-speed railway networks and motorways have significantly contributed to improving the connection between established metropolitan areas and these new peripheral cities. But at the same time, due to rapid population growth, sprawled suburban areas with small-scale residential developments were built without schematic road network planning.
As a result, key functions of the city for the citizen’s lives, such as commerce, administration, and schools, are diffused to suburban area, on the premise of using private cars. But such developments are not sustainable or desirable as the population ages and as energy conservation becomes more important. In principle, a higher quality of life can be achieved if key city functions are aggregated in city centers around the main railway stations. This requires better and more efficient public transportation networks in conjunction with small personal mobility.
In this research program, the students will investigate how to re-locate key city functions to the city center while optimizing small personal mobility and public transportation by applying the Internet of Things (IoT).
We welcome applications from motivated team-players who have knowledge and practical skills of one or more of the followings:
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NEC is focusing on Solutions for Society businesses that utilize the strengths of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to create the social value of safety, security, efficiency and equality that is necessary for people to live more prosperous lives. For example, NEC provides ICT solutions in manufacturing, retail and services, and finance in the private sector, helping customers to launch new services. We will resolve social issues and create value for customers through value chain innovation utilizing ICT assets as IoT and AI.
In this project, we will deal with problems in Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems at various industrial scenes like factories and construction sites. In these scenarios, workers and managers want to improve their productivity using IoT systems, but poor wireless network connections to their local or handheld devices prevent introduction of such IoT systems. One of the reasons is that the reliability of wireless connections is quite sensitive to external condition such as the weather or the movements of things such as people, mobile robots etc. Besides, surrounding environment in these scenarios changes intermittently. In some cases, radio (e.g. WiFi, LTE) power also has to be taken into account to minimize impacts for production machines as well as the condition mentioned above. Such conditions and limitations make it even more difficult to ensure the reliability of the wireless connections.
There is wide variety of research related with to wireless networking covering optimization theory, stochastic geometry, random graph theory, and mathematical-intensive persistent homology theory. However, such mathematical performance analysis of wireless networks was not possible because these methods rely on resorting to (extreme) simplifications or assumptions such as the case in which all the nodes in the network are required to transmit at the same bit-rate. But such simplifications are often not appropriate and neither fit in our scenarios nor to the case of actual wireless networks.
We would like to investigate methods to build reliable wireless network system for Industrial IoT. In order to achieve our goal, we need to improve previous work that resulted from both theoretical aspects as well as and practical aspects, and then integrate these methods properly.
This project would be divided into subprojects, some of which are listed below:
We welcome applications from motivated team-players who have knowledge and practical skills of one or more of the followings: