Message from the Director

Hiroshi Nakashima, 

Director of Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies

Toward Progressive and Stable IT Systems

 The Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies (ACCMS) has four research departments for networking, supercomputing, multimedia oriented educational computer systems, and academic digital contents. The mission of ACCMS is not only to apply direct research products and advanced technologies obtained in the research to the infrastructural and multimedia IT systems in Kyoto University, but also to provide them to nation-wide academic community with which we pursue collaborative research for further advancement.

 Our contributions to university's IT are found in a wide-spectrum of IT systems and services for which we tightly cooperate with the Information Management and Communication Department, our sibling member of the Institute for Information Management and Communication. For example, our researchers and their technologies are deeply involved in university's IT infrastructure such as campus-wide network and various types of computer systems for research and education, for their designs and operations, security control essentially required as systems open to the world, and contents/software development and education methodology establishment to fully utilize them.  The other example is the university-wide integrated authentication system which our researchers designed and developed as the common portal for the IT systems and services.

 As for the nation-wide collaboration, we took a new step in 2010 when we establish a networked COE with other seven leading supercomputer centers of national universities for inter-disciplinary high-performance IT infrastructures.  This establishment redefines the importance of the collaborative work, which we had pursued by providing our computational resources and by cooperating for the development of supercomputing software and academic digital contents. Furthermore, it triggered our activity to further improve our collaborative research quantitatively and qualitatively through the cooperation with other centers.

 The infrastructural and multimedia IT resembles public infrastructures such as electricity and water supply in the necessity of high stability and reliability, but at the same time has unique feature that it requires continuous and rapid progress.  Our center is unique institute which always chases both of most advanced research issues and practical and real applications to fulfill both requirements.