The Best of AI in Japan - Prologue

The history of AI research in Japan goes back to the 1960s. At Kyoto University, Toshiyuki Sakai formed a research group that focused on media information processing (computer vision, speech processing, and natural language processing). The major members included Shuji Doshita (speech recognition), Makoto Nagao (natural language pro-cessing/computer vision), and Takeo Kanade (computer vision). At the Osaka Expo in 1970, Sakai's group presented the world's first face-recognition system. Major AI research groups became more popular in Japan in the 1970s. The late Toshihiko Kurihara led a group at Kyushu University. The group's major contribution is a kana-kanji conversion system, which addressed the notoriously ill-formed problem of converting sequences of kana (or Japanese phonograms) into ordinary written Japanese sentences containing kanji (or Chinese ideograms), a difficult problem because of the many ambiguities that are hard to resolve even with semantic processing. This resulted in the Japanese Word Processor JW-10 that Toshiba made possible in 1979. Knowledge information processing also became popular in the 1970s. The late Kokichi Tanaka led a knowledge information-processing group at Osaka University. Setsuo Ohsuga set up a logic-based knowledge information-processing research group at the University of Tokyo. Setsuo Arikawa established a research group at Kyushu University to harness numerous young researchers in algorithmic learning theory. A research group at NTT Labs worked on Lisp machines. Although AI research was active in western Japan, n This article is the first report in the best of AI in Japan series. This series will focus not only on prominent accomplishments made in AI research and development but also on AI-related events in society. As the first in the forthcoming series, this opening article features a historical background and outlines the contemporary AI research activities in Japan. It then highlights some recent prominent results from industry. Finally, a future perspective is given.