The Second Stage of the Cybermedia Center

Professor Shinji Shimojo,
former Director,
Cybermedia Center,
Osaka University
Welcome to Osaka University’s Cybermedia Center. On behalf of the faculty, staff and students in the Cybermedia Center, I would like to thank you for your continued interest. Our Center was founded after reforming the former Computation Center, the former Education Center for Information Processing and a part of the library in April 2000. Such reforms were conducted in order to comprehensively promote educational study in view of the rapid developments in the field of information technology.
During the last five years, we have developed rapidly due to the efforts of our faculty and staff under the direction of former directors, Professor Nishio and Professor Kishino, and a new building was built in Toyonaka Campus in October 2002, which enabled five of our divisions to work together in the same building.
The work of our facility is twofold: 1) to continue providing the stable infrastructure services and technical knowledge about supercomputers, information education systems and networks used around the world, and 2) to pursue research aimed towards providing the most advanced infrastructure services.
As an infrastructure services facility:
We’ve managed super computing services, LINUX rooms, and CALL(Computer Assisted Language Learning) rooms. The LINUX rooms adopted a diskless system in 2005 to make it a safer and more flexible system. The CALL rooms have been used effectively and efficiently and we’ve increased personal computers three times as many as five years ago. Recently, we’ve emphasized to diffuse course management systems, one of which has originally developed by our faculty, to support improved relationships among students or between students and faculty. ODINS (Osaka Daigaku Information Network System) in cooperation with other faculties, introduces stronger firewall to make the system better and safer.
As a research facility:
We’ve focused on promoting interdisciplinary research, especially using information technology by working with other graduate school faculties; namely: Graduate School of Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, and Graduate School of Language and Culture. Currently, we are conducting R&D for Grid middleware to integrate observation devices such as Ultra high voltage microscope, large scale storage and high performance computing facility for science. Grid technology enables integration of science and IT which forms integrated science. An on-going example of this is biogrid project in Japan (see: http://www.biogrid.jp).
Being incorporated, each corporate body is improving the efficiency of various tasks in a university. Therefore, we innovate the Student Administration Information System and the Campus-wide IT Authentication Platform System, with cooperation from General Affairs Department and faculty of other departments. On the other hand, there’s been some concern that competition among universities after the incorporation may fragment research. In order to remove such concerns, we support better communication systems to connect researchers and exchange useful information. We are looking forward to working with you as we explore areas of mutual interest.