The overall goal of the Center is to provide of knowledge and functionality for cutting-edge large-scale computation, information and communication, multimedia content, and education on the Osaka University campus, and to closely cooperate with internal and external educational and research organizations, engaging in leading-edge technology transfer as well as talking a leading role in interacting with the community through public courses and events to promote a globalized and information-literate society.
Specific goals are detailed below.
- Perform the planning, integration, provisioning and operation of information technology building blocks for supporting important advanced research centers both inside and outside the university, including general-purpose computing servers, supercomputers and high-speed networks.
- Functioning as the IT headquarters of the university, collaborate with all departments and research fields to accumulate expertise related not only to computers but also subjects including networking and digital content, and raise the standard of use of these subjects by engaging in technology transfers.
- Proactively work to promote the effective use of computers through the implementation of a comprehensive data processing education curriculum, covering everything from basic subjects such as email to advanced computer technologies such as Massively parallel programing massively parallel programming.
- In our increasingly global and information-oriented society, provide relevant support for the development of information usage ability in foreign language education by enriching multimedia-based language education and providing feedback on results from related educational engineering research activities.
- Reaching outside the field of data processing, work to promote multimedia and the digitization and uploading of material toward the overall goal of achieving extremely wide-ranging improvements in the sophistication and effectiveness of educational activities.
- Implement a unified computing environment to unify different types of computers, such as personal computers, graphical workstations, and supercomputers, greatly increasing user-friendliness as well as return on investment and operational efficiency for educational and research foundations.
- Work to convert this university to an open university possessing close relationships with people of other regions by converting the university’s academically significant material into digital archives that can be shared freely throughout society, as well as by engaging in outreach efforts using methods such as SCS distance learning.
- Carry out research, development and planning, particularly in the areas of information searching, collection, and analysis, in order to function as a “digital library.”
- Gather a library of important books and images and multimedia information, such as lecture slides, and perform technical development and research for use by educational and research organizations, providing an archive for use both inside and outside the university.
- Carry out the most important functions of a university related to information processing technology by investigating and researching computers, networks, databases and other leading-edge technology in related fields and by endorsing promising human investment in platform-related fields (such as programming and system architecture).
With a longer-term view, encourage the utilization of computers at all stages of education and research. In the context of education, the goal is to offer functionality to greatly improve learning efficiency through digitization of material and offering of material in multimedia formats. In the context of research, the goal is to offer the functionality necessary to enable research on larger scales.
Additionally, with these next-generation forms of computer usage, the thoughts of researchers will each need to be digitalized as well. Therefore, it will be necessary for systems to interact with each step of research, including information input, searching and aggregation, reports and conclusions, and analysis and modeling.
In order to achieve the above goals, the following broadly-defined functions are required of the Center: 1) leading-edge scientific research support, 2) high-level educational support and information technology diffusion, 3) information transmission and 4) related research and development.