Human Science Integration through the Cycle of Communication, Contents and Community

Mihoko Otake

Associate Professor, Ph.D

Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering, the University of Tokyo

Science Integration Program - Humans, the University of Tokyo

PRESTO, JST

There is an argent need for technology to support people physically, mentally or socially because of the rapid aging of the modern society. In particular, understanding cognitive neural mechanism of human is necessary how human processes the information of external environment or that of internal state. Our approach is to integrate data and knowledge at all scales in diverse research fields which include but not be limited to: neuroinformatics, neurophysiology, neuroengineering, brain imaging, cognitive science, psychology, healthcare, and welfare technology. However, it is difficult to systematize the expanding scientific knowledge, mainly because there are invisible walls between different research fields. For one reason, human network of researchers are organized according to the affiliated departments and participating research societies. For another reason, knowledge structure and vocabularies of each domain are different, which make the relationship between each research domains unclear. These two reasons have synergetic effect.

In order to make clear holistic picture of human, the speaker has been facilitating interaction among researchers of different domains by designing and implementing the cycle of communication, contents and community at “Human Science Integration Seminar Project”, which is organized by the Science Integration Program- Humans of the University of Tokyo. The project has been providing interactive seminars once or twice a month since April 2005 for 20 times by September 2006, which are presented by the university members of diverse disciplines related to human science in order to embody research community and knowledge base towards human science integration, with the help of information and communication technology (ICT) especially web-based contents management systems. All the abstracts, references, and profiles of the speakers are accumulated on the website accessible from all over the world, which form the knowledge base of human science (http://human.ws100h.net/). The numbers of community members are 106 with 37 different laboratories, 22 departments, 15 departments and 9 institutes in September 2006.

The speaker co-organizes the sessions “Human Science Integration and its Synthetic Research Methodology (1) and (2)” with Prof. Ling Yin, at the 20th International CODATA Conference in Beijing for expanding the network globally. Selected members of the project are the starting members of these sessions. The goal of this series of sessions is to discuss how we can integrate human science so that we can solve the problem of human i.e., diseases, disorders and improve our daily life. In the first session, holistic research field on human, traditional Chinese medicine is introduced for integrating eastern and western perspective of human. In the second session, synthetic research methodologies, which are necessary for human science integration, are provided. These sessions aim to contribute to the Initiative for Science for Health and Well-Being where the speaker serves as the Steering Committee.