Foreword

The 21st Century COE (Center Of Excellence) programs were one of the major projects launched by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture of Japan in 2002. Our program "Informatics Research Center for Development of Knowledge Society Infrastructure," comprised of members from the Graduate School of Informatics and Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies, both in Kyoto University, was selected as one of such programs. This symposium will report our activities in the first two years out of a total five-year program, and receive comments, suggestions, and criticism from the audience, in particular from the evaluators of this program. Our project aims at building infrastructure of the knowledge society, which is considered to be a mature form of the current so-called information society. For this, it is important to study how to transform the abundant information into knowledge that can be easily recognized, shared, and utilized by the people living in this society. We will contribute to this end by integrating research activities of our group, which were traditionally centered around such topics as media, databases, Webs, field work, and basic theories. To execute this, we formed four groups: (1) real world media processing for knowledge society infrastructure; (2) cognitive science and human interfaces for knowledge society infrastructure; (3) knowledge sharing, retrieval, and distribution technologies for knowledge society infrastructure; and (4) algorithms, modeling, and theory for knowledge society infrastructure. In addition to enhancement of research activities, the 21st century COE program encourages the creation of new organizational structures for facilitating academic and industrial collaboration, regional coordination, international exchanges, promotion of intellectual property, and fostering young researchers to take the initiative and perform innovative work. In this symposium, we report our efforts in these directions.