Memorandum of Understanding was signed with ITL/NIST

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: Dr. Hideo Miyahara)and the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology(ITL/NIST, Director: Dr. Charles H. Romine) have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on international cooperation at the headquarters of the ITL/NIST on February 7, 2012. ITL/NIST is one of the major research laboratories in the field of information technology representing the United States. Both organizations will promote collaborative projects and cooperate together in all of common interest such as Cyber-Physical Data Cloud and Network Security.

[ Cyber Physical Data Cloud ]

Today, widely-available ubiquitous broadband networks enable instant disseminations of physical environment sensor data, such as weather observation data, over the Internet (e.g., sensor Web). In addition, recent advances of mobile devices, especially like smart phones, facilitate sensing and distributing information about the physical environments observed by people. Examples are text messages, photos and movies on the Web describing what’s happening around people. Moreover, social media like Twitter and Facebook encourage people to voluntarily publish and distribute their sensing data in real time (called “social sensing” or “participatory sensing”) . Ranging from numerical observation data to web contents, a cyber space becomes a vast repository of heterogeneous sensing data. There are increasing demands for managing those cyber-physical data, in order to get knowledge on real-world situations and provide more “actionable” information services to people. The cyber-physical data cloud will play the central role for collecting, archiving, organizing, manipulating, and sharing very large cyber-physical data.