A research group consisting of Associate Professor Takahiko Makiuchi, Assistant Professors Tomosato Hioki and Yuki Shimizu, Graduate Student Koujiro Hoshi, and Professor Eiji Saitoh (also affiliated with IMR (Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University）, as Chief Researcher, and concurrently serving as Professor at the Institute for AI and Beyond, The University of Tokyo, collaborated with Mehrdad Elyasi, Assistant Professor at IMR (Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University） (WPI-AIMR), and Gerrit Ernst-Wilhelm Bauer, Chief Researcher, to discover a mechanism that allows for persistent magnetic coherence in magnets, which was conventionally believed to last only for a short time.

The coherence within magnets has the potential to handle both 0 and 1 information, but maintaining this state for an extended period was considered challenging, limiting its practical applications. However, by successfully extracting the hidden coherence within magnets in this study, new possibilities have opened up for the development of magnetic information devices.

This research was supported by the Beyond AI Joint Project which is a collaborative initiative launched by the University of Tokyo and SoftBank, CREST-JST, ERATO-JST and Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (JSPS）.

The findings of this research was published in the British scientific journal "Nature Materials" on February 6, 2024 (UK time).

・The full press release (in Japanese only) in PDF.
https://www.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/hubfs/press-release/2024/0207/003/text.pdf

＜RELATED LINKS＞
・nature com.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-024-01798-z

・UTokyo Focus
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/

AI House Davos: A GLOBAL FORUM FOR AI PROGRESS

The UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond※ announced the results of 'AI House Davos'（https://www.aihousedavos.com/) held in conjunction with the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in January 2024.
The event aimed to promote discussions and advancements in the field of artificial intelligence during the WEF Annual Meeting (Davos Conference).

https://beyondai.jp/contents/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/AI-House-Davos_Report.pdf

※ The Beyond AI Joint Project is a collaborative initiative launched by The University of Tokyo and SoftBank, with the aim of developing an ecosystem for social implementation and business deployment of research outcomes generated from the “Institute for AI and Beyond”. https://beyondai.jp/?lang=en/

AI House Davos: A GLOBAL FORUM FOR AI PROGRESS

The UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond※1 intends to support the “AI House Davos” (https://www.aihousedavos.com), launched during the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2024, taking place in Davos, Switzerland between 15 and 19 January 2024, as an initiator.

【Sessions by the UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond】
The UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond will co-host the following sessions at AI House Davos ("AI House"), inviting experts and presidents of leading universities around the world to participate in panel discussions on the themes of AI and governance and AI and higher education.

① AI Governance and Safety - G7 Hiroshima AI Process
・ Date & Time: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 14:00 - 14:40（CET）
・ Venue: Valley Stage, AI House Davos, Promenade 68, 7270 Davos Platz
・ Format: Interactive Panel Discussion
[Session Coordinators]:
・ Arisa Ema (Associate Professor, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo)
・ Tomomi Yamazaki (Deputy Director, Institute for AI and Beyond, The University of Tokyo)
[Speakers]:
・ Amandeep Gill (Under-Secretary-General, Tech Envoy - United Nations)
・ Christoph Winterhalter (Vice President, International Organization for Standardization)
・ Yoichi Iida (Director, Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications)
・ Arisa Ema 【Moderator】
https://zoon.swisscom.com/en/event/ai-house-davos/agenda/b743ba75-6fb9-4f6e-93ef-24146df97758

② AI and Higher Education
・Date and Time: Wednesday, January 17, 2024 10:00 – 10:55（CET）
・Venue: Valley Stage, AI House Davos, Promenade 68, 7270 Davos Platz
・Format: Interactive Panel Discussion
[Session Coordinators]:
・Phil Baty (Chief Global Affairs Officer, Times Higher Education)
・Tomomi Yamazaki (Deputy Director, Institute for AI and Beyond, The University of Tokyo)
[Speakers]:
・Eng Chye Tan (President, National University of Singapore)
・Irene Tracey (Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford)
・Paul Alivisatos (President, The University of Chicago)
・Kohei Itoh (President, Keio University)
・Teruo Fujii (President, The University of Tokyo) 【Moderator】
[Overview]:
With presidents from leading universities as panelists, this panel has two objectives. One is to advance higher education by addressing the challenges posed by generative AI and promoting its utilization. The other is to contemplate how higher education, especially university education, should evolve as generative AI progressively replaces many aspects of human intelligence.
https://zoon.swisscom.com/en/event/ai-house-davos/agenda/5d911ca5-600f-4d33-b479-9c7739d10b89/

③ Harmony in Coexistence: Navigating the Future of Human-AI Partnership
・Date and Time: Thursday, January 18, 2024 18:30 – 19:10（CET）
・Venue: Valley Stage, AI House Davos, Promenade 68, 7270 Davos Platz
・Format: Interactive Panel Discussion
[Session Coordinator]:
・Chris Luebkeman (Head of Strategic Foresight, ETH Zurich)
[Speakers]:
・Aurelio Cortese (Head of Dep. of Decoded Neurofeedback, Computational Neuroscience Labs - Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International)
・Menna El-Assady (Professor, ETH Zurich)
・James Landay (Co-Director, Stanford HAI)
https://zoon.swisscom.com/en/event/ai-house-davos/agenda/1452680a-6eff-47a3-a08c-773eb0ca2beb/

【Overview of the “AI House Davos”】
The AI House will bring together leading representatives from academia, industry, government, and other relevant stakeholder groups. The intention is to create a platform for the global conversation on the impact of AI and make the AI House Davos a premier international conference for AI during the WEF Annual Meeting 2024.
The UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond, intends to support the AI House as an initiator, with Merantix※2, ETH AI Center, Swisscom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and G42※3,during 15 - 19 January 2024.

Date: 15 - 19 January 2024
・Initiators: Merantix, ETH AI Center, Swisscom, UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, G42
・Venue: 750m from the Congress Center on the Promenade
・URL: https://www.aihousedavos.com/

※１ The Beyond AI Joint Project is a collaborative initiative launched by the University of Tokyo and SoftBank, with the aim of developing an ecosystem for social implementation and business deployment of research outcomes generated from the “Institute for AI and Beyond”. https://beyondai.jp/?lang=en/
※２ https://www.merantix.com/
※３ https://www.g42.ai/

● Joint initiative by Merantix, ETH AI Center, Swisscom, UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
● With AI likely a key theme of WEF ‘24, AI House Davos will bring together academics, industry leaders, government officials, investors, and entrepreneurs

Merantix, ETH AI Center, Swisscom, UTokyo Institute for AI and Beyond,and Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announce the launch of the AI House Davos during the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting, 15th-19th January 2024. The Swiss Foreign Ministry will be the hosting country partner of this year’s edition.
By bringing together academics, industry leaders, civil society, government officials, investors, and entrepreneurs, the AI House will facilitate in-depth discussions and collaborative efforts to ensure that the requisite safeguarding of AI is made accessible and prioritized by all. The AI House will provide a dedicated platform to foster an inclusive multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach to addressing critical challenges facing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry, including responsible scaling, integration, and regulation.
As the key topic of global conversation, debate, and legislation throughout 2023, AI will certainly be a key topic of discussion during the WEF Annual Meeting. The AI House and its partners will attract the most relevant stakeholders from academia, government, industry, finance, civil society and the entrepreneurial world to provide a global forum to discuss the benefits AI can bring to humankind and world economies, and to provide a catalyst for responsible and sustainable innovation.
The AI House is a global, multi-stakeholder platform, with partners and subsidiary sponsors including European Commission, European Innovation Council, European AI Forum, Automation Anywhere, EPFL, TÜV AI Lab, and more. Forbes, Handelsblatt, and Devex will join as media partners.

Teruo Fujii, President of The University of Tokyo (Founding Director, Institute for AI and Beyond), comments: “AI is transforming human society, including education, science, and industry. To further contribute to the development of AI research and the realization of a better world, the Institute for AI and Beyond, a collaborative initiative launched by the University of Tokyo and SoftBank, is advancing AI research and pioneering new sciences and businesses while solving AI-related social problems. The Davos AI House will be the suitable platform for us to have discussions with multiple stakeholders on different aspects including the topics related to the G7 Hiroshima AI process.”

・AI House Official Website
https://www.aihousedavos.com/

・For more detail, please refer to the URL below.
https://beyondai.jp/contents/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AIHouseDavos2024_EN.pdf

A research team consisting of Professor Kenichi OHKI and Jumpei UKITA (a graduate student at the time of the research) of the Department of Physiology, Division of Functional Biology, Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo, revealed that some of the vulnerabilities in deep neural networks can be mitigated by injecting random noise that mimics the brain in deep neural networks.

Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving at an accelerating pace, and its underlying structure is based on deep neural networks. Deep neural networks are known to be tricked into producing outputs that are clearly different from that of humans by malicious attacks, known as adversarial attacks. For example, image recognition AI in self-driving cars must correctly recognize a "stop" road sign as "stop" to make the car stop. However, the image recognition AI may not be able to correctly recognize a "stop" road sign generated by a hostile attack, even if it is clearly a "stop" sign when seen by a human. As a result, the car may not be able to stop, leading to a traffic accident. Thus, vulnerability to hostile attacks is one of the major challenges of implementing AI in society.

Incorporating brain properties of animals, such as humans, into AI may help overcome such vulnerabilities. The research team discovered that certain types of vulnerability can be reduced by introducing noise that mimics the randomness of neurons in the brain into deep neural networks. By using this method, the possibility of creating AI that more closely resembles the behavior of humans and other animals is thought to be greater.

This research was supported by the Institute for AI and Beyond of the University of Tokyo, the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) "Project to Elucidate the Entire Functional Brain Network through Innovative Technology", the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and CREST-JST.
The research result was published in Neural Networks on 16 September 2023 online.

Professor Ohki is the Project Leader for the Basic Research Project entitled “Development of next generation AI by modeling brain information” at the Institute for AI and Beyond.

・The full press release (in Japanese only) in PDF.
https://beyondai.jp/contents/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Press-Release_NeuralNetworks_20230916_Web.pdf

＜RELATED LINKS＞
・Published paper (Title: Adversarial attacks and defenses using feature-space stochasticity)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608023004422?via%3Dihub
DOI 10.1016/j.neunet.2023.08.022

・Article in English at UTokyo Focus
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00311.html

A press release was issued on August 3, 2023 regarding new findings on a study on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using the ASD perceptual experience simulator, in which Project Professor Yukie Nagai of the International Research Center for Neurointelligence (IRCN) at the University of Tokyo was involved as the principle investigator.

Professor Nagai was the former leader of the Mid- and Long-term Research Project “AI x Tojisha-Kenkyu: Computational Neuroscience for Systematic Understanding of Cognitive Individuality” and current Alumni committee member of the Institute for AI and Beyond.

Full press release at the IRCN official website:
https://ircn.jp/pressrelease/2023083_yukie_nagai

Professor Nagai presented the ASD perception experience simulator in the 8th Beyond AI Science Café video, in which she was featured last year.
The video, which is available in Japanese at the Institute for AI and Beyond YouTube Channel as linked below;

A scientific paper entitled “Audio Signal Enhancement with Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data” written by Dr. Nobutaka ITO and Professor Masashi SUGIYAMA of the Graduate School of Frontier Science at the University of Tokyo was selected for the “Best Paper Award” at 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023), one of the largest and most influential research conferences of the Signal Processing Society in the world. The paper was selected from 6127 submitted papers, of which 2765 were accepted for publication in the conference proceedings.

Dr. Ito who participated in-person in the conference, received the award at the awards ceremony held on Friday, June 9, in Rhodes, Greece from the organizing committee, represented by General Chair Dr. Petros Maragos.

Professor Sugiyama and Dr. Ito are respectively, the project sub-leader and associate researcher of the Basic research project (Advancement of Fundamental AI) titled “Automatic Learning of High Accurate Prediction Models from Limited Supervised Data” led by Professor Tatsuya HARADA (Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo) in the Institute for AI and Beyond.

Dr. Ito receiving the honorable certificate from Petros Maragos General Chair

・Full paper
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10095988/authors#authors
・ICASSP2023 Official website
https://2023.ieeeicassp.org/

Professor Eiji Saitoh of the Graduate School of Engineering, leader of the Mid- and Long-term research project "Analysis of materials’ quantum properties using AI (Quantum ID: Exploiting “Quantum Fingerprintings” of materials with AI)", has posted a column on his website regarding his research at the Institute for AI and Beyond.
The column is titled “New Challenges with Machine Learning - Are AI and Physics a Good Match?” and written by Marie Minagawa, his research collaborator.

・Link to the column (available in Japanese only):
https://saitoh.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/interview/column/entry-892.html
・Prof. Saitoh’s Research Project page:
https://beyondai.jp/contents/projects/saitoh/?lang=en

HEMILLIONS Inc., a commercial company, was established on 7th April as a joint initiative of the University of Tokyo, SoftBank Corp., and KIS Inc. The company will promote health and medical data standardization and their dissemination by utilizing the HL7 FHIR (FHIR: Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard. Ultimately, HEMILLIONS will work towards building a society that can utilize health and medical data safely and securely by developing and providing solutions such as FRUCtoS, a platform software including FHIR server.

The HEMILLIONS started as an applied research project, a part of the efforts undertaken by the Institute for AI and Beyond, and was later converted to a joint venture company through the Collaborative Innovation Partnership (CIP) system. It is the first commercialized and incorporated company initiated by the Institute. It is also the first case for the University of Tokyo to directly hold common shares of a company in return for their intellectual properties.

The Institute of AI and Beyond aims to create new academic fields by integrating fundamental technology research of AI and other research fields. It also aims to establish an ecosystem which can return resources to the University to enhance its education and research activities by accelerating the social implementation and business deployment of the research outcomes generated from the Institute. The Institute will continue its efforts in commercialization based on the research outcomes via the CIP system to further promote the ecosystem.

The full press release is available below (in Japanese only) (PDF).
https://beyondai.jp/contents/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230420_Press-Release_HEMILLIONS.pdf

UTokyo Focus　https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/ja/press/z1702_00042.html
SoftBank News https://www.softbank.jp/corp/news/press/sbkk/2023/20230420_01/

B’AI Global Forum led by Professor Yuko Itatsu of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, has published its first book “Understanding AI in Society: How Technology Exerts Power.” (The University of Tokyo Press, March 2023) .

Professor Itatsu is the research leader of the basic research project “B’AI Global Forum: Research on norms, ethics and praxis for a truly gender equal society and a guarantee of rights for minorities in the AI age”.

For further details of the book, please visit the website below (Japanese only).
https://www.utp.or.jp/book/b10026693.html

B’AI Global Forum Official Website
https://baiforum.jp/

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