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Kyoto University’s Institute for Information Management and Communication provides support for scholars. Throughout their Kyoto University careers, scholars continually work with this organization, which improves and oversees information network environments in education and research at the university. Professor Hajime Kita, who serves as its director, has for many years been thinking about and working on issues related to the relationship between scholars and their research environments. We asked about his opinions regarding how to use of research funds today.

Research Environment Changes Due to Technological Innovation

For many years. you have been involved in developing Kyoto University’s information infrastructure. What are some changes that your long-term experience has enabled you to see?

Kita: I feel that due to the technological innovations in the past thirty years or so, the relationship between research and money has changed greatly.

Compared to when I worked as an assistant, technology has progressed considerably, leading to major changes in research styles. For example, in my field of systems engineering, there was a time when one paid to use mainframe computer centers, as well as a time when one would purchase a three million yen workstation to do research. However, before I knew it, I became able to do the same research with a one hundred thousand yen PC. Also, in the past, you would input a program into a mainframe computer and use the full day that it took to produce results as time to think. However, with machine response times becoming very short, now there’s no need to wait for so long. Rather, it’s become an era in which machines wait for scholars. Of course, since the capabilities of machines exert a great influence on the level of research done (as can be seen in research that uses supercomputers), there are some fields that use more and more money to buy more capable machines and work on more difficult problems. I think there are many experiment-centered fields that need funds to catch up with the advancement of experimental methods.

Kita: Another large change is that the services necessary for setting up the networks needed for research and education are now provided by universities to each individual, a result of universities putting in place, to an extent, research infrastructures while emphasizing ICT environments. When I was young, there were people, such as technical personnel, who would help everyone out when it came to the LAN and server maintenance. In my case, in order to improve the faculty’s network environment, I actually went around with cables in hand. By doing so I got to know a variety of people at the university and developed connections with office staff and tech staff members. Today, with this environment in place, there is no need for teachers to go around like this. However, doing so also had an infrastructural function: people exchanging knowledge with each other. So, how do we compensate for this knowledge sharing that has gone away? While not very apparent, I think that is a very important topic with regard to the research environments of universities today.

Knowledge Isn’t Flowing Properly Between People

While one feels that improved research device performance and developed university research environments are good things, you’re saying there are also drawbacks?

Kita: While the situation is, of course, a good one, I myself feel that some harmful effects are also appearing.

I think that due to environments which from the beginning have a developed research infrastructure (machines, network services, etc.) and no funding issues, it’s hard for people to feel that they need to inventively use money in order to improve the research process. By this I mean dividing up what one can do oneself and what one should rely on or share with others. In other words, when using money, knowing if it is necessary to ask someone for help, if so, who this should be and how they should be asked, as well as if there is a really a need to purchase the item in question. Since people, not computers, now determine how fast things move, these “dividing up” decisions are an important element in research management. If one thinks about the most efficient combination of human resources and money for purchases, then one can make research costs—the total of these—more efficient. When opportunities to share knowledge were naturally created, one was able to properly gather the information necessary for judging how things should divided up. Through such inventive efforts, or the dividing up of work, knowledge was shared even more. While today it has become easy to gather information on the internet, perhaps there are fewer opportunities to talk with those around oneself.

Think Critically About the Research Process

Is the time used for making research costs more efficient and knowledge sharing not something that increases costs?

Kita: I once read an article which said that Shuji Nakamura, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the blue LED, created his own experimental equipment. This is a good example of making research costs efficient. Reading it, I noted that in order to accelerate research, people in fields other than my own similarly think about what is acting as a restraint, how to create a device (in the case that the restraint is a device), as well as how to acquire the skills for it. Businesses that support research are also involved in research in more ways. Now there are mail-order businesses from which one can buy single components used for research and development. My friend has made development prototypes their business. It is not rare for such prototypes—proposals of experienced businesses—to be drawn from at universities. One should have various partners in research because there is really so much one can’t know unless one gives it try, amongst other reasons. While money always tends to be used in research groups in an apprentice system style, I think it would be good if people have opportunities to properly study what other research groups are doing. If they become able to actively share knowledge in this way, there many things that can be solved.

Also, I think that making research costs efficient directly leads to valuing originality in the research process (rather than in research results). Looking at students these days, there are more people who from the beginning try to produce original research results. When I was a student one didn’t really have to worry about the likes of originality up through one’s master’s program. I thought that it was easier to build my research on top of the existing research of senior students. Engaging in discussions with them while doing the legwork for their research, naturally my own research findings emerged. Today’s students become dead set on finding themselves, and it seems like this makes them suffer. Also, while research has sped up due to technological innovation, the amount of time that humans work, as if being used by machines, for this to happen continues to increase. I think that we could look at this critically.

Kita: To use myself as an example: I’ve been engaging in a joint research project for twenty years with scholars from a field completely different than my own. Each of us gets research funds bit by bit and has continued to work on this project task by task. For the first five years I also studied the other field, with the attitude it would be fine if I didn’t produce any results—it seemed interesting. The project is about using information technology in this field, and I did this joint research thinking that even if I did not write an article, we could probably reflect in our own research what we had studied about creating systems. While it is true that it’s easy for the field of information technology to collaborate with other fields, there’s a lot to be gained from working on things in a way that isn’t all about the results.

I think it’s good to always think critically about one’s own research process and share with those around you issues in order to solve them.

Everything Costs Something

You just described how considering ways in which to make research costs more efficient creates more opportunities to acquire knowledge. However, there are some scholars who don’t feel the need to go as far as to spend the time writing an application to acquire funds. What are your thoughts about this?

Kita: There are certainly some fields, like my own, in which it no longer costs much money to do research on one’s own. While one might say that funds to go overseas and present one’s findings are necessary, if it’s just speaking about one’s findings, there are cases in which one doesn’t need to go through the trouble of presenting them overseas. However, in order to create a joint research group and widely share with people its research topic, some funds are necessary.

Also, no matter the field, sharing one’s research findings in a high-quality form costs money, and one should anticipate this. Recently, due to an increase in the number of busy professors and the demand for research results on the level of form and not substance, graduate students and young faculty members aren’t engaging in enough polishing. I also feel like there are more submissions of articles that aren’t written that well. This is a burden for the peer-reviewers who are working entirely as volunteers. If one can heighten the quality of the articles one publishes by using money and the like, then I think one should invest in this. There are many things that can be done to improve quality, such as spending money on copy editing, learning how to write academic papers at workshops held by academic societies, and so on. It also might be good to visit scholars one respects and hear what they have to say.

Kita: I think that the basic approach for making research costs more efficient is to maintain a critical eye throughout all parts of the research process and keep one’s antennae raised so that you can share your critical awareness and the like with a variety of people.

December 5th, 2018
(Interviewer: Asa Nakano)