April 2016 to March 2017

Authors/Persons in charge:
Motoyuki Matsunaga (Senior Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)
Masaru Nagura (Senior Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)

 It is argued that the creation of social value by the platform business on the basis of IoT will be the key for the business of next generation. A variety of key-words such as Big Data, AI, robots and so on are used to illustrate what IoT is, but we are afraid these words are only illustrating the one specific side of IoT in the historical evolution of general purpose technology of ICT. We would like to develop the argument on how to define IoT from the new network structure concept of polymorphic (polytypic structure).

 This report comprises of two parts. The first part is covering “New network in IoT age” and the second part is covering “Social service and IoT platform under diversification”.

 In the first part we focused on the autonomous or self-standing robots with the merger of hardware and software technology, especially on the “network robots” in close connection with the ICT network. We put major focus on the networking of robots with further focus on Artificial Intelligence, structural concept and finally introduced the case study of autonomous or self-standing control system in the field of traffic and transportation.

 We set up our hypothesis that network robots autonomous or self-standing and powered by artificial intelligence will change the network structure like internet space structured by typical monomorphic network and survive by themselves in the area densely connected in polymorphic network.

 In the second part we picked up the key word of IoT with AI, the topic getting popular during recent 2 years. This IoT with AI is combining the concept of IoT connecting and networking every devices and systems in the society and the concept of AI researched in the Big Science strategies of EU and USA to analyze the human brain’s structure or mechanism.

 We outlined the latest move in this field and developed the argument how the polymorphic structure could be applied to the urban activities and picked up several case studies of early adapters. We further studied how IoT network like human nerve system can be smarter showing the cases of early adoption of Polymorphic.

 We organized second public symposium entitled “New development of IoT City~ Polymorphic adaption to the city activities” on 22^nd March 2017 to present the results and findings of the study succeeding the one in 2016.