OREANDA-NEWS. September 10, 2012. Fujitsu Laboratories and Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) today announced that, starting this fiscal year, Fujitsu Laboratories will participate in NII's artificial brain project, known as "Can a Robot Pass the University of Tokyo (Todai) Entrance Exam?", otherwise known as "Todai Robot." Based on its formula manipulation and computer algebra technology, Fujitsu Laboratories will participate as the math team for the project.

Led by NII professor Noriko Arai, Todai Robot was started in 2011 with the aim of once again bringing an integrated approach to research into artificial intelligence (AI), a field that had grown fragmented since 1980, as a way of opening new horizons. The goal of the project is to enable an artificial brain to score high marks on the test administered by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations by 2016, and to cross the threshold required for admission to Todai by 2021. The project is organized into separate teams for each subject of study, with Fujitsu Laboratories in charge of the math team.

For many years, Fujitsu Laboratories has been researching formula manipulation and computer algebra, which are necessary to exactly solve mathematical problems related to mathematical analysis and optimization technologies. Its participation in the Todai Robot math team starting this year will leverage the technological foundation it has already built.

Fujitsu Laboratories sees its involvement in the Todai Robot math team as a way to develop, along with the NII, the technologies that will be needed for human-centric IT. The hope is that the technologies developed as part of this project will enable anyone to easily use sophisticated mathematical analysis tools, which will lead to solutions for a wide range of real-world problems, and even the automation of mathematical analysis and optimization.

The initiatives of the math team are scheduled to be detailed in "Uniting Natural Language Processing and Computer Algebra to Solve Mathematics Problems" (Akiko Aizawa, Takuya Matsuzaki, Hirokazu Anai), a paper in a special issue on the Todai Robot project in vol. 27, no. 5 of the Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence.