Kurihara Green ICT Project - Towards Symbiosis between Human's Life and Nature

The Kurihara Green ICT Project is aimed to create "symbiosis between our daily life and nature via information communication technology (ICT)." This is a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications project of Japan, with a budget of 250 million yen for year 2010 and Professor Norio Shiratori is serving as the project leader. Our goal is to conduct a real-world experiment in the community based field to test the technical specification of necessary communication protocol, to realize network integrated control system aimed at community development to reduce environmental burden in the wide-area distributed community. We are also considering international standardization of our proposed protocols. Two themes have been discussed, which will be achieved by the symbiosis between natural environment and human by integration of wide-area distributed community. Theme-1 is an integrated system to ensure seamless communication among heterogenous networks in a wide-area distributed community/offices. Theme-2 is an efficient network management system for reducing environmental burden of wide-area distributed community. Kurihara city, situated in northern Japan, is our experimental field, selected as our demonstration area because of its special characteristics. Human inhabitants of Kurihara are scattered around the entire city area including some in mountainous places. The sub-offices of this city are also far from each other. For these above features, it is considered as a perfect example of distributed system and so an ideal location to test our system. In view of the ongoing debate on global warming, among other developed countries, Japan's former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama pledged to reduce Green House Gas (GHG) emission by 25% by year 2020. To achieve such an ambitious goal, in a symbiosis society a cooperative coexistence of human and information technology is very much essential. In this paper, we describe our project's concept and initial experimental result for human-nature symbiosis.