Welcome to West Lab.

The Nishi Laboratory is engaged in research on the next-generation Internet, smart communities, and related information infrastructure.

• We have independently developed intelligent Internet routers for the next generation Internet, and are working to improve their performance and functionality, as well as to apply them to the edge computing domain.
• As for smart communities, we are developing services for residents and communities by pointing to various demonstration environments in which we partner and collaborate. We are also involved in related initiatives such as smart industry and smart agriculture.
• We are building information infrastructure systems that integrate next-generation Internet and smart communities. As elemental technologies, we are also building information anonymization and security technologies to protect personal information.

To realize these technologies, we use various computer languages such as C, C++, C#, Python, Java, and JavaScript, as well as basic libraries such as DPDK, which speeds up the processing and monitoring of information flowing through the network, container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. To process the massive data collected and to efficiently understand the processing status of the entire system, we also use mechanisms that use machine learning, especially Deep Neural Networks, such as Pytorch, Keras, and Tensorflow. In addition, we design real systems through hardware design, such as Verilog and FPGA. We continue to propose solutions to various problems by designing real applications and operating them on our own.

Nishi Laboratory belongs to the Department of System Design Engineering in the undergraduate school and the Department of Information Engineering in the graduate school. Without information processing and signal processing technology, there would be no social infrastructure. For example, AI requires real-world data, automatic driving requires control, smart cities require urban design and cooperation with local governments, and hardware construction requires evaluation of performance, power, heat, and ease of use. In other words, knowledge of information engineering alone is not sufficient to correctly construct and evaluate systems. Conversely, without knowledge of information engineering, it is impossible to construct efficient and highly interoperable systems. In the undergraduate program, students will acquire practical knowledge of information systems in collaboration with various academic fields based on the principles of analysis, design, and harmonization, which is the philosophy of the Department of System Design Engineering. The Department of Information Engineering conducts unique research to construct advanced and practical information systems that highly integrate various fields.

In addition, since we are thoroughly application- and demonstration-oriented study and implementation, we place great importance on field and actual equipment experiments. In smart communities, we have data from sensors installed in towns, houses, and factories, data on residents’ movements and purchases, and even captured network traffic, as well as actual field data in smart agriculture, all of which we have constructed ourselves. Using this environment, students can comprehensively learn and research system construction techniques, techniques for using data acquired by the system, and even service provision techniques. In addition to conducting numerous joint research projects with local governments and companies in Japan, we also have many opportunities to conduct joint research and internships with universities, companies, and prominent research institutions outside of Japan, and many students are involved in research with overseas universities and research institutions every year, as well as studying abroad. Through these collaborations, we not only obtain research results but also actively engage in international technology standardization.