Towards the realization of distributed computing environment to support collaborative human activities

Today's computing environments have not yet reached their goal enough to support human collaborative activities. The Distributed and Collaborative Systems Laboratory is working on four areas of collaborative media research to promote the collaborative activities that emerge in human daily life.

1. "Urban Memories": An information sharing environment that enables mobile terminals to exchange information autonomously, promoting serendipitous discoveries of information
2. A learning environment that lets schoolchildren work on collaborative creation activities in the classroom
3. A collaborative development support system that enables various types of knowledge generated on software/system development sites to be organized and shared
4. A P2P replicated object computing environment built on Java (a platform used to construct various collaborative systems)

The learning environment described in Item 2 has been incorporated into regular school curricula and holiday workshops under a partnership with organizations such as Ritsumeikan Primary School and a nonprofit organization for science education.