This paper aims at discussing engineering ethics from the perspective of the relationship between professional ethics and engineering ethics. Moreover, we will try to discuss the possibility of the application of engineering ethics to the information and knowledge sciences. Code of ethics, which plays a critical role in engineering ethics, is composed of two parts—norms common to engineering and norms specific to each field of technology. Therefore, if we want to apply engineering ethics to the information and knowledge sciences, we should take steps to specify the range of the field and clarify the norms in the field. In this paper, we will suggest norms specific to the information and knowledge sciences by conducting a case study to clarify the ethical problems in the technology of information filtering.

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Based upon the concept of “JICCHI (practice)”, this paper discusses practical engineering education. The topic becomes more and more important in engineering education. Then, the paper shows new approaches in engineering education. They are regarded as next generations of engineering design classes, which Japanese universities introduced to their engineering curriculums recently. Lastly, it discusses their relation with engineering ethics.

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At present, engineering ethics is introducing into engineering education in many countries in the world. In Japan just the same, engineering academic societies and professional societies are dealing with ethics education, and engineering ethics education is in activity at universities of science and technology. In this paper, the author will examine the necessity of engineering ethics and future engineering ethics, making a survey of historical backgrounds of engineering ethics including the difference of each country. He will take historical backgrounds into consideration by concentrating on the professional responsibility of engineers. And at last, he shall proceed to consider future engineering ethics, and the discussion of necessity of founding engineering ethics by philosophy of technology, paying attention to European approach which is trying to expand engineering ethics into ethics of technology.

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This paper proposes a Bayesian networks technique and a heuristic search method for retrieving the most relevant documents, by combining the user profiles with the document details in matching the given query words. This proposed technique helps users to retrieve the documents in the descending order relevant to their needs, as the users can specify their requirements through a set of query words of interests along with heuristic information regarding the required documents. This technique stores heuristic information in both document profiles and user profiles. Then Bayesian networks are used to order documents in the descending order of users' relevancy. We have completed the experiment with 850 document records in the faculty library. Experimental results show that there are two factors that might have some effects on the results. The first factor is the sampling of the documents by the system itself and the second factor is the document number relevant to the users' needs.

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An explosive increase of the gene expression data provides us a chance to analyze fundamental biological phenomena such as how the genes are being used in the organisms. As the data increases, however, we faced new problems how we deal with and analyze an enormously large amount of data. Moreover, the gene expression data includes information of the time, location and network of the genes that cannot be managed easily. Thus, the establishment of a novel management system for the gene expression data is one of the most essential tasks in the biological data analyses. Here, we introduce our visualizing platform of higher-dimensional biological data for the management of the gene expression data.

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This article describes how successfully Corporate Research & Development of Ube Industries, Ltd. had tackled to construct an information retrieval system for end users, and briefs the “Information Retrieval Adviser System” being emerged from the IR system construction. It is based on the policy that research or information retrieval should be done by researchers or scholars themselves who actually engaged in R&D, invention and so on. The company continues to introduce end user oriented information retrieval systems and necessary end user education or orientation. In detail each research department selects “information retrieval advisers” for the purpose of making the end user education more effectively, and raising the effects. Those advisers not only do their own studies but also instruct or advise for other researchers on how to effectively conduct information retrieval. In addition to this adviser system, the author also describes the support of user education of electronic journal (ScienceDirect) for laboratory members.

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Recently, it is globally necessary to collect data on toxicities of numerous chemical substances available in market. But safety tests using animals take huge cost and period, and it is impossible to get toxicity data on all unascertained chemical substances by animal test. Also there are many problems in existing databases which collect toxicity data on chemical substances. As a screening method for animal tests, a toxicity prediction on a basis of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) is meaningful. Several toxicity prediction systems with QSAR have been developed, but the performances of most existing systems are highly questionable. In order to develop a toxicity prediction system for numerous chemical substances showing a higher performance than those of existing systems, we are applying a neural network technique. Several problems on toxicity information and its QSAR prediction of chemical substances are discussed.

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