Since late 1990's, the reliability of temperature measurements at high temperatures was remarkably upgraded by establishing the national metrology standards for calibration of thermocouples up to 1550 °C, and by implementing the traceability system. The traceability system, structured as a hierarchical link of calibrations between the national metrology standards and practical measurements, was designed in consideration of various elements such as availability of the measurement standards and sharing the responsibility with accredited calibration laboratories. The optimized scheme for industries in Japan was established by promoting a balanced combination of conventional techniques held by accredited calibration laboratories and progressive technology, taking into account the spread of the progressive technology.

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Point of care testing (POCT), the analysis of biomarkers at patient's beside, is a continuously expanding trend in the practice of laboratory diagnosis. Although some POCT devices for the analysis of blood glucose and/or several infectious diseases have been developed, many laboratory tests in almost all hospitals are contracted out to laboratory diagnosis companies. However, outsourcing of biomarker analysis is time-consuming, high in cost, and requires much blood and reagents. Consequently we are constructing a biomarker analysis system on microchips for the POCT device. In this paper, we show the core technology for the analysis of biomarkers on microchips, and describe the problems and its solutions in the application of microchips for POCT device.

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It is of importance to establish the hydrocarbon flow standard which acts as the basis for vast dealings and taxation for hydrocarbons, enforcement of the policy on energy savings and high quality management of industries. As a result of investigation into calibration methods, reliability, and effectiveness, the specification of the national primary standard and the traceability system for hydrocarbon flow in Japan was designed. We took the technical initiative in establishing the traceability system using JCSS (Japan Calibration Service System) as basis of the national primary standard in the limited region of flow rates and various kinds of liquids. The national primary standard of high accuracy and safety has been developed. This project was evaluated through verification of international consistency by way of international key comparisons.

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We propose Clinico-Informatics, as a research field for dealing with risks of information systems based on informatics. In this paper, we concentrate on extracting a general model of technology transfers from the author's experiences, i.e. transferring mathematical system verification techniques to the fields of system development. We consider a general scenario for technology transfers with the methodology of field-science. Moreover, we discuss roles of the elemental technologies used in the scenario such as ways for conducting fieldworks, interviews, and participant observation.

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For the purpose of assisting skill transfer training in small and medium manufacturing industry, an acquisition method of judgment skills of experienced factory workers on shop-floors of metal processing such as forging, casting and plating is proposed. Several software applications based on the method have been developed and evaluated in the manufacturing factories. The future vision of skills and skilled workers in the manufacturing industry is also discussed.

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The use of cryptographic modules is rapidly expanding throughout the world. Because of this, it is necessary to standardize a security evaluation scheme and to establish a public evaluation and validation program for these modules. Side channel attacks, which extract secret information from the cryptographic module by analyzing power consumption and electromagnetic radiation, are attracting a lot of attention. Research activity on such attacks has intensified recently. However, it is difficult to compare evaluation schemes proposed by different researchers because of differences in the experimental platform or environment. This makes it difficult for other researchers to repeat and verify the results. Therefore, we have developed cryptographic hardware boards and analysis software to serve as a common, uniform evaluation platform for side channel attacks. We have distributed this platform to government, industry, and academic research labs throughout the world in order to facilitate the development of an international standard.

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This article intends to give a basic logical framework of “research & technology development (RTD) evaluation” for the realization of “science for society”. Although the RTD evaluation is to be designed for promoting the evolution of strategies that utilize the knowledge derived from science and technology for the well-being of society and for solving public issues, some confusion emerges due to misinterpretation of concepts and/or verbal abuse when putting evaluation into practice. Through conceptual mapping of previous studies with original daily-life examples, this article shows that the role of evaluation is to reflect the current state of affairs in order for strategies to be better reformulated cyclically and circularly.

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[in Japanese]

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