[in Japanese]

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As a step of the National Innovation System, foresight activity is increasingly operated in a variety of countries. One of the major methods in the foresight studies, Horizon Scanning method is being penetrated in the world foresight community. We investigated such national foresight activities in Taiwan, Thailand, Philippines, South Korea, Iran, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, China, Finland, and USA. On the other hand, we found that in Japan, corporate foresight activities are more active than Japan’s national foresight activity. In about 15 years, many Japanese corporates have adopted Horizon Scanning method as a way of idea generation for new business developments. However recently, some Japanese corporates refocused on the same method as a way of building internal inno- vation ecosystems, in which creating their own future chronology map was effective to share common future scenarios in their organizations. In Japan, sharing common future scenarios between national and corporate level should be a current challenge.

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The research purpose is to promote of the return of research results on the natural disaster risk study to local communities. Establish a database which will provide a web service for local natural disaster-risk management practices. Research findings of natural science, engineering, and social science from universities and research institutes and so on all over Japan are to be integrated and combined within the database. This web service will facilitate the research finding distribution in the proper form to be utilized by local natural disaster managers in Japan. In this paper, we search for indices of the regional characteristics necessary to implement disaster prevention countermeasures and study a method to extract these countermeasures and examples based on the indices. In addition, we show the results and problems of this research and consider future Web services for regional disaster prevention.

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This document describes the history and future prospects of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan. The society runs unique events including International collegiate Virtual Reality Contest and qualification tests for VR technology. The load map of VR for 2040 was drawn up in 2013.

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This report introduces the Medium Term “Shinka” Plan of the Japan Society for Quality Control and the cooperative activities among academic societies based on it. In particular, we in- troduce the following research activities in brief: The first is a research for standardization to attain service excellence with Society for Serviceology, the second are intensive industry-university collab- orative researches to harmonize classical statistical modelling and machine learning approaches for quality improvement and the third is research activities on new product development processes with Robust Quality Engineering Society.

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In behavioral economics, violation of rationality in human judgment and decision making has been investigated. In neoclassical economics, on the contrary, almost all human behavior (in- cluding addiction) has been assumed to be rational. Recent developments in Neuroeconomics have revealed neural foundations for human judgment and decision making. Cyber technologies offer new risks for new types of addiction (e.g., internet addiction, online video game addiction, and smartphone addiction); while these technologies can potentially offer new intervention methods for the treatment of addiction. In this review, current findings in the studies of addiction in the age of “super smart society” (i.e., societies highly digitized and connected via SNSs) are introduced and future directions are discussed.

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Aim and process of establishing the Society for Science on Form, Japan are explained, along with relations with some Japanese and international organizations. A contribution of Dr. Torahiko Terada to this field is introduced, who was a physicist active in the early 20-th century. A hint for future development of this field is given at the end.

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Communities can be divided into two categories: regional and thematic. The regional community exists within a geographical area while the thematic community which relates to a par- ticular subject goes beyond space. These communities are the warp and woof of society, so they are thought to constitute a matrix. The community matrix framework has important implications for the near future of Japan.

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