This series of articles is for presenting the outcomes obtained through activities by the Research Committee on Society Design, Transdisciplinary Federation of Science and Technology (TRAFST). In order to solve the problems our modern society is now facing, new approaches more positive and more predictive are required for designing social institutions and social functions. The committee discussed the present situations, promising approaches, and successful cases of society design, and consequently could suggest some directives for future researches. Promotion of such transdisciplinary studies fits the objectives of TRAFST.

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Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) is a cutting-edge technique to understand various social phenomena. ABM focuses from global phenomena to individuals in the model and tries to observe how individuals with individual characteristics or “agents” will behave as a group. However, the importance of the modeling methodology has not been common yet even in the academic convergent technology societies. The paper discusses the principles, strength, and weakness of ABM. The paper also describes the role of simulation sciences in social system domains and how ABM should be a new standard of such analysis.

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Consider that human behavior is a three dimensional object. Each field of social sciences has been tackling this object using a different sword: emotion in psychology, incentive in economics, norm in sociology, and so on, and these sections almost have no intersection, which we call the state in blind men and the elephant. As an attempt to overcome this, we show some results of our research notes in social dilemma including the problem of public good provision.

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It is important to understand characteristics of human behaviors in real world settings for society design, because human is a major element of society and human factor is a dominant driving force of real world social behavior. This paper describes an example of applying an interview-based Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) incorporating with content analysis for eliciting cognitive competencies for disaster nursing. CTA is a methodology from cognitive systems engineering to examine human cognition in real world context by such as field observation, process tracing, interview, and questionnaires and content analysis is a methodology originated in social science to analyze text contents. The result of this study indicates that this interdisciplinary method is more effective for examining human behaviors than a single disciplinary method and is a promising approach for society design.

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To solve current social problems, manufacturers need to supply service rather than materialized products to consumers. We have been proposing a novel engineering paradigm to deal with services, service engineering. We define services as a state change. A service model consists of three sub-models: scope model, view model and flow model. A computer-aided design tool, called Service Explorer, is developed to represent a network of the parameters and determines the influence weight one another.

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Modern science developed its methodology through the Scientific Revolution in 17th century and established its social institution through the second Scientific Revolution in 19th century. In the latter period, science was specialized from science to sciences, and lost its unity as “natural philosophy.” The mainstream of scientific thought consists of atomism, analytic method and local optimization. To overcome the specialization of science and to realize the integration of knowledge, it may be stimulating to consult the intellectual heritage of Japanese thought which includes the unique concepts of “place (basho),” “scene (bamen)” and “between-ness (aida).”

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This document describes the personal identification by using finger vein patterns, one of the recent enterprizes conducted by the TRAFST (Transdisciplinary Federation of Science and Technology). First, a brief review is given on the biometrics using finger prints and iris. Next, an equipment of personal identification by using finger veins developed by Hitachi Co. Ltd. is illustrated. Then diversity of human finger vein images is shown by extracting their patterns, by using the equipment, from the right and left index fingers, and middle fingers of 506 person and finally the usefulness of finger veins patterns for personal identification is shown by evaluating the false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR). These rates depend on the cut-off point C; when C = 0.295 those rates are estimated to be 0.00000001% and 0.00005%, respectively.

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“Virtual Reality (VR)” is a name of the technology to give us an opportunity to go inside an image world synthesized by computers. This word has become popular to the public since 1989. Thanks to the progress of computer technology, various VR-like services and applications are available in our society nowadays. Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ) was established in 1996 to promote communication among the researchers and engineers of this field. This paper introduces the history and current activities of VRSJ and Virtual Reality R&D.

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The Japan Statistical Society is a professional society of statisticians founded in 1931. The mission of the society is to promote excellence in statistical research and research training, in statistical education, and in the practice of statistics as well. In this article, after a brief review of its long history the present activities of the society are presented such as academic journal publications, organization of annualmeetings, international affairs and also awarding of distinguished statisticians, among others. Future directions that the society aims to are also discussed.

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