Increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge with the rise of modern science and technology in the last two centuries have resulted in the loss of a sense of unity among sciences and technologies,which hinders the total understanding of the universe, humans, and society. Optimal design of highly complex artifact systems can only be possible through the unified use of all kinds of relevant knowledge and wisdom. Further, solving the complex problems that humans are now facing will require the integration of all sorts of knowledge and wisdom in a coherent manner. Thus, transdisciplinary unification is needed and its realization is greatly anticipated. However, even though the importance of consilience or unity of knowledge has become popular among communities, there is no standard method to unify the necessary knowledge. This article introduces studies on “chinotogo,” or the transdisciplinary unification of knowledge and wisdom at the Science Council of Japan and “chinotogogaku” or “consilienceology.” That is, the study on the methods of the transdisciplinary unification of knowledge and wisdom is discussed together with a proposal for a concrete trial method of transdisciplinary unification using a virtual universe consisting of knowledgebase,modeling, simulation, and virtual reality based realistic human interfaces connected by networks.

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This document describes the prehistory and some episodes before Transdisciplinary Federation of Science and Technology (TraFST) was established from a viewpoint of a person who concerned deeply in those days.

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Econophysics and its related topics are overviewed from the historical and conceptual point of view. Unlike many other unsuccessful trials, the recent trend of econophysics that began at the dawn of the 21st century seems to be doing much better than expected. With the help of rapid progress of computational tools, econophysics seems finishing its first stage successfully and preparing the second stage as a part of “big data science.”

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This paper summarizes the trials of predicting price movements in the financial market in various ways. The first example is to use the framework of the game theory between two players by regarding the next price movement as the next action of a player and the information of the environment surrounding the price movement as the action of the opponent player by using the evolutional computation. The second example is to predict trendy sectors by using RMT-PCA. The third example is to use the randomness of the price fluctuations by means of the RMT-test. An empirical rule “High randomness predicts a good performance in the next period” is extracted by studying the randomness of stocks in the period of 2007-2009.

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We study group correlation structures of financial markets in Japan and U.S. from a network-theoretic point of view. The correlationmatrix of stock price changes, purified by the random matrix theory, is regarded as an adjacency matrix for a network. The weighted links in the networks thus constructed can have negative sign corresponding to anticorrelation between stocks. To identify groups in such a network, we search for the optimum decomposition of nodes which maximizes the total sum of weights of links inside groups. We then find that the network of Tokyo Stock Exchange is decomposed into four groups. The stock prices comove almost perfectly inside the groups and move oppositely across the groups. Also we apply the same analysis to the S&P 500 stocks. The U.S. stock market shows frustrated behavior similar to that embedded in the Japanese market.

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Firms build business relationships through economic activities. PageRank algorithm and motif analysis are applied to Japanese inter-firm network which consists of about one million firms and four million directed links. We show scale-free degree distribution and similarities between degree and PageRank. By comparing with randomized networks, we find that PageRank correlates significantly with the growth rate which is hardly observed with other quantities. We also find that Vshaped triads are network motifs, while feedforward and feedback loop are anti-motifs. By defining roles in the subgraph according to structural equivalence, we detect the significance profile of roles characterizing the industry sector. The taxonomy of industries obtained from the profiles is economically meaningful. These empirical findings may serve to provide an easily interpretable view of the entire inter-firm network and to improve the efficiency and safety of economic systems.

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One of the characteristic analytical methods in Econophysics is observation of distribution function of an economic phenomenon. By comparing the distribution function with a normal distribution, we can find the correlation structure hiding in the phenomenon through Lindeberg’s central limit theorem and the generalized (stable distribution) central limit theorem. We introduce some examples of research which used the distribution function for the phenomena of financial markets, real estate markets, an online product market, and a retail market.

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The restoration revival of the East Japan great earthquake disaster is advancing. But, it is not returned to the former condition return of many companies in the disaster area. In this study, we examined the damage actual situation of the supply chain based on damage fact-finding of precision instrument manufacturing industry Company A. We analyzed it about customer point of contact recovery activity linked a shop floor to former condition return of Company A. Based on this analysis, we examined an indirect problem in the natural disaster for damage and showed permanent countermeasures of the present. It is thought that these countermeasures to the activity that we manufacture and sell it and maintain of many Japanese companies to former condition return are useful for examination. In addition, we contribute to review of BCP/BCM of the companies.

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This case study intends to deepen understanding risk communication and management on genetically modified organisms (GMO). I have been eagerly exploring methodologies and actual cases on these matters, and especially I present results of deliberative discussion cases in this paper. Finally, taken together, I discuss the relatives.

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The ISCIE was founded in 1957 and then called “the Japan Association of Automatic Control Engineers.” For more than 40 years since the foundation, it has been engaged in various activities for the development of science and technology on control and systems engineering through collaboration among the industry, universities, and the government. In the fields of systems and control engineering, there has been dramatic increase in the demand for information-related technology, including computer applications. To meet such demands of the times, the name of the institute has been changed to the Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers (ISCIE) since 1986.

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