About us
Welcome message from the head of the department
The department of Systems Innovation comprises several departments established during the University of Tokyo’s creative period. By combining diverse engineering elements into holistic systems, we generate innovative solutions that significantly benefit society. This interdisciplinary approach is precisely what we call Systems Innovation.
Recently, technologies developed by humanity have advanced dramatically. New technologies, centered around AI, quantum computing, and communications, not only make our lives convenient, but they profoundly transform the very structure of contemporary society. You may already be familiar with advances in AI, but breakthroughs in communication technologies such as 5G and satellite communication systems are driving the integration of cyber-physical spaces, often referred to as Society 5.0. Moreover, the extraordinary computational power of quantum computing is expected to significantly contribute to the future advancement of science and technology. At the Department of Systems Innovation, we not only conduct research on these tools but also effectively utilize them to foster further technological innovation.
Our department also addresses transformations in how humanity interacts with our planet. Frequent extreme weather events, such as torrential rain and abnormal heat waves, clearly indicate humanity’s profound impact on the global environment. Facing feedback from nature itself, humanity is now initiating transformative actions toward a carbon-neutral society. Transitioning away from our current extensive energy consumption is a notable example; however, we must consider many specific strategies to ensure human survival.
Furthermore, society has been forced to change its form due to new infectious diseases such as COVID-19, combined with persistent conflicts and geopolitical tensions, remind us vividly of how vulnerable our daily lives are—particularly regarding energy, resources, food, and essential supplies. Our society has reached unprecedented complexity, making it impossible for any single technological advancement alone to solve these issues. Today’s challenges require designing sophisticated societal systems that go beyond mere optimization based on isolated metrics.
In such a contemporary society, we are expected to lead the development of science, technology, and the social environment. This requires systems innovation at the forefront of challenges related to global environmental issues, such as energy and resources, and Society 5.0. Neither a group of generalists nor specialists alone can achieve innovation. Simply organizing various experts from different fields can often create friction. Instead, we need individuals with deep expertise and experience who can guide us to the correct solutions with a holistic view. We are at a significant turning point in society, which presents an opportunity for system innovation to stimulate major changes, including creating new industries and rejuvenating existing ones.
The Department of Systems Innovation is committed to nurturing individuals with both deep expertise and a broad, integrative perspective. With a strong awareness of today’s complex societal challenges, our students and researchers work across disciplines, combining the latest research findings to develop new ideas and contribute meaningful solutions back to society.
Best wishes,
Fujio Toriumi, PhD
Head of the department and professor,
Department of Systems Innovation
Department of Systems Innovation
New Horizons for Education and Research
In modern days, multifaceted challenges involving humans, artificial objects and nature require attention and more versatile personnel are requisite. We at Department of Systems Innovation, based on systems science to comprehend phenomena from multilateral and panoramic viewpoints, are committed to implementing both education and research on principles and methodology to materialize innovative systems for better harmony between nature and human society through integrating engineering knowledge that has been subdivided into specialized areas.
Creation of New Values
Systematic ways of thinking to comprehend phenomena from multilateral and panoramic viewpoints are becoming increasingly important in modern days as we need to find solutions for sprouting various challenges in our society where we see globalization accelerating and complexity growing deeper. Engineering of today is expected to make a clear departure from a conventional perception of engineering such as extraction and analysis of basic elements of the subject matter. What is expected in modern society is having solutions presented for challenges in our society such as environmental issues, realization of safe and secure society and many other tasks. These solutions need to happen while trying to integrate processes with due consideration for the relationship or interaction among factors as well as putting together our knowledge and technology previously obtained in specialized fields. For instance, we have a challenge to harmonize nature, society and technology. This challenge calls for more commitment in factors around human-made objects such as humanware, management, service or social system in addition to other familiar human-made industrial product objects. We are seeing more importance in considering the impact of human-made objects to our society as well as their installation method with more economic-soundness while continuing to pursue better design and production processes for each human-made object. The expectation is the possibility for creating unrivaled, multidisciplinary values by overall redesigning the mechanisms for society and the environment but doing so not only for individual product values.
Exploring New Fields
For engineering to meet the expectations of our society and to be more extensively applied, we at Department of Systems Innovation wish to explore new engineering fields toward the goal of functional fusion of natural systems, human-made objects and social systems based upon integrated knowledge of engineering as well as system thinking.
