The JSAI and AI activity in Japan

Japan has a long history of AI research, in fact, research on computer vision and natural language processing was already in progress in the early seventies. However, two events that started Japan´s wave of AI research were the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Tokyo in 1979 and the Fifth Generation Computer System Project which the Ministry of International Trade and Industries started in 1982. Both events greatly impacted Japanese AI research-especially the FGCS project, a 10-year national project to build an inference machine based on logic programming. Japan established its Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence in 1986. JSAI has about 3,500 members and several special-interest groups. It publishes bimonthly online journals and transactions. JSAI recently established a new technical paper category called AI Frontier. This category has distinct evaluation criteria: papers must deeply impress the six expert evaluators. JSAI established the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1990 to complement IJCAI and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.