Shinji Shimojo
journey of academic networks and examines the challenges — and
opportunities — they face in the era of Agentic AI.
The speaker co-founded SAINT (IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and
the Internet) in 2001 and has since led international research through
testbeds including PRAGMA, CENTRA, and the RISE/OpenFlow SDN platform.
Academic communities built the internet’s foundations — but the harvest
was reaped by commercial platforms. The survival of US Ignite after
GENI’s closure offers a key lesson: testbeds thrive when connected to
communities. As the Supercity Architect for Osaka, the speaker witnessed
how smart city platforms, including the Osaka Regional Data Exchange
Network (ORDEN), fall into a structural trap — centralized cloud
feudalism — where local data sovereignty is surrendered and small
communities cannot sustain systems without subsidies. Agentic AI will
deepen this divide.
This talk proposes countermeasures rooted in academic tradition: a
“local production and local consumption of information” architecture,
the MYPLR data marketplace (which holds no actual data, returning
sovereignty to citizens), and the role of academic federations such as
eduroam in enabling trusted data exchange. Drawing on the “Valley of the
Wind” charter — which envisions technology fully harnessed for human
coexistence with nature in decentralized, autonomous communities — the
talk proposes an Academic Agentic AI Federation as the infrastructure
for 1,000 such valleys. Finally, the talk highlights the critical
importance of cultivating the next generation who will build this
future: through JST ACT-X “Cyber Infrastructure for an AI-Coexistent
Society,” of which the speaker serves as Research Director, young
researchers across information science, AI, quantum, and social science
are forming the human network that will sustain cyber infrastructure for
decades to come. Just as one testbed changed the world, the people we
cultivate today will build 1,000 Valleys of the Wind tomorrow.
Bio: Shinji Shimojo received the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University
in 1983 and 1986, respectively. He was an Assistant Professor with the
Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Faculty of Engineering
Science at Osaka University from 1986, and an Associate Professor with
the Computation Center from 1991 to 1998. During this period, he also
worked for a year as a Visiting Researcher at the University of
California, Irvine. He has been a Professor with the Cybermedia Center
(then the Computation Center) at Osaka University since 1998, and from
2005 to 2008 and from 2015 to 2023 had been the director of the Center.
He was an executive researcher and a director of the Service Platform
Architecture Research Center(SPARC) 2008 to 2011 at the National
Institute of Information and Communications Technology from 2008 to
2011. He is a professor at Aomori University. His current research work
is focusing on a peer-to-peer communication network, ubiquitous network
systems, HPC, HPDA and IoT systems. He is a founding member of PRAGMA
and CENTRA. From Aug. 2023, he served a APAN chair. He was awarded the
Osaka Science Prize in 2005 and by the Minister of Internal Affairs in
2017. He is a member of IEEE, IEICE fellow, and IPSJ fellow.