Shinji Shimojo
Thursday July 9
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Location: Auditorium (Salón de Actos)
Keynote: As COMPSAC marks its 50th anniversary, this talk revisits the 50-year 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.