NTT Research and Development for the Age of Transformation

In response to increases in the number of security threats and in the volume of traffic on the network, the various research and development (R&D) laboratories at NTT (hereafter, NTT R&D) are carrying out R&D to address social issues, reinforce industrial strength, help revitalize local economies, and thereby build a better society by providing advanced technologies that enable information and communication technology (ICT) to further penetrate our lives. Toward these ends, NTT R&D is focused on networking, cloud, security, and basic technologies that provide foundations for those technical areas. This article first addresses artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), both of which have come under the spotlight in recent years. AI has become a hot topic and aims at duplicating the intellectual faculties of humans using machines. The workings of the human brain can be regarded as consisting of three processes: 'recognition/understanding of the external world,' 'inferring/judging,' and'providing feedback to the external world.' Based on this understanding, AI is beginning to be used in a number of different fields. What are the intellectual faculties of humans? Human activity for perceiving/recognizing the external world means recognizing not only objects and people but also human emotions and nuances of human expression.