Topics of research

Natural Language Processing: What we are focusing on in AI technology is Natural Language Processing (NLP) which can understand natural human language using computers.
This NLP technology is already implemented in account closing reports or Japanese-English translation in our Nikkei Digital and Nikkei Telecom.
We are making an effort to refine our existing technology and functions, and proceeding investigative research for innovative new use such as searching out certain information we need from massive data and summarizing them instantly. We aim for implementing those technologies and services to provide precise information to meet user’s needs.
Image processing: As AI’s deep learning technology advances, a learning function from the image is remarkably improving. We are now actively pursuing investigative research of this automatic image processing technology which can identify human faces or objects.
Further progress of this technology will enable us to minimize and rationalize tagging or captioning work which media companies spend much of time and labor costs.
End users will also be able to enjoy new useful content, such as pinpointing scenes where specific people appear from video news or movies.
Voice processing: We are now working on to accelerate our investigative research of the AI voice recognition system and text-to-speech system.
Audio processing becomes common in our daily life and we naturally ask things or give instructions to our smartphones with our voice. The AI speaker featured audio processing is now also a part of our lives. The lifestyle like waking up with the narrated latest news or weather forecast from AI speakers may soon be our daily routine.
Big data analysis: One of our important themes is the investigative data for analysis technology using big data, and we actually are doing this research using the data of articles of our published papers, market index, and corporate finance data. We are to invest our time to expand this analysis technology, which enables us to find unpredictable useful facts for users, or to forecast the economic market using a variety of devices.
Augmented reality: It is said that the AR technology which can create virtual visual space by adding virtual content in existing space will be the main battlefield in the IT industry of the next generation. As with Google US and Apple are working on development research of the smartphone app, we also focused on its figure and the potential at an early stage and proceeding our research. Our dedication to AR research bear fruit, and the AR technology is being used in the news articles or advertisements in our smartphone app “NIKKEI AR” which launched in November 2018. For us, AR investigative research is now truly an important theme, and will be, too.
Virtual reality: VR is an emerging next-generation technology that can expand the visual expression. By watching stereoscopically deep images, users can experience immersive feeling s as if they were in an environment far from our daily life.
At the “Pierre Bonnard Exhibition” which was held at The National Art Center in Roppongi (supported by Nikkei News Paper, etc), Pierre Bonnard experience booth was created and was spotlighted well． Because, in this booth, Pierre’s paintings and his atelier ware visually created using VR. To create this VR, one of our lab recorded Pierre’s paintings and his atelier in France using a 360° camera, and processed them to VR in Japan.
We will continuously research and refine VR technology, devices, and content.
5G technology: In our various investigative research themes, next-generation mobile communication system 5G is also one that we always focus on. 5G will be the common base of the new digital era, and has great potential to change the existing IT business paradigm.
Once 5G is commercialized in every region in Japan after 2020, we can be benefited to gein wireless communication up to 100 times faster than now.
This change of mobile communication system from 4G to 5G will accelerate the widespread of AR, VR, and AI technology such as image/audio processing, and big data analysis.
Internet of Things: As well as the commercialization of 5G and the technological innovation of AI, IoT, where everything is connected to the Internet, is becoming the infrastructure that will support the information society in the future. This IoT is expected to be used in automatic driving, manufacture field, and our daily life, too. As a good sample, AI speaker, as we are now familiar with, is one of them, and we, Nikkei Digital also use IoT and commercialized as news article webcast via Podcast.
In addition to investigating the latest trends in various devices and devices connected to the Internet, we will flexibly pursue R & D while verifying the practicality and usefulness of IoT-related technologies and services.

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5G AR Natural language processing Voice processing VR