Takashi Washio (Professor, Faculty of Business and Commerce, Kansai University)

　As the expression Measurement is the mother of science suggests, progress in science and technology begins with seeing and noticing. The history of advances in science and technology can also be called the history of advances in measurement technology.
　In resolving global social challenges such as the SDGs, beginning with becoming carbon neutral by 2050, it will be essential to develop various new practical materials, including from the standpoints of energy and recycling. At the front lines of leading science and technology research, the subjects of the research are shifting toward grasping and understanding the peculiarities of complex, uneven layered structures and substance changes. Understanding complex substances and phenomena like this is hardly achieved by simply improving conventional measurement technology or similar strategies, and so breakthroughs in measurement and analysis methods are essential.
　In this research area, our aim is to bring about sophisticated advances in measurement and analysis methods and generate new measurement and analysis systems that are capable of resolving actual and various difficult challenges in measurement and analysis by combining advances in measurement technology with information technology such as advanced mathematical modeling and machine learning. We also aim at innovating measurement and analysis processes to offer Japan’s research environments advantages over the coming 10 or 20 years. Moreover, the effectiveness of the new measurement and analysis methods produced in this research area should be verified in the real-world situation such as the development of actual new materials, and their generality should be explored in other research and development fields that face similar difficulties beyond the original target fields.
　More specifically, the research will position boundary-breaking advanced measurement, adaptation of measurement data informatics, and multiscale/multimodal measurements, and their use case development as key research components, and will pursue measurement and analysis innovations by realizing a research environment that merges these components.