Japan to Develop AI to Assist Research

Illustration (Pixabay)

JAKARTA - The Japanese Ministry of Education plans to develop generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology that has the ability to produce scientific and medical hypotheses by studying research papers and research images to assist the research process.

As quoted by Antara from Nikkei on Sunday, the Japanese government hopes that by developing its own AI technology, it can guarantee data security while increasing national competitiveness.

Currently, AI development is focused on scientific and medical research, which is estimated to cost 30 billion yen (IDR 3.2 trillion). The Japanese Ministry of Education will raise funding for the initial development phase in the 2024 fiscal year.

Research institute Riken will lead the development of the AI. It is planned that the AI ​​technology will be tested in external laboratories and companies starting from the 2025 fiscal year.

The project is expected to last eight years and aims to make the technology available to researchers nationwide starting in fiscal 2031.

Additional research data will be fed into generative AI to enable it to identify substances that cause disease or design materials for medical or industrial use.

Riken has a collection of research data that can be used to improve generative AI capabilities. AI will study data relating to candidate compounds or diagnostic images used in research in the medical and industrial fields.

The AI ​​technology will also help with paper writing by researching past literature. In the future, researchers can interact with AI to discover and test new hypotheses.

Currently companies from the US such as Open AI and Google are leading the trend in developing generative AI. Meanwhile in Japan, NTT and SoftBank are working on an AI model that is compatible with Japanese. The technology is expected to increase productivity in the administrative field, such as making electronic mail, documents and minutes.