Abundant marine resources are widely distributed throughout Japan’s exclusive economic zone, mainly on the seafloor. These resources include hydrothermal mineral deposits, methane hydrate energy resource, and fishery resource. The quantity and the distribution of those resources have been made clear. My laboratory has developed autonomous underwater vehicle which can navigate and observe the seafloor using mounted sensors, and resource investigation method using image processing. Fishery and mineral resources have been surveyed using developed vehicle and observation system, and these results contribute to keep sustainable use of underwater resource.
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http://www.ccr.kyutech.ac.jp/professors/wakamatsu/w6/w6-4/entry-2701.html
In recent years we have witnessed a rapid increase of digital data stored in computers, and have faced difficulties in using/analyzing a large scale data unavailable before. Although developing scalable algorithms has been a main theme in computer science, the recent situation seems to force us to take further steps, that is, we need a new paradigm to deal with such big data. As one of the promising approaches to the problem, we study the compressed data processing in which data is processed in compressed form. Since the compressed data processing algorithms run directly on compressed data, we can process the data very efficiently if it is highly compressible.
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http://www.ccr.kyutech.ac.jp/professors/iizuka/i-12/i12-3/entry-4707.html
Power electronics is a key technology on power conversion in energy infrastructure that lead to contribution to energy-saving. Among that, power electronic device is a major component and demands high efficiency and high power. The device comprising of silicon (Si) semiconductor, recently, has approached theoretical performance limits. Accordingly, expectations for wide bandgap materials such as silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN) and diamond, have increased. Among them, diamond has attractive physical properties surpassing other materials, such as high breakdown electric field and high thermal conductivity, for power electronic devices. The practical use of diamond for electronic devices, however, is restricted until now by several issues, including small size of crystalline substrate and high resistivity of semiconductor layer. We are trying to solve these issues by experimental approaches, which are crystal growth by hot filament chemical vapor deposition and reduction of resistivity by heavily doping. Our aim is contributing to the realization of a low-environment-burden and energy-saving device by making the most of characteristics of the material.
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http://www.ccr.kyutech.ac.jp/professors/tobata/u-16/u-16-2/entry-2687.html
We are aiming to construct virtual cells to accelerate rational drug discovery and fermentative production. Life is a system that consists of multiple building blocks such as DNAs and proteins. In the last century, one of the main themes in Biology was revealing the properties of each building block. A current challenge is to understand how the components interact with each other and produce biological functions. For this purpose, not only biological experiments, but also computer simulations are essential. Using supercomputers, we are simulating and analyzing dynamics of metabolic networks.
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http://www.ccr.kyutech.ac.jp/professors/iizuka/i-12/i12-3/entry-2636.html
As is well known, the biomedical field is strongly demanded to investigate a single cell and determine the functions and properties of cells. Nowadays, in terms of tissue engineering, this approach has been applied to restructure artificial tissue, organs, and body parts by assembling cells. For such purpose, combination of many technologies is quite important to build and control cells in vitro environment. In order to establish an effective method for assembling a cell, our research group focuses on development of high-speed and accurate mechanical system for handling and measuring wet objects with multiple scales based on micro-nano mechatronics, medical robotics, MEMS, and micro fluidics technologies. As integrity and innovation of these technologies, our team is highly motivated to contribute to discovery in mechanism of living organisms and development of novel actuators and sensors.
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During the last two decades, the world’s information is rapidly growing. The digital information is processed by electronic devices using semiconductor and stored in memory devices such as a hard disk drive using ferromagnet. Spintronics is an exciting research field that holds promise to build faster and more efficient devices to process and store the information. We study static and dynamical properties of nano-scale magnets to generate spin current which is a flow of spin angular momentum. The spin current will be applied to develop a new class of spintronic devices.
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Recently, the therapies for damaged or lost tissues, including tissue or organ transplantation, surgical reconstruction, drug therapy, synthetic prostheses, and medical devices, have been performed. However, our human body has very complicated system, so still now a lot of researchers are studying to regenerate the human tissue. One of the roles of implants is to replace malfunctioning original human tissues to achieve their functionalities as they are fixed to the healthy tissues. In our group, the synthesis of novel natural polymer and inorganic hybrids has been studied. The hybrids improve the cell attachment, cell proliferation, and cell differentiation. The current focus is on the elucidation of the effect of silicate species on the cell behavior and the development of new biomaterial.
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https://research02.jimu.kyutech.ac.jp/html/100000586_ja.html
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All living organisms have experienced many phenotypic changes in the evolutionary process to adapt various environments. However, the cause of phenotypic changes is not clear in DNA level. In my laboratory, using genome data and expression data in various plant species, we inferred molecular changes causing various phenotypes. Determining the evolutionary timing of molecular changes, the evolutionary origin of phenotypic effect is examined. Also, based on the patterns of DNA changes, we try to identify novel functional genes in plant genomes. Now, we’re examining the function of phenotypic genes or newly identified genes experimentally.
