Ideas machine feeds industry

Press, 10 February 1983, Page 17

Ideas machine feeds industry

From

PETER McGILL

in Tokyo

.The ability of Japanese to spot industrial winners is no accident. It is derived from more than 100 years of scouring the world for new ideas in science and technology. Recent cases of computer espionage have caused suspicion of Japanese methods, but success has been largely due to thoroughness in collecting publicly available research data, whether through the trading companies or the Japanese Government’s own agencies. This efficiency is typified by the Japan Information Centre on Science and Technology, which picks out new ideas from 5000 periodicals from over 50 countries and spreads the word through a dozen journals and a nationwide computer system. This links nine branch offices in major industrial and research centres. Subscribers can dial into the system to produce files on tnousands of subjects. Call-up the file on Interferon, for instance, the new anti-cancer

drug that scientists everywhere are trying to mass produce by bioengineering, and the computer spews out a stream of information on Japanese and foreign research work. While the centre is not unique in function or size (“It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Lockheed Corporation’s ‘Dialog’ service,” says Tom Owens of the United States National Science Foundation), it offers users much better access to foreign research work. Much of its $250 million-a-year budget is spent on translating documents, a task that will become easier and cheaper when a three-year Government project for “machine translation” of scientific literature by computer bears fruit. Surprisingly, few foreigners bother to take advantage of the openness of Japanese research work or the mass of scientific articles available in the Japanese language. — Copyright, London Observer Service.