(No.1) Making Information Richer As an information technology
engineer, I often reflect on the importance of content.
Traditionally, the most important content has been text, which
is circulated mostly by printing and publishing activities. As
Figure 1 shows, these activities stopped growing around 1990.
When we take into account that information grows at an average
of 40% annually, this abrupt change should indicate that
information is moving from the printed page to some other
medium. My guess is that the shift has been predominately to
images. The most precious information, of course, is art. And
Chinese calligraphy is a valuable form of art for many Japanese.
The most famous calligrapher is Yi Zhi Wang, who is often called
The Mahatma of calligraphy (Figure 2). He lived in China in the
4th century and is still worshiped. With calligraphy, images
(font style) are very important. Some valuable contents have
survived as long as 1600 years. Our Image Appliance Lab has been
tasked with achieving better use of