Site: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Multimedia System Research Laboratory
Shinagawa-Ku Tokyo
Japan

Date Visited: 24 March 1998

WTEC Attendess: L. Goldberg (report author), T. Ager, B. Croft, M. Shamos, R.D. Shelton

Hosts:

BACKGROUND

Matsushita Electric is a conglomerate company in the consumer electric and electronics field representing some 281 individual companies, including major names, such as National, Panasonic, Technics, and Quasar. The company employs 270,000 workers and had net sales of $62 billion in 1997. This visit was conducted at the Multimedia Systems Research Laboratory, one of 13 specialized company laboratories that includes a Central Research Laboratory in Osaka. The company has increased efforts in areas of telecommunications, home equipment, and industrial equipment, while seeing a decrease in the area of traditional consumer video equipment.

The Multimedia Systems Research Laboratory undertakes projects with a time horizon of five years, in comparison to 10 years at the Central Research Laboratory. The mission of the laboratory is the development of networking-based systems and the support of business creation. Three key elements to achieving this are differentiating technology development, fundamental systems development, and creation of new business. The laboratory sits in an exceptionally modernistic building which houses business units, system integration units and an extensive display and demonstration area. The concept of the whole building is to become the systems business front end of Matsushita, with a view to developing new applications and responding quickly to needs of customers.

LAB DEMONSTRATIONS

Full-Text Search

Mr. Oyama previewed a project to develop an English language search engine software based on the company's prior work on Japanese language search engines. Researchers have developed a method of maximal word indexing that is considered well suited for indexing of Japanese text and affords improved accuracy in retrieval. The method utilized character-based indexing, and the size of the index is about 2 times as big as the original text. The demonstration was the full-text search of the U.S. patent literature. The search speed was said to be the fastest in the industry, at an average of 700 million words/sec index search for up to 1 million documents on the server. Compiling the index of the document set required approximately 1-1/2 hours for 1 GB of data. Similar efforts are under way employing their unique methods for the Chinese and Korean languages (4 billion characters/sec in Chinese and 2.4 billion characters/sec in Korean), as well as for other European languages.

Mr. Yasukawa then described another text retrieval project, involving 100,000 documents, that is intended as an intelligent search finder on the World Wide Web. The functions include document ranking, by a similarity measure; automatic summary generation, with quoting of relevant parts of a retrieved document; and extracting related keywords, by selecting a set of keywords relevant for a query from the retrieved documents. The method uses special indexing techniques to compensate for finding words, as in Japanese, which have no spacing as word endings.

Digital Video Disk-Internet Linkage System

Mr. Kiyono described creation of a new business model for providing high-quality video digital information services over the Internet based upon the use of Digital Video Disk (DVD) technology. The DVD ROM, residing with the end user, is encoded with disc identifiers, which when transmitted to the Web server, enables automatic access to a specific Web server. The Web server in turn sends an HTML file to the user to generate up-to-date Web page information and simultaneously provides MPEG-2 playout of the desired video data from the DVD. This service is in preparation, under the growing popularity of DVD with 600 titles recorded. Panasonic has been playing an important role in DVD forum. Some 10-11 companies are involved in this area, and they do not see a problem in setting common formats for this technology. The range of applications envisioned for these services is electronic publishing, electronic commerce, information service, and remote education.

Video Archive and Browse System

Mr. Kato described development work on a visual system of retrieval for large video tape archives, such as those held by TV broadcast stations or even in home video libraries. The video medium is registered and encoded by keywords for subsequent search. Currently, 63 (9 x 7) video clips within the medium are digitized and displayed in a single composite screen in MPEG format.

OPEN DISCUSSION

Following the demonstrations, an extensive discussion period took place dealing with questions raised by the visiting WTEC group. The text following each question below is paraphrasing the hosts' replies.

What are the Activities in Cross-Lingual Retrieval?

[Mr. Yasukawa] The company is just starting such a project and has 6 or 7 researchers in the natural language area. As to speech recognition, it is working in Japanese, English and Chinese. It is planning cooperation with other companies and Japanese universities in this area.

Is Digital Libraries an Application Area?

[Mr. Nishikawa] Matsushita is interested, but since it is a business company, it is hard for it to invest in such a large project. Matsushita is interested in personal home video and document access.

Are There Test Beds for Video Retrieval?

Only for text search but none for visual data.

Is There Interest in Music Downloading?

This lab doesn't deal with music, but it will be a very interesting area.

Where Does Multimedia Fit in?, And How Will it be Supported?

The government supports promotion of multimedia in municipal systems, but customers aren't ready. This laboratory has little government support at this time, but the government has asked for proposals to be submitted. There are a lot of such opportunities.

Is Virtual Reality Being Supported By the Company?

We don't have any projects here, but other Matsushita labs are working with broadcast studios.

Is There Any Focus on the Human Interface?

This is very important for our consumer activities. Only commercial divisions are pursuing it from the practical approach, e.g., designing control buttons on remote controls. Our laboratory focuses on the needs of consumers-hence it is more short term. For example, the National Museum of Ethnology's need for MPEG images drives that work.

[The following two questions elicited a thoughtful response by the senior engineer, Mr. Tsumura, who had the longest experience in the company.]

Does Matsushita Have A Theme?

The company is strong in the consumer electric field. It has been strong in that field and we would like to remain a leader. The future is for a home information infrastructure-with small personal computers in the home. We'd like to build this up.

Is Information a Commodity to be Sold by Matsushita?

There will be a variety of types of information from the society to the home. We need to have something for the homes; neither PCs nor TVs as currently used will be sufficient. We have been a company that provides hardware, but in the future, we need content, technology to manage content, and hardware to play it. We are not so capable in the first two areas of content or management of content.

Where Has the Growth Been in Telecommunications?

[Mr. Nishikawa] In wireless phones, where the number of subscribers reached 20 millions in only five years in Japan. Matsushita is looking at the wireless infrastructure and working on access systems in the home. The company is working jointly with NTT.

Where Do Your Ideas Come From?

The definition of basic research is becoming ambiguous. Multimedia is an applied science that is important. Some work done at the Central Research Laboratory in speech recognition has been going on for the past 20 years.

[An issue of common interest was the level of cooperation between universities and industry in each country. This led to the following question:]

At What Level Are Your Staff Educated, and How Much By the Company?

[Mr. Nishikawa] Employees are educated at the Bachelor's and Master's level, and then trained by the company. Some companies said that they did not always hire professional people. They don't want workers trained in any way, because the companies want to go in a certain direction. They wanted collectivism, not individualism. In this point, general education is more welcome. But things are changing. To create new technology, we need specialists. So the role of universities becomes critical. Generally speaking, their projects have been small, but some universities collaborate and form large projects. This trend helps to accelerate new technology development.

[The young people sitting at the table were asked what their experience level was before joining the company. Most were at the Master's level in computer science related fields, and some had had subsequent experience in basic research, such as at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba.]

REFERENCES

DVD-Internet linkage system. Briefing material.

High-speed English language full text search/registration program. Briefing material.

Intelligent WWW finder. Briefing material.

Matsushita Electric. (General brochure.)

Noguchi, N., Y. Kanno, M. Inaba, K. Kurachi. 1998. New indices for Japanese text: A new work-based index of non-segmented text for fast full-text-search. Systems Trans. of Information Processing Soc. Japan, 39, 1.

Panasonic AV&CC Systems Square. (Multimedia brochure.)

Saato, Mitsuhiro. n.d. Text retrieval system based on Maximal-Word indexing method. Briefing material.

Video archive & browse system. Briefing material.

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Published: February 1999; WTEC Hyper-Librarian