Project-based learning

Our university2002 2002 The project-based learning course (officially called "Systems Information Science Practical Training"), a required subject for third-year students, is a problem-finding and problem-solving learning course in which students collaborate both inside and outside the university to solve and resolve a diverse range of issues rooted in real society. It is a pioneering course implemented nationwide as a required subject for all students, and with a history of over 20 years, it forms the core of our university's educational curriculum. A key feature is that teams are formed not only by students but also by faculty members, transcending departmental and course boundaries, and sometimes including people from outside the university, such as local residents, government officials, and businesses.

Project-based learning is more motivating in a socially meaningful environment and collaborative activities. Furthermore, the process of encountering and communicating with team members, teachers, and people from the community and businesses is of great value. The qualities honed through project-based learning activities—such as perspectives, data collection and analysis, discussion skills, understanding and empathy for others, and presentation skills—will be invaluable assets in one's future life.

The presentation unfolds through three themes focusing on sensory organs.

2021 2021 The "Make Brain Project," which follows this one, aims to develop artificial intelligence inspired by the brain's information processing and to understand the mechanisms of the brain in living organisms.
Associate Professor Tomoki Kurikawa, the supervising professor, said, "I simply told them that I wanted them to use their knowledge of the nervous system to tackle real-world problems, and then I started by having the students discuss and decide on specific themes." As a result, the 13 members split into three groups to begin their activities: "a walking robot with a sense of touch," "an AI car with vision," and "an AI that outputs a character predicted from a voice."
When asked about the common thread between the three themes, project leader Masamune Kano explained, "The walking robot focuses on the tactile senses of insects' feet, the AI ​​car focuses on vision, and the AI ​​group that creates characters from voices focuses on hearing. Each of these projects focuses on the sensory organs of humans and other living organisms." In order to explore the workings of the brain, this year they focused on the sensory organs, which are the input and output parts.

The students achieved a certain level of success, despite having areas for improvement.

Associate Professor Kurikawa explained that the actual progress of the project was left to the students' initiative, stating, "It's important for the students themselves to decide on a theme and then think about what methods they will use to achieve it, and build it up from there, so in that respect it has great educational significance." Regarding the project's results, Associate Professor Kurikawa commented, "I got the impression that this year's project came together in a pretty solid form," to which Kano replied, "I spent too much time on making the robot, and didn't have enough time to think about how the brain works."
While other universities also have similar PBL (Project-Based Learning) programs, it seems that few universities are doing it as seriously as Future University. As Associate Professor Kurikawa proudly states, "The leaders of each project develop their management skills, and they also have the opportunity to present their work in Tokyo. That's another one of our strengths," and indeed, the members have grown significantly through their experience with MakeBrain Project.

When purchasing products online, it has become common practice to research information through customer reviews on review sites. This project aimed to analyze customer reviews, which have a significant impact on purchasing decisions, using data science and provide them to users as useful information. The basis for this was the data from "@cosme," Japan's largest cosmetics and beauty information site, provided with the cooperation of the operating company.2023 2023 This project involved approximately 138 million customer reviews. Project leader Kai Hashimoto, who said, "I've always loved cosmetics, and I also found the data science I learned in class interesting, so I didn't hesitate to volunteer for this project," led the 10 members, who split into three groups to carry out their activities.
In "Review Visualization," which selects and analyzes frequently occurring words to provide an overview of reviews at a glance, we successfully created graphs for specific products. In "Review Evaluation," which examines the usefulness of reviews, we created a model to determine whether a review is useful or not and verified its correlation with the number of "Likes." In the "Cosmetic Sample Team," which analyzed the nature of reviews based on the use of manufacturer samples, we gained insights that can lead to the proposal of new services.
Analyzing a massive amount of data all at once would result in errors, so Hashimoto explained that they spent considerable time and effort on preliminary work, such as subdividing and narrowing down categories. "We spent the first half of the year considering themes and analysis methods, and then in the second half, we started working on data analysis in earnest. I'm relieved that we were finally able to put it into practice," Hashimoto said. There are high expectations that this word-of-mouth analysis, which can be applied to other products and services, will improve the convenience and satisfaction of many users.

Security through public-key cryptography is essential for information exchange over the internet. This project aims to learn about cryptographic technologies such as public-key cryptography and blockchain, and to solve related social issues. This year, four members worked to program the elliptic curve algorithm, which is the mainstream of public-key cryptography, and to implement it in hardware.
Project leader Ryosuke Goto explains his reason for choosing this project: "I wanted to study security so that I could take responsibility for the things I create as an engineer in the future." In the first semester, they spent their time learning fundamental mathematics, deepening their knowledge and understanding by reading a thick number theory textbook together as a group. In the second semester, they aimed to implement the project in programming and hardware based on that foundation, but Goto says, "We ran out of time and couldn't reach our goal, but I think we were able to create something that can be carried over to next year and beyond." This experience of tackling a difficult problem with a small, elite group will surely be valuable for each member's future.