University of Tokyo
Tokyo University, or the University of Tokyo, is a Tokyo-based research company in Japan. Hong?, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano house its five campuses. The University of Tokyo is considered to be Japan’s most prestigious university. The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranks it 21st in the world last year and the highest in Asia.
The University of Tokyo was chartered by the Meiji government back in 1877 by integrating older government schools for medicine and Western learning. In 1886, the university was renamed as the Imperial University and later changed to Tokyo Imperial University in 1897 when the Imperial system was created.
The 1923 Earthquake that struck Tokyo, coupled with the fire, destroyed 700,000 volumes of the university’s library. Hoshino Library, which was under Hoshino Hisashi before it became an integral part of the university, lost a collection of about 10,000 books.
The aftermath of the last World War brought devastation to the university, but the resiliency of the Japanese people brought hope to the university, as it started assuming its original name. And in 1949, with the advent of the new system, Todai got the former First Higher School campus and the Tokyo Higher School, which assumed the responsibility to teach the first and second year undergraduates, and the teachers on the Hongo main campus taught the third and fourth years.
Years later, the University decided to change the beginning of their academic year from April to September, allowing it to align its calendar that of the international standard. It took them five years to finally complete the transition. Currently, the university offers Law, Medicine, Engineering, Letters, Science, Agriculture, Economics, Arts and Sciences, Education, and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
The university has also a lot of research institutes. Among them is the Information and Robot Technology Research Initiative, a research body of the university, and the Johou Systems Kougaku (JSK) Laboratory which is divided into four divisions: The Intelligent Systems Informatics Department, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology; Creative Informatics Department, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology; The Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies; and The Mechano-Informatics Department, Faculty of Engineering.
Among the notable robots that this university has developed is the “Home Assistant Robot.” This robot moves on two wheels and is equipped with two arms each having three fingers. It is also equipped with five mini cameras, six laser sensors and a neck and head that move in three directions.
Recently, the JSK laboratory of the University of Tokyo unveiled their HRP3L-JSK robot, a bipedal robot that can maintain its balance and when tripped, it can calculate its foot position in just 1 millisecond.
With the research made by their labs, the university aims to be one of the leading robotic researchers in the world today.
