Society, in which universities in Japan are embedded, faces a range of diverse structural problems. These include the progressive aging and the continued decrease of the population since 2005, the decline of domestic industry due to recession and the necessity of tackling environmental issues as represented by greenhouse gas emission control stipulated in the 1998 Kyoto Protocol. Universities are affected by the decline in the population of 18 year olds. There are many universities in a state of management crisis unable to procure students sufficiently due to the severe competition among universities. Our discussion is based on the work of the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ,) since 1999. We first examine the necessary conditions for a campus master plan for realizing the mission of universities (AIJ, 2004)and then direct our attention toward the relationship between campuses and cities – specifically between campuses and the neighboring urban area(Kobayashi et al., 2008), and between academic activities and the activities and livelihoods of the local community (AIJ, 2011).
Current patent systems face a serious problem of declining quality of patents as the larger number of applications make it difficult for patent officers to spend enough time for evaluating each application. For building a better patent system, it is necessary to define a public consensus on the quality of patent applications in a quantitative way. In this article, we tackle the problem of assessing the quality of patent applications based on machine learning and text mining techniques. For each patent application, our tool automatically computes a score called patentability, which indicates how likely it is that the application will be approved by the patent office. We employ a new statistical prediction model to estimate examination results (approval or rejection) based on a large data set including 0.3 million patent applications. The model computes the patentability score based on a set of feature variables including the text contents of the specification documents. Experimental results showed that our model outperforms a conventional method which uses only the structural properties of the documents. Since users can access the estimated result through a Web-browser-based GUI, this system allows both patent examiners and applicants to quickly detect weak applications and to find their specific flaws.
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