International Digital Earth
Applied Science Research Center

When looking back in the history, we notice that mankind has been continuously struggling with natural disaster, conflicts, and infectious diseases and other emerging crises. Unfortunately, not just that we haven’t reached the solution, we are now challenged by a new types of risks, such as global warming and a negative impact from the excessive technologies. Globalization has strengthened the inter-relations among the risks, and not only it makes problem complicating but also it significantly expanded its range of impact. Therefore, irrelevant local issues may end up as a threat for global humanities in a blink of an eye. Characteristics of the nowadays risks will be in its complexity, diversity, and urgency which demands quick response to avoid an unnecessary expansion from the impact. To confront these varieties of risks, a new inter and trans-discipline based approach which grasps and visualizes the problem comprehensively in real-time is required.
Chubu university established an institute, IDEAS (International Digital Earth Applied Science Center), to encourage collaborative study among researchers in different fields and to deploy this approach to resolve the complexed problems in the nowadays society (we call this complex systemic problem).