Category: News

Since 2021, SOI Asia has offered the APIE (Asia Pacific Internet Engineer) program to partner universities across Asia to develop Internet talent. Recently, a part of this program has been adopted as regular formal course material at Vietnam-Japan University (VJU).

The online courses “Understanding the Internet” and “Operating the Internet” included in the APIE program have been utilized in the required course “Computer Networks and Communications” (instructor: Quang Trung Lu, lecturer) for 43 third-year of undergraduate students in the Computer Science and Engineering (BCSE) program at VJU, starting in October 2024. 

Students who complete these courses will not only earn credits from VJU, but also receive digital certificates that conform to the Open Badges standard issued by SOI Asia on its digital certificate platform INXIGNIA. The digital badges provided through INXIGNIA can be attached when applying to various SOI Asia programs or used as proof of skills and learning history on business platforms such as LinkedIn.

The APIE program generally accepts students twice a year and consists of the following components.

1. APIE Online: Self-paced learning through two online courses offered by Keio University on FutureLearn.
   • Course #1 “Understanding the Internet” (4 weeks)
   • Course #2 “Operating the Internet” (5 weeks)
2. APIE e-Workshop: A series of six seminars and hands-on sessions held bi-weekly on Saturdays via Zoom. These sessions provide opportunities for reflection on learning and community building while progressing through the online courses.
3. APIE Camp: A five-day camp-style program for students who completed the APIE Online and APIE e-Workshop. Hosted by partner universities in Asia, this camp brings together approximately 20-25 students from various Asian universities, including Keio, for collaborative learning.
        
4. APIE Advanced Camp: A five-day residential program open to students who completed the APIE Camp. This camp, held mainly in Japan, gathers approximately 20-25 students from several Asian universities, including Keio, for further collaborative learning.

To date, over 1,400 students from 18 universities across 10 Asian countries have registered for the APIE program, resulting in more than 1,000 digital badges (certificates) being issued. Additionally, the “Understanding the Internet” course offered through APIE Online is available to the public worldwide, with approximately 1,200 students from 99 countries.

Students from VJU who completed APIE Online as part of a regular formal course can continue to participate in other courses, including in-person courses such as “APIE Camp” and “APIE Advanced Camp” by participating in the “APIE e-Workshop” mentioned above after the class period and continuing their study. These APIE courses are offered as extracurricular activities at JVU, providing students with practical skills and knowledge as well as opportunities to build a professional network with peers from SOI Asia partner universities in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, along with researchers and active network engineers in the Internet industry. This experience is also expected to offer valuable insights into future career paths.

SOI Asia is a platform for inter-university education and research cooperation, launched in 2001 led by Keio University.  As of 2024,  29 universities and research institutions are participating in the APIE program. The APIE program, supported by the APNIC Foundation, began in 2021 as part of SOI Asia’s initiatives, in collaboration with partner organizations like the WIDE Project and AITAC (Advanced IT Architect Council), with a mission to nurture the next generation of Internet professionals. 

Today, the development of Internet infrastructure technologies and network operations tends to attract less attention from young engineers compared to emerging technologies like smartphone applications, generative AI, blockchain, and quantum computing. 

However, with approximately thirty percent of the global population still lacking Internet access, despite a worldwide penetration rate of around seventy percent¹, there remains a strong demand for more engineers in the Internet sector. The APIE program aims to equip university students with knowledge of the Internet’s history, design philosophy, practical skills, and career pathway planning, fostering talent to support research and operations in the Internet field, primarily across the Asia-Pacific region.

Vietnam-Japan University was established in July 2014 as the seventh member university of Vietnam National University, Hanoi, under the initiative of the Japanese and Vietnamese governments. Its mission is to foster future leaders and professionals, promote sustainable development, and enhance knowledge transfer between Japan and Vietnam. With “Liberal Arts” and “Sustainability Science” as its educational philosophy, VJU currently offers a wide range of academic disciplines, focusing on interdisciplinary social sciences and advanced engineering and technology. Specifically, VJU offers eight graduate master’s programs (Area Studies, Business Administration, Public Policy, Global Leadership, Nanotechnology, Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Climate Change and Development) and six undergraduate programs (Japanese Studies, Computer Science and Engineering, Civil Engineering, Smart Agriculture and Sustainability, Food Technology and Health, Intelligent mechatronics and Japanese production). As of 2024, the university has approximately 1000 students and is steadily growing as a medium-sized comprehensive university that nurtures human resources to actively contribute within Vietnam and internationally.

(1) https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2023/

The APIE program’s story was published on the Asia Pacific Advanced Network‘s blog, APAN PULSE (Perspective, Updates, Learning, Stories & Experiences). This platform is a collection of stories highlighting APAN members’ contributions and how they impact and inspire greater engagement and collaboration within the community.

The blog post was written through the lens of Shun Arima, the videographer in charge of APIE courses and documentation video content.

This story could not have been told without strong collaborations and young talents willing to participate in the constantly evolving Internet.

SOI Asia operates the APIE program in partnership with APNIC, the WIDE project, and AITAC. The APNIC Foundation funds and supports APIE activ­ities.

Learn more about the story of APIE:
https://pulse.apan.net/the-story-of-the-apie-program/

The parabolic antenna that had been installed in Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (Japan) and serving for Asia-wide Satellite Internet communication for a long time – a C-band earth station facility – was decommissioned on August 3, 2022. 

It was a large antenna with a diameter of 7.6 meters and a transmitting power of 100 watts, which is rare in the private sector.

This parabolic antenna was installed in October 1999 to demonstrate research on satellite Internet. It was part of a joint research project by Keio University, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (now the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, NICT), and Japan Satellite Systems Inc (now SKY Perfect JSAT Corp). This joint research was named the AI³ Project (Asian Internet Interconnection Initiatives Project) and was headed by Professor Jun Murai of Keio University and Professor Suguru Yamaguchi of NAIST.

AI³ recruited joint research partners from universities in the Southeast Asia region, and the partner institutions also installed C-band earth station facilities to connect to SFC via the Internet. Ultimately, 13 countries were connected to this antenna, creating a communications infrastructure covering all of Southeast Asia. (Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Nepal, East Timor, Singapore, and Mongolia)

There are three main outcomes of AI³.

First, a great deal of research has been done on satellite Internet. The AI³ network served as a test bed for satellite Internet research, which is rare in the world.

Second, AI³ contributed to the deployment of the Internet in Southeast Asia, where the Internet boom was already underway in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but many countries in Southeast Asia were “just getting started”. In some countries, Internet access through these antennas was the catalyst for Internet diffusion.

Third, AI³ contributed to the development of human resources in Southeast Asia; many of the Southeast Asian researchers involved in AI³ are now active in research institutes, government agencies, and private companies as “first-generation Internet researchers” in their countries, supporting the Internet in this region.

The AI³ network and the antennas that were at the core of the AI³ network have produced many results, but as the facilities became obsolete, it became necessary to rebuild or decommission the equipment. The “5G interference problem” influenced the decision to decommission the antennas. The antenna was found to be hindering the introduction of 5G in the vicinity of SFC because the frequencies of the C-band used by AI³ and those used by 5G are close to each other, causing interference.

We repeatedly discussed whether the valuable testbed network should be discontinued for 5G, or whether it should be allowed to continue since we have a vested interest in the use of the radio waves. We then decided to give priority to 5G for the happiness of SFC and its neighbors.

The antenna, which had produced many research results, supported the development of the Internet in Southeast Asia, and had been a symbol of SFC for many years, quietly ended its role on August 3, 2022 during the campus summer break. The radio waves that were used for research and for Southeast Asia will now support the daily lives of everyone at SFC in the form of 5G cell phone use.

The AI³ research community will move on to the next phase of the research utilizing space & non-terrestrial communication technology in various ways for 100% internet coverage of the earth.By Haruhito Watanabe, senior researcher
Keio Research Institute at SFC

Japanese version of this article was published on Keio SFC’s website: (Click here)

Please enjoy antenna photos:(Click here)

We are excited to announce that the EBA (Evidence Based Approach) Project a new sub-project of SOI Asia, is about to start in April 2022.

The EBA Project, aims to foster the Asia Pacific wide collaborative community among Universities for designing evidence-based resilient future society. The root of this Project, The EBA Consortium, started in 2012, with Keio University (Japan) and universities in Southeast Asia, supported by the Re-Inventing Japan Project of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. 5 years under this support, the Consortium had conducted many programs to foster students capable of identifying and tackling emergent issues in Asia, based on the evidence and analysis.

From 2022, the successful EBA Consortium activities resume under SOI Asia as a new program to promote collaboration and capacity building for solving issues in Asia and the Pacific. Collaborating with EBA, SOI Asia aims to achieve a new phase of research and development.

EBA Project: https://eba.soi.asia/