Muroran Institute of Technology (MuroranIT), as the sole college of science and engineering deeply rooted in the region, is committed to implementing the educational and institutional reforms necessary to improve research capabilities and promote co-creation with society. This commitment is based on the belief that addressing local problems in Hokkaido will make it possible to provide solutions to similar issues elsewhere in Japan and the world.

MuroranIT’s philosophy is Making Dreams Come True Through Creative Science and Technology. This year, we have adopted a new slogan grounded in this philosophy—Creating Future Value Through True Curiosity. The “value” in “creating value” corresponds to outputs in the engineering sense, including hardware and software, and knowledge obtained through the exploration of principles in the scientific sense, as respective artifacts. The “future” part of the slogan implies a temporal spread from the immediate future to several decades into the future and a spatial spread from the region and Hokkaido to Japan and the rest of the world. The “true” in “true curiosity” represents the hope that whatever seems small and intriguing now will ultimately be essential, eventually leading to the generation of value. My wish is for this slogan to be used from the standpoint of not only faculty members involved in education and research but also students as an aspiration for the future, and I sincerely hope that MuroranIT will continue to be a place where value is created for society in the future.

The curriculum of the Faculty of Science and Engineering is designed to promote science, math and information education unique to a university of science and engineering. It aims to nurture students capable of understanding the essence of ICT and AI and using them to contribute to the creation of products and value. By providing extensive information education that is mandatory for all students, MuroranIT has been accredited by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as an Approved Program for Mathematics, Data Science, and AI Smart Higher Education since FY 2021. In the Master’s Program of the Graduate School, we are also changing the curriculum to enhance the common compulsory subjects of information science as well as information subjects taking advantage of each course’s characteristics. In April of this year, the Course of Cross-Disciplinary Informatics was established within the Division of Information and Electronic Engineering. As the title suggests, this course is designed to foster students in informatics who will transcend different academic disciplines and areas of expertise to combine specialized knowledge and various methodologies to tackle recent complex problems and bring forward new ideas and solutions. Therefore, the majority of students who enroll in the course are graduates from all fields of science and engineering, not necessarily limited to the field of information technology. Upon completion of the Master’s Course, students are expected to find employment in all fields of industry in a manner that makes use of the specialized education and training they have received during their undergraduate years of study. In this way, the cultivation of advanced science and engineering personnel in a fusion of disciplines, or specialization combined with information, is a consistent policy throughout the undergraduate and graduate curricula of MuroranIT.
Based on the preceding framework , our enthusiastic faculty members with solid research capabilities, will convey the excitement of science and engineering to students from a professional standpoint and nurture them to ensure a solid outcome. We would like to once again express our sincere gratitude for all the support we have received and ask that you continue to keep a close eye on the activities of the Muroran Institute of Technology.