Mr. Kazuhiko Ishimura

I am very pleased that the second Vision Zero Summit will be held in Japan. For a long time, I was in charge of safety and health management as the head of a manufacturing site in a private company. Having witnessed accidents firsthand, I was acutely aware of the importance of a prevention strategy as well as the difficulty of eliminating industrial accidents. I also felt the limitations of conventional safety management efforts that, in the end, tend to fall into the mentality that “it is important to raise safety awareness by educating workers.” For this reason, I have been thinking about how we can reduce industrial accidents, occupational diseases, and risk factors to zero in a smarter way by incorporating new technologies such as IoT, rather than relying only on the awareness of individual workers. Since hearing about Vision Zero’s initiative to “realize a new preventive safety including technological development,” I greatly sympathize and support their efforts.

Japan is aspiring to realize an innovative society (Society 5.0), in which a high degree of convergence between cyberspace and physical space is achieved; people, things, and systems will be connected by IoT technology; and various information and knowledge will be shared by AI to bring new values to industry and society. In such a future society, work styles will be highly diversified. AI and robots will replace routine tasks. People and machines will work together not only in manufacturing but also in a variety of fields. Remote work will evolve further, allowing more people to work regardless of location or time, and work will be fluidized and optimized. For such a diverse and changing work environment, we need to continue discussing the safety of workers from a new perspective. It is also important to reconstruct the concept of safety from the perspective of health, which means physically, mentally, and socially satisfied, and from the perspective of well-being, which is also translated as happiness.

One of the missions of AIST is to solve social problems. Promoting Society 5.0 and achieving safety, health, and well-being of workers in such a future society is directly related to overcoming current social issues. For example, we are working on technology for building safe human-robot collaborative systems and standards, and technology to improve the reliability and quality of AI predictions. AIST will continue to contribute to the safety, health, and well-being in the new society, through emerging new technology and bridging them to society.

We look forward to many lively discussions among diverse experts and practitioners at this year’s Vision Zero Summit.