History of ALFAE

Food safety and security became an international issue towards the end of 20th century. One of the advanced industrial societies, Japan, started to bring forward agricultural policy reforms.

MAFF-JAPAN (The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) formally launched MAFF IT Project in 1997. The project members from academic institutions conducted systematic research on these agricultural, forestry and fishery fields. During the years of data mining and system development from 1999 to 2005, it was accompanied by an application with Optical Sensing systems, which is called BIX project. (BIX:BioInformation eXchange)
The purposes of this project are

  • to monitor the information arising on the field by Field Server
  • to construct the measurement system for acquiring growth information of crops using sensors based on the various optic techniques with multiband spectra
  • its structured data handling by standard XML format

In 2007, METI held the international symposium on 'Ubiquitous Cluster linking up to the world' in Mie, Japan. The major focus of this symposium was placed on strategic initiatives for creating new Ubiquitous (business) models through world collaboration.
At the symposium, Dr. Kameoka, Mie University, presented official launch of the ALFAE, an innovative project to develop FAT (Field Analytical Technology ), taking over the objectives and members of BIX project. The ALFAE is the Food, Agricultural and Environmental Strategic Base in Asia-Pacific, which builds upon the core concepts of MAFF IT Project and works for efficient functioning of BIX Project, sponsored by METI (The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan)