It is my pleasure to report that 2021 TRON Symposium (TRONSHOW) was held successfully in a hybrid manner: there were both real and virtual symposiums and exhibits. The theme of 2021 TRON Symposium and this year’s is “Rebooting.”

How can we "Reboot" the society which has been disempowered in many ways due to Covid-19, and establish New Normal, new ways of thinking and behavior different from the past ways through digital means? Each subproject in TRON Project has been working on element technology to facilitate the Rebooting.

TRON Project has been aiming at the realization of Highly Functionally Distributed System (HFDS) where any objects will have computers embedded and collaborate with each other to offer convenience and realize comfortable society ─ this approach is recently called Aggregate Computing model and enhanced by incorporating service collaboration.

2021 TRON Symposium (TRONSHOW) introduced the latest version of IoT-Engine, elemental technology of Aggregate Computing, Board Support Package (BSP) of “μT-Kernel 3.0,” an embedded RTOS that operates on IoT-Engine, and other latest results of element technology. The symposium also presented the activities of “Open Smart UR Study Group” which I have been leading as Chair and which has been established by collaborative Hub for University and Business (cHUB), Faculty of Information Networking for Innovation And Design (INIAD), Toyo University and Urban Renaissance Agency (UR) as an effort to realize service collaboration in housing sector.

The Awards Ceremony of “the 4th Open Data Challenge for Public Transportation in Tokyo” was held on the last day of the symposium as the activity output of “Association for Open Data of Public Transportation (ODPT,  Chair: Ken Sakamura).” Since the commercial usage of the provided data was allowed this time, private enterprises including Google Maps and others participated in the challenge. In addition, TIVAC, an activity to introduce IoT-related security vulnerability information, and “Open IoT Education Program” led by INIAD as recurrent education for working engineers were introduced in 2021 TRON Symposium (TRONSHOW).

This year marks the 20th anniversary of TRON Forum, which was established as "T-Engine Forum" originally in 2002, taking over the activities of TRON Association in 2010. As introduced in the symposium session, TRON OS has been used to control space satellites and rockets, as well as for various control devices, communication terminals, printers, digital cameras, and many other products around you to support social infrastructure without stopping them, or stopping them quickly and reliably when they need to be stopped.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 still affects us significantly and we need to be very careful every day. On the other hand, it is also true that social activities are gradually being rebooted by the power of digital technology. I appreciate that the activity results of TRON Project have been used as the basis for Rebooting thanks to the efforts of everyone involved in the project.

Thank you in advance again for your contribution to TRON Project in 2022.

Ken Sakamura