A quarter-century has passed since Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) was founded on October, 1990 as the first independent national graduate university in Japan without any undergraduate programs. JAIST has adopted extremely innovative educational systems. In addition to a main-theme research, each student is supposed to conduct a sub-theme research under the supervision of a professor who is different from his/her main-theme research supervisor to broaden his/her perspective. Moreover, each student is assigned one more professor with whom he/she can talk on his/her life, future career, etc. Hence, each student is given three supervisors. Students are highly encouraged to perform coursework hard, and then JAIST provides a very rich set of lecture courses for three sciences (information science, material science and knowledge science). JAIST is very international, conducting international collaborative educational programs with many oversea universities, such as University of Oulu (Finland), Vietnam National University (Vietnam), Thammasat University (Thailand) and Tianjin University (China). Many lecture courses are carried out in English, and then foreign students who do not speak in Japanese can go through both master and doctoral programs in JAIST. JAIST has produced many PhD holders, many of whom became professors in universities in foreign countries as well as Japan.

JAIST will offer a challenge to something more innovative on April, 2016, integrating the three schools (School of Information Science, School of Material Science, and School of Knowledge Science) into one (School of Advanced Science and Technology) so that we can tackle many difficult problems human beings have been and will be facing, which requires multiple scientific disciplines. The one school consists of the nine research areas: (1) Human Life Design, (2) Knowledge Management, (3) Security and Networks, (4) Intelligent Robotics, (5) Entertainment Technology, (6) Energy and Environment, (7) Materials Chemistry, (8) Applied Physics, and (9) Bioscience and Biotechnology. Some of them are very interdisciplinary.  Since JAIST has just become a quarter-century years old and will proceed to the next stage in about a half-year, November, 2015 is the best time when JAIST announces this innovative transformation to the world. This is why the three schools of JAIST hold the international symposium on November 10 - 12, 2015, inviting researchers from oversea universities and institutions. Ordinary technical presentation sessions are scheduled on November 10 & 11, 2015, and a special discussion session on some future directions with the invitees is scheduled on November 12, 2015.