Hideaki Takeda is a professor and director of scientific information services at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan. NII was founded in 2000 and is funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. NII has two main roles - conducting research in informatics as a center of excellence, and providing internet and information services to academia. Some of the key information services NII provides include the CiNii database for academic papers, the JAIRO repository for institutional research, and the KAKEN database of government-funded research projects.