The AKARI Architecture Design Project was a project for designing a new generation computer network architecture supported by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan. The name "AKARI" indicates "A small light in the dark pointing to the future" and it comes from the Japanese word Akari, which means "a small light". Launched in May 2006, the AKARI Project investigated technologies for new generation network by 2015, developing a network architecture and creating a network design based on that architecture. AKARI is also denoted as a Future Internet project.