Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Scientific fields of study such as astrobiology, nanotechnology, and cave and karst science involve the study of images and associated biological, physiochemical, and geological data. In order to ensure interdisciplinary analysis, it is important to make these kinds of datasets available for analysis and curation by the scientific community. The goal of this project is to design and develop an online workspace that enables scientists to collaboratively view, analyze, and annotate such datasets. The prototype contains scanning electron micrographs of karst and cave samples. The target users are the interdisciplinary community of scientists who study karst samples to learn more about critical biological and geological processes and the microbial communities often found in karst terrain. The prototype can inform the design and development of collaborative workspaces in other interdisciplinary fields.

In this paper, we propose “yourStory” as an effective reminder management system to construct a life story from the viewpoint of communities to which the user has belonged. Our framework helps the user manage his/her personal history and tell his/her life stories to other users through sharing communities and episodes. This system provides four kinds of functions: building up a life story in accordance with community information, output of the “communityTree” and “lifeChart” data based on the life story, registration of an episode in relation to a community, and display of various kinds of data, including “communityTree,” “lifeChart,” photos and episodes.

This paper proposes a novel idea of the Spatial Electronic Mnemonics (SROM) that augments human memory by using electronically annotated and/or converted materials based on places, objects and people in the real world. The SROM provides effective recall cues for information to be memorized with visual materials such as digital images captured and modified for easy association. A basic function as well as structure of SROM and some plans to construct the SROM is presented. The initial implementation and a preliminary registration experiment of spatial virtual memory peg are demonstrated.

This study investigates the effect of providing a Web-based diagnostic tool as a collaboration medium on remote customer troubleshooting tasks with and without the assistance of a customer call center agent. The study tested three troubleshooting modes (Web tool alone, call center agent alone, and Web tool + call center agent). The hypothesis that the Web tool + call center agent mode would be faster than the other two modes was not supported. However, the results of the experiment showed that the Web-based self-help diagnostic tool can be a potentially cost-effective way of providing customer support. The performance using the Web tool alone was comparable to the call center agent.

In this paper we present the progress of the natural language usage as the paradigm for information extraction and presentation in the enterprise environment. Distributed heavy personal assistant architecture and its implementation is presented as the solution to overcome difficulties related of the natural language use in the information systems development. A new methodology based on connectionist and symbol processing techniques for a knowledge worker to process his documents and utterance is suggested. Then we suggest the results from those processes to reuse for new documents classification and generation of small atomic applications. Finally the experiment is presented. We compare Microsoft EQ, IBM WebSphere Voice Server NLU toolbox and our solution for concepts identification accuracy.

Trust has become an essential prerequisite for customer relationship building. Implementing institutional mechanisms seems to be an obvious outcome in inducing trust, rather than the result of independently motivated decisions of the user’s interpretation on the institutional design features to be trustworthy. Proponents of this idea argued by understanding the concept of a sign and its related properties, it is possible to improve the analysis and design of interface design elements within web environment to induce trust. Drawn from established theoretical work on institutional based trust and semiotic, the concept of Institutional Symbolism and its four underlying dimensions are proposed to facilitate thinking and perception as to how trust can be built through signs comprehension. Conceptualized in the context of web mediated information environment, the implications of these dimensions on web site design and future work is further discussed.

Email is a convenient tool, however, it is still difficult for elderly people and kindergarten children. If they can learn to use it, their ability to communicate may be remarkably increased. Therefore we developed two kinds of email software ’Gin-Mail’ for elderly people and ’Ocha-Mail’ for kindergarten children. They adopt a pen-based interface with a tablet PC. Users write email using Ink function, and software sends it as an attached image file. There are two modes in it, User mode and Maintenance mode. User mode offers only minimal functions to prevent misoperation. We devised each user interface in accordance with the user’s characteristics. ’Ocha-Mail’ and ’Gin-Mail’ are accessible to kindergarten children and elderly people respectively. Our goal is to encourage interactions among different generations by through the use of email.

The present authors have developed a communication system WSCS (Waseda Shadow Communication System), with which your remote communicating partner (or you) can be positioned and appeared 3-dimensionally in your (or your partner’s) real space, by exchanging body shadows each other. With this WSCS, we have reported previously that cooperative work and conversation can be achieved with your remote partner while taking the spatial distance (“Maai” in Japanese) between you and his shadow appeared in your space. For further development of the WSCS as Arts Communication System being supportive to a generation of co-creative “Encounter Ba”, a creative expression technique has been investigated in the present study. With this technique, a relationship between you and your remote partner at the encounter occasion can be strengthened from the following two points of view. The first point is related to a supportive method to a self-organization of “Ba” at the encountering “Now, we are here”, by enriching the co-existing feeling between remote participants. For this specific aim, the application software was developed with which remote participants can perform embodied interaction between remote groups using a virtual shadow ball. The second point relates to a method by which scene of the past time was reproduced across the time scale and the bodily expression of the concerned person can be trace-experienced. For this point, a co-experiencing type archive software was developed with which one can put himself at the past scene by processing of shadow images of recorded person(s), so that one can share experiences with concerned person(s) while entering the past scene across the time scale. After installing these software programs into WSCS, several communication experiments were conducted. It was found that (i), with the first software, a similar effect as an ice-breaking activities occurred at a workshop was recognized, and the software was found effective to develop a workshop which shares a mutual context among groups, and (ii), with the second program, since participants and the concerned person can be present at the same scene, changes in feeling/emotion of the concerned person can be conveyed directly via the embodiment.

Voice chat system is one of the most popular communication systems using computer networks. There is considerable delay to transfer the sender’s voice to the receiver on usual voice chat system. The message transfer delay often causes unintentional interruptions and makes participants of the system feel confused. It is considered that such negative effects occur because participants can’t know the status of their voice playback in remote site. In this paper, two types of remote status monitoring systems are introduced to reduce unintentional interruptions and confused feeling. Then, it is confirmed experimentally that these systems were effective to reduce these problems.

Fond memories provide not only warm feeling to those who possess them, but also bonds that tie people who share them together. Utilizing this property, we propose to develop an environment where people can share their feelings for fond memories, as well as empathize and communication with each other. We consider this environment like a park, where you drop in and take a rest on a bench, look at the fountain and feel comfortable atmosphere away from your daily life. Instead of benches or fountains, we provide some triggers for fond memories. We named this environment "Reminiscence Park". An example of the triggers for remembering in Reminiscence Park is the old popular song common to the users’ younger days. We developed a prototype system modeling a music box. Opened by one or more people, the box starts to play a common song from their youth.