This paper proposes a support system for the user who did a work referring to contents and must do the work again. To increase flexibility, we realize a search by the real world objects. The problem to bind objects and contents for the search is to estimate ease to remember objects with the contents and the work. We notice the fact that important objects of a work are usually near the user, and propose Seshat, a weighting system for binding objects and contents. Evaluation results show the objects users had remembered were bound to the important contents of the work.

In this paper, we present the results of both classroom lessons and Web-based learning for Japanese manual alphabets (YUBIMOJI) to ordinary elementary school children. So far, we have developed an easy-to-use edutainment system: Practice! YUBIMOJI AIUEO (PYA). The objectives of PYA are to promote basic expressions of Kana characters (AIUEO) of Japanese manual alphabets, and to give the experience of communication with deaf people to ordinary children at elementary school age. In our previous work, we have shown that PYA is the effective educational materials to increase the awareness of pupil concerning the universal design. Extending the results, we develop a new framework for a classroom design. For the purpose, we have improved PYA to PYA-WEB. In this paper, we have carried out series of intensive experiments at classrooms of Sumiyoshi Elementary School and Web-learning (7 or 8 years old; 59 subjects). The results are summarized as follows: 1) The greediness for learning at starting point is important to motivate learning and practice in order to let the students feel accomplished; 2) PYA-WEB is effective to increase the capability of YUBIMOJI reading; 3) PYA-WEB users with the higher motivation keep the learning effect the longer and they get a YUBIMOJI skill the more, in proportion to the access time; and 4) After the children mastered YUBIMOJI, the communication lessons with deaf people are successful. These results have suggested that PYA-WEB has encouraged children's self learning and enhanced the communication skill. The YUBIMOJI lessons with the proposed classroom design and PYA-WEB would be useful to construct a inclusive society.

Infants can achieve their purposes such as obtaining toys or drinking milk by their caregiver's assistance. We are interested in the mutuality and reciprocity between infant and caregivers in achieving the collaborative actions. And it is noted that infants can acquire the social skills to elicit caregiver's assistance during achieving their purposes. Here, the goals of our research are to build a robot that has these social abilities of making reciprocity with human and acquiring the social skills to evoke caregiver's assistance. As a carrying vehicle, we have been building Sociable Trash Box, which cannot pick up a trash itself, but can achieve "garbage collection" by eliciting supports from surrounding peoples. In this paper, we show the architecture of the system, and research findings from experiments and the observation of the interaction with children.

In this paper, we focus on handwrite training, generally utilized at our daily life, and discuss the human interface technology to support learning precise control of draw-stroke efficiently. Concretely we developed handwrite support device with inter-personal interaction with exchanging visual image of handwriting motion, and evaluate the effectiveness of the method. As the result, it was clarified that the draw-stroke motion became precise with the inter-personal training, realizing the draw-stroke control not only by visual feedback but also by feed-forward with internal Body Image information. Accordingly, to realize the efficient learning of draw-stroke motion, we suggest that the inter-personal interactive handwrite support is effective training paradigm which can realize improvement of Body Image by the visual feedback and the smooth control of draw-stoke motion with the Body Image and anticipatory motor control.

A part of the surface mount work of printed circuit boards is conducted by human workers. Therefore, when adopting new employees, it is required to conduct a training for practicing the work to them. The present training methods is the OJT with instruction by a manager or a expert worker. That method requires much personnel cost. The goal of this study is to develop an instruct system for the surface mount work of printed circuit boards by utilizing a CCD camera, image processing techniques, a laser irradiation device and so on, which can conduct a training in place of a manager or a expert worker. This paper describes the design of the instruction system, developed functions and the results of their evaluations.

User-tests are often conducted at laboratories before bringing a product into the market. It has, however, not been clearly understood to how much extent laboratory-based experiments reflect the behavior of real users. We conducted both laboratory experiments and the field-study in the same conditions, and compared the results. The results showed that the users at the lab tended to try to contend with the problem by themselves, whereas the users in the field turned to others easily. We also found that the rate of the mistakes when connecting the devices together differ between at the lab and in the field because of the environmental differences. However, success rate didn't show any differences.

By the popularization of digital cameras and the increase of their memory storages, everyday people can take much more photos than before and can store large amount of pictures. As the consequence, people have huge number of personal photos. We think viewing slideshow as a creative narration superimpose activity and propose a new slideshow system with automatic narration called PhotoLoop. The PhotoLoop automatically captures the images and sound of slideshow viewers, and therefore creates new contents without extra efforts. In this paper, we observed and analyzed the user behavior during slideshows, and developed the prototype of PhotoLoop based on them and evaluated its effectiveness. We describe on the prototyping and it evaluation.

In recent years, we frequently make use of the computer to find information utilizing advanced network technology. While the spread of the Internet has facilitated the acquisition of information, serious problems have been generated by the huge information capacity and complications in regard to the reliability of information. These problems affect the acquisition of appropriate information. In this research, it's proposed that information modeling provisions can produce appropriate information. The outlines of the modeling provision are based on human relations and actions. Specifically, we set up a psychological experiment to observe the influence of group type and internal group relations on the reliability of information. Results of the psychological experiment suggest that information derived from organizational structure is more reliable information than group community itself and good relations product more dependable information than bad relations.

Patient stress or anxiety during dental treatment has been of major concern to dentists. Many suggestions for evaluating stress have been given in the literature. However, there has been little or no systematic research on monitoring system. Therefore, the aims of this study were to describe and demonstrate the newly developed, easy and simple system monitoring Electrodermal Activity and Grasping Force (EDA-GF) which is based on the objective evaluation system for the psychological stresses during the dental treatment. Recordings of all 20 subjects were performed using this system without substantial difficulty in the clinical settings. The degree of pain and tension which conjectured from each dental treatment was demonstrated in most of all subjects. This result suggest that electrodermal response and grasping force monitoring system has clinical validity for the evaluation of the psychological stresses, which reflects the degree of pain and tension and that it has high potentials for dental clinical use because of its easiness and peculiarity.

The study analyses the behaviours observed in co-design workshop for house/home building between users (clients) and architects in actual settings. The workshop is designed based on inclusive design, or participatory design, methodology and it makes users' behaviours increase and facilitates users' descriptions of their own needs/desires on their house/home. Reflecting the design of the workshop programmes, the ratio of participants' behaviours was changed. We also found that behaviour was suggested as a variable for participation.

Spoken utterances can be regarded as an "artifact" that constrains and drives our utterance and thought. In our everyday conversation, spoken utterances and social displays of dialogue participants become important "artifact" as a resource to organize conversational sequences in talk-in-interaction. In this paper, we are focusing on how to visualize "conversational field" as an artifact in organizing multi-party conversation. So our research question here is how to model and visualize the conversational field that is spontaneously emerged from interactions between dialogue participants. In this paper, we propose TableTalkPlus system, which can displays conversational dynamics in a participation frame using simple CG animations. And some research findings from dialogue experiments with the TableTalkPlus are discussed.

Various types of intercultural collaboration tasks are carried out in the fields of education, medical care, and so on. Members in such fields need support customized for each field. Intercultural collaboration tools, therefore, should allow customization to suit diverse tasks and circumstances. Since tools provided by existing portal sites cannot be customized, they fail to meet the needs of various fields. Therefore, we have developed the Language Grid Playground, an intercultural collaboration environment, which enables easy creation of customized tools. The basic idea of the Playground is to organize language services in a layered architecture and to develop light weight building blocks that form collaboration tools by combining services. In fact, we 1) accumulated and classified useful components for language tools and 2) identified what kinds of language service components will be useful by implementing several tools, developed these components as programs which can be deployed as web services and published them. The Language Grid Playground, which is an aggregate of components, enables easy creation of customized tools. As a practical example, we implemented a customized multilingual chat tool and deployed it to a real-world classroom in just 6 man-weeks. This shows the efficiency of our approach for developing tools.

This paper presents a viewpoint of "benefit of inconvenience" based on the symbiotic thought and discusses several issues in the research field of systems design. Convenience generally implies "saving labor. " Designers aim to develop goods for sparing humans labor based on the assumption that "the more convenient life is, the richer it is." This assumption has yielded technical developments and outcomes that we generally appreciate. On the other hand, technologies have brought about several problems. One of the way to overcome such problems is pursuing further developments and convenience. But in the case where such developments yield further problems, symbiotic thought doubts of the final destination of this way. An alternative way is to get back to the basic focus on the problems. Benefits of inconveniences navigate us to the promising ways. Inconvenience enhances awareness, prompts creative contribution, and brews affirmative feeling.

We sometimes feel better impression in listening the live music performance than in listening the recorded music such as CD. Moreover, the player also feels better impression in the live performance in many cases. Thus, there is the difference between the live music performance and the mechanical performance that doesn't change in real time. In this research, to clarify the difference, we analyzed the cooperative performance of the drum and the bass from a rhythmical aspect. The results showed that a synchronization error between musical rhythms, and the fluctuation of musical rhythm became smaller in a cooperated performance rather than in a performance to mechanical music. From these results, we discussed the difference between the live music performance and the mechanical performance, and discussed the mechanism of live performance.

We propose a novel display technique that presents information with different visibilities to each of multiple users. It projects information to a screen through a revolving linear polarizer in front of the projector, and it shows information through another polarizer in front of the user's viewpoint. The brightness of the observed information is reduced according to the relative angle of the polarization axes between the two polarizers. This technique allows applications to provide information at different arbitrary levels of brightness for each user by controlling the angle of the revolving polarizes. We measure the brightness values of an implemented prototype and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. Then we discuss potential applications and possibility toward more effective implementations.

In this paper, we propose a virtual haptic map using a haptic device. The virtual haptic map includes haptically-displayed roads and buildings which are automatically constructed from a numerical map. This system aims to give map information and support outdoor activities to visually disabled persons. The features of this system are that customized maps such as a concavo-convex shape of the objects or friction of surfaces are easy to construct in accordance with the user's conditions. To evaluate the usability of this system, recognition experiments using simple virtual haptic maps were conducted by ten blindfolded subjects. In the experiments, recognition rates were compared between two expression methods. One method was to make the area of road concaved, and the other was to make it convexed. As a result, high recognition rates were confirmed in both methods, and it shows that this system has reasonable usability. Additionally, we found that concaved areas were touched for a long time than convexed areas. This result suggests that important information should be displayed by concave parts.