International communication with people in different locations is common and necessary because of globalization of societies and economies, and communication by mother language supported by machine translation helps this communication. However, machine translation causes mistranslation because of low accuracy of translation. Moreover, multi-party communication makes this issue more complex in case of a number of participants. To solve this issue, we tried to extract action protocol of participants after we get Japanese and Korean participants to join multilingual gaming simulation using their mother language. In this study, we analyzed their communication by communication tags that participants assigned during the experiment. Then we extracted and arranged action protocol. As a result, we found that we could extend action protocol to contextual protocol considering a multitude of conversation topics. Also, we also found that an utterance to a participant which speaks same language or monologue in a communication may work to overcome multitude of conversation topics or mistranslation in multi-party communication.

In recent years, attention to social design is increasing. Some of the social design, some users and I want to do something, and services that can satisfy both the users want to do. This service, unlike until now people have been regarded as a user, people has become a provider of services. This service not only can gain cost and efficiency, it also can give a higher satisfaction by a new relation that is formed by the participation in anything and by doing something to anyone. Further, it can be said that the user not only receives the service, and the services can act actively users. Therefore, in this discussion, the authors conducted a survey of understanding act of "I'll do it for you" day-to-day. And measured the act of "I'll do it for you" of willingness by using magnitude estimation method in the 20 act of "I'll do it for you" of willingness to do which occur daily. Analyze the results, will be discussed. The results, it shows that the degree of willingness of the act of "I'll do it for you" is correlated with the degree of intimacy and subject to the act. In addition, the degree of willingness is correlated with the frequency of altruism behavior that actually performed.

This paper describes a basic activity model for a collaborative project between a company and a university. Cooperation between the industry and academia for first-year education could be one of the important career development programs in Japan. We consider the relationship between the company and the university as a social interface and believe that there is an uncertain interaction regarding the learning activities of students in that social interface. To utilize this uncertain interaction, we exploited research on distributed intelligence for the design of a community of learners. Based on the comparison of two types of activity models, we propose that the autonomous approach is appropriate for the activity design of first-year education at the university.

Rumors can easily spread on the microblogging service Twitter in the form of retweets, which are tweets that a user has forwarded to his/her followers. This study investigated the social network characteristics of Twitter users who retweeted rumors concerning the Great East Japan Earthquake. We targeted not only the users who spread the rumor that was delivered to their timeline but also those who did not retweet the rumor. Moreover, we investigated each personal network of the user and his/her followings and followers on Twitter, including the set of connections between them. Consequently, we found that the users who spread the rumors are characterized by lower centrality (lower degree and betweenness) and lower reciprocity (fewer mutual follow relationships).

The motive to use help is influenced from the subjective confidence as much as the help operation cost. On the basis of the motivation model, the former is drive and the latter is incentive. This experiment was executed to investigate the factor of the help operation cost in conformity with the experiment paradigm of the motivation model. Participant's task is to memorize the places of the targets and recall them by clicking the targets. Participants can use some help information during the recall phase. The user interface of the help was varied. The help information is displayed, when participants click the icon on monitor display, click the right button of the mouse or push the space bar. As a result, right button click was steadily used, regardless of the height of the subjective confidence. When the operation cost in the user interface was lower, it is found that participants use the help.

Evaluation of Web usability with the help of gaze information involves plotting the gaze locus and estimating the gaze duration for an image on a Web page. From the output image, an evaluator can determine the browsing order and time for a Web page. In this method, input is required from the observer (at the position of the gaze) and the evaluator. Therefore, considerable time is required for analysis. However, evaluation of Web usability is often performed at limited cost. The proposed method uses HTML features to automatically identify the objects viewed by an observer. In an HTML document, a DIV tag is often used to separate the content areas according to a specific style. The output of the developped tool is the gaze area and gaze time in a time series. The features of each content area are compared. Thus, by using the proposed method to evaluate Web page and Web site usability, gaze information, which was analyzed qualitatively earlier, can be analyzed quantitatively.

In this study, we focus on consensus building communication via embodied avatars with various computer generated (CG) objects such as plants in cyber space. By providing a communication environment in which not only avatars but also CG objects around the avatars are related to speakers in cyber space, it is expected that the mutually shared sense of unity and interaction will increase and human communication will become more efficient. We developed embodied communication systems including speakers' avatars and speech-driven embodied entrainment objects using plant or shadow-figure models. In addition, we confirmed the effectiveness of the communication system which presents entrainment reaction using a plant model as virtual audiences in an experiment under free conversation and role-playing conversation. For consensus building from different opinions of speakers, we can expect the system to provide confidence to speakers about their own opinions using the interactive CG audiences, because speakers can experience the agreeable responses from the objects. We thus conduct two communication experiments in consensus building using speech-driven embodied entrainment plant objects or shadow-figure objects. Virtual audiences influenced the decisions of subjects; male subjects were influenced by plant objects and female subjects by shadow-figure objects. The effectiveness of the proposed system was confirmed in the study.

A major cause of traffic accidents is the driver's lack of awareness during driving. According to a current report on accident investigations, it was found that non-adaptation to environment changes is a major factor for many accidents. In the case of elderly drivers, many accidents have occurred as a result of non-pause stops at intersections. It is well-known that elderly drivers show wide individual differences in relation to driving experience, driving skill, recognition and judgment ability. Therefore, to reduce the occurrence of accidents involving elderly drivers, it is necessary to design an appropriate driving support system for individual elderly driver. It is even more important to evaluate the effect of such support system using objective methods as well as subjective evaluations. In this study, a driving assistance system that consisted of various auditory-visual alerts to encourage pausing and stopping at intersections was constructed for elderly drivers, and the effect of system was evaluated. While elderly drivers were approaching an intersection, physiological signals were measured and the changes after alarms were analyzed, which included an electro-cardiogram, cerebral blood flow and aortic pulse wave. The results showed that effects of the five kinds of alerts were compared in physiological signals and suggested to be possible to design the optimal support and assisting methods for elderly drivers with their different driving characteristics.