This plenary lecture addresses concepts of Hitozukuri and Monozukuri, centuries’ old philosophy deeply rooted in Japanese culture to respectively addresses educating human to be a responsible individual who can lead the world to a better place and making things with excellence, skills, spirit, zest, pride, and more. Hitozukuri and Monozukuri are the philosophy to seek balance and harmony with nature, where integration and synthesis play a key role than specialization and analytical skills. This lecture is intended to address a possibility to create win-win philosophy by harmonizing the eastern thinking and the western thinking in education and research in the global world where we live now.

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The University of Kentucky’s Lean Systems Program recently merged with the Institute of Research for Technology Development (IR4TD) to provide broader and complete service to both domestic and international customers. The new organizational structure of IR4TD, including the Lean is shown in Fig. 1. Our immediate goal is to assist industry in implementing Lean thinking and strategies to improve performance. This lecture will focus on specific examples on achieving this goal using Lean principles and several lean tools that were developed by Toyota.

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For the establishment of the technology for the management of liquid propellant in space vehicles, a numerical method, called ‘CIP-LSM’ (CIP based Level Set method & MARS), was developed to simulate three-dimensional free-surface flows under various gravity conditions. The dynamic behaviors of liquid in the model tank with multiple ring-baffles were successfully simulated.

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The focus of our work is the elicitation of communication network systems’ knowledge resources in a generic and reusable manner for providing the automated support to network management tasks. Key features of the proposed knowledge model are: ontological representation of static domain-content and management-expertise encoded as the core knowledge of distributed multi-agent architecture. Our emphasis has primarily been on the modularization of resource knowledge to facilitate its reuse in a flexible manner. To demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed scheme, we have implemented an experimental network in our laboratory, and the devised knowledge model has been deployed through multi-agent based middleware layer in the prototype system. A couple of application scenarios have been designed for testing with the prototype system. Experimental results confirm a marked reduction in the workloads of the network operator with our system providing the automated support to network management functions. Validation of the reusability/modifiability aspects of our system illustrates the flexible manipulation of knowledge fragments within diverse application contexts. We envisage our knowledge modeling approach as the first step towards the comprehensive knowledge acquisition, representation, and dissemination in the communication network management domain.

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In this paper we present a linear-time constant-memory algorithm for scanning a rotated grid image. The algorithm transforms the grid data into a stream data where the pixels are output in the increasing order of the distances to the line y=ax giving the rotated axis. We first deal with the special case where the slope a of the rotated axis is a quotient number of two small integers, then extend the method to the general case where the slope is an arbitrary real number.

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In this paper, we show a stability property of mean curvature vector fields of codimension-one foliations with respect to small perturbations of the given codimension-one foliation. This is an extended form of D. Sullivan’s result: If a codimension-one foliation is geometrically taut then any foliation sufficiently close to the foliation is also geometrically taut.

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