Chigusa Kita

Hiroshi Wada: Pioneering Electronics and Computer Technologies in Postwar Japan

Presents a biography of Hiroshi Wada, who helped promote the electronics industry and computer technologies in postwar Japan.

Events and Sightings

The Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) recently started the Information Processing Technology Heritage program to certify historical artifacts in order to promote the preservation of historical computers.

Toward multilingual support of educational document sharing based on the language grid

Substantial amount of multilingual educational resources are already available online through Web sites. However, such educational resources are not necessarily used extensively regardless of immediate needs. The objective of this study is to propose a way of sharing educational documents so that existing assets can be fully usable in different languages. In this paper, we introduce a brief overview of a multilingual environment for sharing educational documents, which is being developed on top of Language Grid that is an extensible, open platform for online language services.

Events and Sightings: SIGCIS 2016 Workshop Report

SIGCIS 2016 Workshop Report The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) held its 59th annual conference in Singapore from 22–26 June 2016. The Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) also held a day-long workshop on Sunday, 26 June. The workshop was cochaired by Jason Gallo and Ramesh Subramanian. The theme for this year’s workshop was “Convergence and Divergence.” The SIGCIS executive board felt that this theme was particularly representative considering that the SHOT conference was held for the first time in Asia. The call for papers noted:

History of Computing in East Asia

All four articles in this special issue cover stories of real-world implementations or applications of computing technology in East Asia. Each article adopts a unique approach and historiographical strategy, which demonstrates the diversity of this scholarly community.

A Comparative Analysis of Usability Evaluation Methods on Their Versatility in the Face of Diversified User Input Methods

Every command consists of an action and an object, suggesting that a usability problem can occur whenever the user is unable to identify an appropriate action and/or the object associated with his/her current goal. The recent shift from mouse-based to touch-based interaction demands that any usability evaluation method be sensitive to not only object-related but also action-related usability problems. This study involved a total of 32 participants, four kinds of tasks differing in the difficulty of identifying objects and executing actions, and four qualitative methods of usability evaluation. Analyses of sets of observation data with concurrent and retrospective protocol by the same participant and interpretive protocol by a new participant indicate that while the oral instruction method seems least appropriate, the newly-devised narration method seems to have better prospects than the observation and the think aloud method for the usability evaluation of touch-based interaction.

Proposal of Advance Care Planning Support System

In terminal care, patients may not receive the treatment they want because they cannot express their will. We found that the “Advance Directive” and the “Living Will” are useful for determining the treatment in terminal care. However, patients being unable to respond to changes due to self-choices and share these self-choices when using a conventional format are some problems that remain. We propose an advance care planning support system that enhances the possibility of performing self-choices, collecting data about end-of-life care, confirming self-choices, and sharing the information with others using social networks.

Dynamic term suggestion for searching multilingual school documents

The number of school children having ties overseas is on the rise year after year in Japan. In order to support these children and their parents, we developed a multilingual school document portal site, and made it open to the public. The portal site allows easy-to-use document retrieval by faceted classification as well as keyword search. However, it is not necessarily easy for the users to express their information needs in query terms, and they often come up with poor results from short and generic query terms. In pursuit of the formulation of better query statements with a few search terms even in the initial query, we realized a dynamic term suggestion or auto-suggest interface in the portal site. In the auto-suggest interface, suggested terms are ranked according to domain relevance, rather than merely on the basis of term occurrence frequency in the document collection. In this paper, we explain an overview of the school document portal site, the auto-suggest interface realized in the portal, and the domain-dependent term-weighting scheme, followed by the results of a user study conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the auto-suggest function.

Events and Sightings [including IEEE Computer Society Awards]

Includes an item about the IEEE Computer Society awards presented in June 2009.

Events and Sightings [includes an obituary for Oliver G. Selfridge]

Chigusa Kita provides an obituary for Oliver G. Selfridge, an early leader in the artificial intelligence field.