Hirokazu Aritake

New holographic technology for a compact POS scanner.

A new holographic technique has been used to make a compact, accurate, and reliable point-of-sale scanner. Our holo-window technique is capable of changing the scan direction, collecting the signal light, and equalizing the scan velocity. At present, compact scanners tend to sacrifice read operation accuracy, speed, and reliability for size. Our technique permits the miniaturization of the optical system of a scanner while preserving performance. Using the holo-window, we have developed a new scanner that has a letter-size footprint and is only 8 cm high.

Extracting document relationships by analyzing user's activity history

In order to reduce peoples workload of looking for valuable information from a large amount of available information, recommendation systems, task management systems, and so on are attracting considerable attention. Such systems are expected to allow easy access to information under the current work context. In the development of these systems, how to handle a users current work context to know what information he wants to use is a key point. We have developed a novel method to extract relationships among documents as the work context by analyzing the users activity history according to several viewpoints of a human being who memorizes and seeks information. We report the details of the proposed method, the evaluation result, and an application example.