Kenji Sugawara

Perspectives on the Field of Cognitive Informatics and its Future Development

The contemporary wonder of sciences and engineering has recently refocused on the beginning point of: how the brain processes internal and external information autonomously and cognitively rather than imperatively like conventional computers. Cognitive Informatics CI is a transdisciplinary enquiry of computer science, information sciences, cognitive science, and intelligence science that investigates the internal information processing mechanisms and processes of the brain and natural intelligence, as well as their engineering applications in cognitive computing. This paper reports a set of eight position statements presented in the plenary panel of IEEE ICCI10 on Cognitive Informatics and Its Future Development contributed from invited panelists who are part of the worlds renowned researchers and scholars in the field of cognitive informatics and cognitive computing.

Interactive Design Method of Agent System for Symbiotic Computing

Agent-based systems have been designed and developed using recent agent technologies. However, design and debugging of these systems is difficult because of agents situational and nondeterministic behavior, and effective design support technologies have not been proposed. To raise the efficiency of the agent system design process, we propose an interactive design method of agent system founded on an agent-repository based multiagent framework which emphasizes an important feature of agent system design: the use/reuse of existing agents from an agent repository. We propose an interactive design environment of agent system (IDEA) and demonstrate its effectiveness.

Concept of Symbiotic Computing and its Agent-Based Application to a Ubiquitous Care-Support Service

In this paper, a concept of “symbiotic computing†is formalized to bridge gaps between Real Space (RS) and Digital Space (DS). Symbiotic computing is a post-ubiquitous computing model based on an agent-oriented computing model that introduces social heuristics and cognitive functions into DS to bridge the gaps. The symbiotic functions and agent-based architecture of symbiotic applications are also discussed. Based on the concept, functions, and architecture of symbiotic applications, we develop an agent-based care-support service to enable supervision of persons by their families and friends easily while protecting privacy. In this application system, a hierarchical structure of multi-agents is organized dynamically using heuristics in agents based on the situation of a watched person and watching persons. The system appropriately alters the contents and quality of the live video. The flexible system construction scheme using a multiagent framework facilitates the symbiosis of RS and DS by bridging the gaps in the care-support service domain.

A design of cognitive agents for recognizing real space — towards symbiotic computing —

The growth of the ubiquitous computing and the Web computing is expected to make the internet society more convenient. Furthermore, intelligence of information systems is also expected to make our society safer and more content. The symbiotic computing is a technology to introduce symbiotic relations between users and computing systems by installing a function to recognize the important and relevant aspects in the real space into computing systems, using Ubiquitous computing and Web computing. We have developed various symbiotic applications that have practical use in our society, based on the concept of the symbiotic computing. In this paper, we propose a design of cognitive agents to enhance the cognitive function for symbiotic applications to recognize the real space. We call this cognitive agent as symbiotic agent which is included in our proposed symbiotic functions to establish symbiotic computing.

Multilingual collaborative design support system

In this paper, we first present an analysis of a multi-language application from a cross-cultural point of view. Then we analyze the specific activities of a multilingual collaborative design and the automatic translation system that it requires. We also propose an architecture of a design support system producing the UML design of applications and allowing a multilingual collaboration. We present the first results of an experiment with such a system.

Symbiotic Computing Based Approach Towards Reducing User's Burden Due to Information Explosion

In this work, Symbiotic Computing (SC) based solution to combat the problem of Information Explosion is addressed. Symbiotic Computing was proposed to bridge the gap between the Real Space (RS) and the Digital Space (DS) by creating symbiotic relations among users in the RS and the information resources such as software, data, etc. in the DS. SC is realized by adding a new axis, S/P computing (Social and Perceptual Computing), to the advanced ubiquitous computing consisting of ambient and web computing. Here, a new framework of SC based on Symbiotic Space (SS) and Symbiotic Space Platform (SSP) has been designed to construct and maintain Symbiotic Relations for S/P computing in order to reduce the burden of Information Explosion. Finally the feasibility of our proposal has been tested by bench-top simulation through applying logical model of Symbiotic Computing to a typical example of Information Explosion.

Perceptual functions for context-awareness of an office worker

Symbiotic Computing is a kind of research project and concept to bridge the gap between Real Space (RS) and Digital Space (DS). The purpose is mainly to develop flexible information service or application as well as to establish the next generation information platform. In order to establish the framework, it is necessary to build Mutual Cognition between human and system. Mutual Cognition broadly consists of two functions; RS Cognition and DS Cognition. This paper focuses on RS Cognition, which is perceptual function of software system for some events or humans activities. In this study, we develop two perceptual functions, which are sitting posture recognition and humans location recognition for an office worker, as a kind of RS perception task. As the results of experiments, we found that our developed functions are quite competent to recognize workers activities.

Soft biometric verification by integrating static and dynamic features based on fuzzy inference

This paper proposes a simple multimodal soft biometic verification method based on fuzzy inference. This study is a part of the challenge to develop an novel natural verification technology that a user doesnt need to hold his/her biometric features to an authentication device. We employ both of static and dynamic features obtained from an appearance of a person in gait. As the result of verification experiment, we show that our developed method works successfully in spite of simple approach and an easy-to-use device.

Synchronous interaction for supporting remote multilingual brainstorming

The motivation of our research is the design and the implementation of tools supporting the activities of several distant teams that have to collaborate for defining the specifications of a project. The paper presents the design of synchronous brainstorming activities between two distant teams mediated by two channels: a TV channel and a resource channel. Via the TV channel, cameras film a team during a session and computer applications allow to record and transmit video sequences to the distant team. During sessions, each team interacts with a large multi-touch device and manipulate virtual post-it notes displayed on both surfaces. Via the resource channel, displays each device are synchronized. The paper also presents the architecture of the main system involving several tactile devices, individual devices like tablet pcs and collaborative ones like interactive tables or whiteboards. The experiment conducted between two team situated in Japan and in France and conclusions about this experiment are described in the last sections.

Proposal of agent organization method on heterogeneous agent platform for symbiotic computing

To achieve cooperative problem solving for use in providing human activity surrogates and supporters, various agents have been designed and developed using many agent platforms. Generally, realizing cooperation or construction remains as a difficult problem confronting agent organizations using different agents running on a heterogeneous agent platform, in contrast to similar agents running on a homogeneous platform. To overcome that problem, a systematic method to construct an organization with different agents on a heterogeneous agent platform is proposed.