Osamu Katai

Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems

Artificial evolutionary systems are computer systems, inspired by ideas from natural evolution and related phenomena. The field has a long history, dating back to the earliest days of computer science, but it has only become an established scientific and engineering discipline since the 1990s, with packages for the commonest form, genetic algorithms, now widely available. Researchers in the Asia-Pacific region have participated strongly in the development of evolutionary systems, with a particular emphasis on the evolution of intelligent solutions to highly complex problems. The Asia-Pacific Symposia on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems have been an important contributor to this growth in impact, since 1997 providing an annual forum for exchange and dissemination of ideas. Participants come primarily from East Asia and the Western Pacific, but contributions are welcomed from around the World. This volume features a selection of fourteen of the best papers from recent APSIES. They illustrate the breadth of research in the region, with applications ranging from business to medicine, from network optimization to the promotion of innovation.

Morphological preprocessing method to thresholding degraded word images

This paper presents a novel preprocessing method based on mathematical morphology techniques to improve the subsequent thresholding quality of raw degraded word images. The raw degraded word images contain undesirable shapes called critical shadows on the background that cause noise in binary images. This noise constitutes obstacles to posterior segmentation of characters. Direct application of a thresholding method produces inadequate binary versions of these degraded word images. Our preprocessing method called Shadow Location and Lightening (SL*L) adaptively, accurately and without manual fine-tuning of parameters locates these critical shadows on grayscale degraded images using morphological operations, and lightens them before applying eventual thresholding process. In this way, enhanced binary images without unpredictable and inappropriate noise can be provided to subsequent segmentation of characters. Then, adequate binary characters can be segmented and extracted as input data to optical character recognition (OCR) applications saving computational effort and increasing recognition rate. The proposed method is experimentally tested with a set of several raw degraded images extracted from real photos acquired by unsophisticated imaging systems. A qualitative analysis of experimental results led to conclusions that the thresholding result quality was significantly improved with the proposed preprocessing method. Also, a quantitative evaluation using a testing data of 1194 degraded word images showed the essentiality and effectiveness of the proposed preprocessing method to increase segmentation and recognition rates of their characters. Furthermore, an advantage of the proposed method is that Otsus method as a simple and easily implementable global thresholding technique can be sufficient to reducing computational load.

Fuzzy Local Currency Based on Social Network Analysis for Promoting Community Businesses

This paper discusses the ability of local currencies (LCs) to exchange goods and/or services by introducing a method to analyze the reciprocity of communities based on fuzzy network analysis. LCs are expected to revitalize social communities that face difficulties due to the attenuation of human relations. Therefore, such currencies have drastically spread all over the world to resolve these difficulties. LCs circulate in particular areas or communities and enhance social capitals. The significance of reciprocity in a community is usually referred to in light of the non-additivity of evaluation measures that reflect the non-additivity of relationships among community members and/or their activities. To analyze such reciprocity, we employ a fuzzy measure based on fuzzy network analysis that provides certain guidelines for the emergence of interpersonal relationalities among community members.

Inclusive design workshop by regional cooperation between an NPO and a university

This is a case of running inclusive design workshops. Communication in an inclusive design workshop is not intercultural collaboration itself. However, as designers, engineers, and users who have individual needs, such as aged and disabled people, gather in the workshop, participants may become aware of differences in individual creation of meanings by communicating with other participants. Because as individuals our imaginative power is sometimes quite insufficient, it is not possible to sufficiently analyze such individual needs without communicating directly. In the inclusive design workshop, participants cooperate with each other during the design process, revealing differences in individual creation of meanings. In this paper, we describe some activities of social-academic cooperation, specifically cases of workshops that were run by an nonprofit organization (NPO) and a laboratory at Kyoto University. The former supports aged and disabled peoples participation in society and the latter researches communication by the system theory.

Formalizing coexistential communication as co-creation of Leibnizian spatio-temporal fields

This paper proposes deep and fundamental structures of communication among persons in a “coexistential” setting. The basic framework for this formalization of communication structures is Leibnizian notions of space and time together with the notion of the Existential Graph by C. S. Peirce and that of the Petri net, more precisely, the occurrence net. The fundamental structures of coexistential communication are then formalized as co-creation of Leibnizian space and time in such a manner that they are used to link the communicated messages, thus establishing the “coexistential atmosphere and field” (“Ba” in Japanese) among the individuals. This framework is then applied to the analysis of theater play communication. Finally, the framework of information edaphology is also introduced to discuss the growth processes of individuals and communities through coexistential communication.

Visualization of balancing systems based on naïve psychological approaches

In this paper, we propose a novel medium for interactions based on an interpersonal psychological approach referred to as ‘naïve psychology’. We adopt the visual assessment of clustering tendency (VAT) to naïve psychology for the visual understanding of other people. The VAT algorithm produces a visual display that can be used to assess clustering tendencies in a set of persons (notions) by reconstructing a digital image representation of a square relational dissimilarity matrix for its set. This algorithm clearly represents two types of imbalanced situations in naïve psychology: crisp and fuzzy. The visual image of a balanced or imbalance situation is useful for a deeper human understanding.

Novel nonspeech tones for conceptualizing spatial information

We propose a novel concept toward interfaces that can provide visually impaired persons with the opportunity to recover the freedom to conceptualize their environment without depending on conventional voice synthesizer systems. Fourteen subjects participated in ten experiments to provide results that evaluated their performances to conceptualize spatial information based on cues in “artificial-sounding” (AS) and “natural-sounding” (NS) tones. The source of AS tones was the digitized sound used by the vOICe Learning Edition, and the source of NS tones was fan noise with analogs in everyday listening. Experimental results revealed that the use of NS tones was essential for improving the conceptualization performance of subjects as the eventual users of novel human–environment interfaces.

Expanding awareness by inclusive communication design

In this paper, we report the case of an Inclusive Design workshop. Inclusive Design is a design method that includes elderly and disabled people not only in interviews, but also in the upstream design process such as basic design and survey analysis. In the workshop, participants designed scientific educational materials that visually impaired and sighted people can use together. To work together regardless of visual disability, participants used the image-processing system and the stereo copying machine to make images tactile. We think that collaborative work with elderly and disabled people in Inclusive Design can teach participants different perspectives and help to correct their biased view of each other. In fact, participants of the workshop noticed several facts that they were not aware of before. That is, the Inclusive Design workshop can improve social awareness.

Encoding Modalities into Extended Petri Net for Analyzing Discrete Event Business Process

This paper proposes a method for encoding discrete systems together with their tasks into an extended Petri net. The main feature of this method is the interpretation of tasks, which are first described by modal logic formulae, into what we call “task unit graphs” that can be naturally combined with a Petri net. The combination of a normal Petri net and task unit graphs provides a method for detecting conflicts among tasks. Furthermore, we examine a way for resolving such conflicts and attaining the correct behavior of systems.

Information Assurance Robot Vision System Based on the Uneven Distribution Level in the Hand Orbit

This research pays attention to visually handicapped persons touching action. It develops the information security robot vision system based on the uneven distribution level in the hand orbit. This system secures information analyzing visually handicapped persons hand orbit based on the image processing. The scene consists of the visually handicapped person hearing the lecture in the citizens course with the tactile figures to be mediated. First of all this paper explains the outline of the information security robot vision system. To enable security after the users intention, we newly propose the spatio-temporal image data structure that arbitrarily specifies the range and resolution. Finally, under the proposed data structure, we analyze the touching action of visually handicapped persons with tactile figures. We obtain the findings of an indicator to enable security more adoptively.