Takeshi Ohguro

Socialware: multiagent systems for supporting network communities

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM March 1999/Vol. 42, No. 3 55 There seems to be three major issues in the support of network communities. The first is how to bring people together, that is, how to link people with others and with communities that share similar interests [1, 7, 8]. Search engines or directory services for communities can partially help, but more sophisticated systems are needed. The second issue revolves around support for smooth communications [4], including support for visualizing and sharing common contexts, as well as s the Internet continues to grow, social activities through the

A content-based collaborative recommender system with detailed use of evaluations

We present a hybrid recommender model that combines the benefits of both content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. In this model, each document profile is represented as a pair of a keyword vector and an evaluation vector. Each user profile, on the other hand, is represented as a matrix of dependency values in relation to other users according to each keyword. This type of recommender system can provide more appropriate documents to suit a users personal information need. The simulation results showed that our model can provide appropriate documents to users with higher precision than other non-hybrid information filtering models.

Shine: a peer-to-peer based framework of network community support systems

A discussion is presented on Shine, a framework of communication systems that support network communities. Shine provides a unified structural design approach to various network community support systems and enables them to share software components and cooperate with each other. Furthermore, Shine has a peer-to-peer architecture, which enables personal agents to form communities suitable for each user by exchanging data in a peer-to-peer style. These features of Shine are described and its effectiveness as a framework is verified by applying it to several systems.

Lumisight table: interactive view-dependent display-table surrounded by multiple users

Lumisight Table is not just an interactive display technology. Now, you have a new canvas. You can display anything, and design new interactive applications on it. The possibilities are unlimited: entertainment, computer supported cooperative work, networked applications, and media art works. In order to realize Lumasight Table, we will implement an application program interface in the near future.

FaintPop: In Touch with the Social Relationships

We propose a tool called FaintPop. It is intended to be an alternative media that is suitable for a very light-weight, acknowledge-only, mode of communication. Furthermore, it intuitively provides, through memories of communication, a general overview of the communication activities. The tool is designed for a community, with which the sense of connectedness can be shared among members. Results from an initial experiment are reported briefly.

CommunityBoard: social meeting system able to visualize the structure of discussions

We have developed a social meeting system called CommunityBoard which visually displays the discussion structure. Discussions on networks, e.g., by a mailing list, Usenet newsgroup, or online forum, are becoming more and more popular. However, many people have difficulty following and participating in discussions on networks, and one of the reasons is due to a failure to grasp the context of discussions. Previous tools have been insufficient in helping to avoid this failure. In order to solve this problem, we have developed CommunityBoard. Users can avoid confusion and achieve informative discussion. This system provides one integrated view of discussions from three aspects: the speakers, topics and time. The integrated view enables users to easily obtain various information about these aspects at one glance and this leads to lively and productive discussions. An example illustrates the efficiency of CommunityBoard.

CommunityBoard 2: mediating between speakers and an audience in computer network discussions

Discussions on computer networks have become increasingly popular. People subscribe to several mailing lists and/or Usenet newsgroups. Discussions using these media are convenient because users are able to express their opinions at any time at the office or home. However, there are few methods that sufficiently support a user’s understanding of what is being discussed or support a sharing of opinions in the discussion group. Thus, it is necessary to make agents that support discussions on computer networks. In discussions on networks, it is often difficult to grasp the outline of a discussion, because there are many messages with various topics and their relations are not obvious. Providing tools that consider only a single participant’s viewpoint does not seem to work well. This is because a discussion is built up by all participants in the discussion group. Let us suppose that a participant wants to post two messages; one is about a romantic movie and the other is about a horror movie. Also suppose that most of the other participants want to read his opinion on the romantic movie but do not want to read his opinion on the horror movie. In this case, it is better that he posts the one on the horror movie at a different discussion group. This example demonstrates that discussion supporting-agents should mediate between speakers’ demand (what they want to talk about and how they want to talk about it) and an audience’s demand (what kind of messages they want to listen to). In this paper, we describe a social meeting system called CommunityBoard 2. Our system visualizes a discussion structure by displaying persons, topics, and the importance of messages in an integrated manner. The visualization is designed to direct a writer’s attention to a discussion group where other participants would want to read his/her opinion. This facilitates understanding in discussions and assists with further discussions.

Building a Network Community Support System on the Multi-agent Platform Shine

An increasing number of applications have been developed for supporting network communities. The authors have developed Community Organizer, which supports people in forming new network communities by providing places where people sharing interests and concerns can meet and communicate. The authors are also developing a platform named Shine to reduce the tasks needed to implement a variety of network community support systems such as Community Organizer. Shine has a multi-agent architecture because it is effective for network community support systems that have to adapt to dynamic changes in community organizations. This paper explains both Community Organizer and Shine, and then gives a description of building Community Organizer on top of Shine.

A platform for making network community support systems in a cooperative distributed architecture

There are an increasing number of applications that support communications in network communities. As the architecture of these applications, cooperative distributed agents are suitable for adapting to dynamic changes in community organizations. We are developing a platform named Shine as a common base for implementing network community applications in a cooperative distributed architecture. The paper describes the platforms significance, requirements, and design policy. We also show an example of building a network community support system on top of the platform.