Yasuyuki Kono

Ubiquitous Memories: a memory externalization system using physical objects

In this paper we propose an object-triggered human memory augmentation system named “Ubiquitous Memories” that enables a user to directly associate his/her experience data with physical objects by using a “touching” operation. A user conceptually encloses his/her experiences gathered through sense organs into physical objects by simply touching an object. The user can also disclose and re-experience for himself/herself the experiences accumulated in an object by the same operation. We implemented a prototype system composed basically of a radio frequency identification (RFID) device. Physical objects are also attached to RFID tags. We conducted two experiments. The first experiment confirms a succession of the “encoding specificity principle,” which is well known in the research field of psychology, to the Ubiquitous Memories system. The second experiment aims at a clarification of the system’s characteristics by comparing the system with other memory externalization strategies. The results show the Ubiquitous Memories system is effective for supporting memorization and recollection of contextual events.

Robot navigation in corridor environments using a sketch floor map

This paper presents a new robot navigation system that can operate on a sketch floor map provided by a user. This sketch map is similar to floor plans as shown at the entrance of buildings, which does not contain accurate metric information and details such as obstacles. The system enables a user to give navigational instructions to a robot by interactively providing a floor map and pointing out goal positions on the map. Since metric information is unavailable, navigation is done using an augmented topological map which described the structure of the corridors extracted from a given floor map. Multiple hypotheses of the robots location are maintained and updated during navigation in order to cope with sensor aliasing and landmark-matching failures due to factors such as unknown obstacles inside the corridors.

I’m Here!: A Wearable Object Remembrance Support System

In this paper we propose a wearable vision interface system named “I’m Here!” to support a user’s remembrance of object location in everyday life. The system enables users to retrieve certain information from a video database that has recorded a set of the latest scenes of target objects which were held by the user and were observed from the users’ viewpoint. We propose the object recognition method to associate the video database with the name of objects observed in the video. The offline experiments demonstrate that the system is useful enough to recognize the objects.

Nice2CU: managing a person's augmented memory

In this paper, we propose a feasible wearable system named Nice2CU to manage a person’s augmented memory. For managing a person’s augmented memory, an “easy registration” method and an “automatic update” method are necessary. We have designed a prototype system using a “Card and Mirror” interface.

Animated interface agent applying atms-based multimodal input interpretation

Two requirements should be met in order to develop a practical multimodal interface system , i . e ., ( 1 ) integration of delayed arrival of data and ( 2 ) elimination of ambiguity in recognition results of each modality . This paper presents an efficient and generic methodology for interpretation of multimodal input to satisfy these requirements . The proposed methodology can integrate delayed - arrival data satisfactorily and efficiently interpret multimodal input that contains ambiguity . In the input interpretation the multimodal interpretation process is regarded as hypothetical reasoning , and the control mechanismof interpretation is formalized by applying the assumption - based truth maintenance system ( ATMS ). The proposed method is applied to an interface agent system that accepts multimodal input consisting of voice and direct indication gesture on a touch display . The systemcommunicates to the user through a human - like interface agents three - dimensional motion image with facial express...

Detection of assessment patterns in ordinary triadic conversation

Recent interests in conversation in the field of artificial intelligence have expanded beyond the development of particular task-oriented dialogue systems toward technologies for supporting human-human communication in various circumstances. Within such communication supportive approaches, the importance of the analysis of multiparty conversation has increasingly been recognized. In accordance with these orientations, this article outlines a three-party conversation corpus built by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, and introduces three preliminary analyses of it that will contribute to the development of Conversational Informatics: The characteriscits of turn-taking procedure in three-person conversation; assessment sequential patterns that appeared in the data; and shared knowledge and interpersonal relationships between participants observable from the assessment sequences in triadic conversation.

A generic framework for spoken dialogue systems and its application to a car navigation task

This paper presents EUROPA, a new generic framework for spoken dialogue systems, and its application to a car navigation task. A EUROPA-based system is based on keyword-spotting, i.e., it accepts and understands users utterance as a set of keyword-sequences, to cope with the diversity of wording in spoken language. Applying voice interface techniques to practical tasks such as car navigation involves many recognition errors, false alarms in the case of keyword-spotting. EUROPA employs a new parsing algorithm, BTH, which is capable of efficiently parsing a keyword lattice that contains a large number of false alarms. The BTH parser runs without unfolding the given keyword lattice, and thus it can efficiently obtain a set of keyword-sequences acceptable to the given grammar as the parser result. This paper also presents MINOS, a prototype spoken dialogue system which is built by applying EUROPA to a car navigation task. It understands the users spoken queries on either places or sections, and replies to them by synthesized voice. It runs on a single Windows-based portable PC in near real time.

Supporting on-demand experience segmentation in the ubiquitous memories environment

This work newly proposes a wearable system in the ubiquitous memories (UM) environment we have already developed, where users can enclose/disclose their experiences in/from related objects. We have designed an intelligent wearable system to support on-demand experience segmentation so that an object can be enclosed by the following two processes 1) continuously recording the users viewpoint images, and 2) detecting the starting point of an experience the user wants to record just when that experience has ended. We describe design concepts of the proposed system and an experiment to confirm its availability to detect the starting point of a certain period of an experience.