Acta Medica Okayama2007池田家文庫こども向け岡山後楽園発見ワークショップEN岡山大学には、江戸時代に書かれた資料がたくさんあります。みんながよく知っている岡山後楽園については、色鮮やかに描かれた絵図や昔のお役人が書いた資料が残っています。このワークショップでは、みんなでたのしみながら江戸時代の後楽園の巨大絵図(複製)を観察したり、園内探検をしながら、昔と今の後楽園のうつりかわりを発見します。 開催日:平成19年7月8日(日) 10:00〜12:30No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2007錯体触媒による革新的化学品製造技術の開発ENToshiyukiOshikiAkinoriIshiduka水和反応は原理的に副生成物が出ないため、本質的に環境への負荷が少ない反応です。この反応に適用できる高活性触媒を開発し、しかも溶媒なしでアミド製造が実現できたことは大きなイノベーションです。さらに、これを出発点として、他の化学品を省エネルギー型水和反応により製造する技術開発を民間企業との連携により現在進めています。岡山大学では、このような自然と人間の共生を目指した研究を通じて、我が国の産業技術開発を担う人材育成に取り組んでいます。No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2007タンタル上のアルキン配位子交換反応の機構研究ENToshiyukiOshiki研究内容
シリルアルキン錯体の合成とその反応性。
アルキン交換反応の速度式と活性化パラメータの算出。
アルキン交換反応の新規錯体合成への応用。No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2007水-有機多相系を制御する新規錯体触媒プロセスによるシンプル水和
反応の開発ENToshiyukiOshiki極性官能基をもつニトリルやエステルを錯体触媒により水和(加水分解)し、工業的に重要なアミドや脂肪酸を得るための究極のシンプルな新規製造プロセスの開発が目的です。その実現のためには、水と油(有機化合物)の多相系を「科学的」及び「工学的」に制御することが必要です。本研究では、新たに開発する多相系制御技術を協奏的に活用し、化学産業で強く求められている環境調和の省エネルギー型水和プロセスの完成を目指します。No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学経済学会Acta Medica Okayama038630693812006<書評>松尾展成,『日本=ザクセン文化交流史研究』,大学教育出版,2005年99105ENHideoTakechiTakehikoSetoNaokiKamimuraNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Human Error Management Paying Emphasis on Decision Making and Social Intelligence
-Beyond the Framework of Man-Machine Interface Design-112ENAtsuoMurataHow latent error or violation induces a serious accident has been reviewed and a proper addressing measure of this has been proposed in the framework of decision making, emotional intelligence (EI) and social intelligence (SI) of organization and its members. It has been clarified that EI and SI play an important role in decision making. Violations frequently occur all over the world, although we definitely understand that we should not commit violations, and a secret to prevent this might exist in the enhancement of both social intelligence and reliability. The construction of social structure or system that supports organizational efforts to enhance both social intelligence and reliability would be essential. Traditional safety education emphasizes that it is possible to change attitudes or mind toward safety by means of education. In spite of this,accidents or scandals frequently occur and never decrease. These problems must be approached on the basis of the full understanding of social intelligence and limited reasonability in decision making. Social dilemma (We do not necessarily cooperate in spite of understanding its importance, and we sometimes make decision not to select cooperative behavior. Non-cooperation gives rise to a desirable result for an individual. However, if all take non-cooperative actions, undesirable results are finally induced to all.) must be solved in some ways and the transition from relief (closed) society to global (reliability) society must be realized as a whole. New social system, where cooperative relation can be easily and reliably obtained, must be constructed to support such an approach and prevent violation-based accidents.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Nondominated equilibrium solutions of multiobjective two-person nonzero-sum games in normal and extensive forms1322ENIn this paper, we review the development of studies
on multiobjective noncooperative games, and particularly we
focus on nondominated equilibrium solutions in multiobjective two-person nonzero-sum games in normal and extensive forms.
After outlining studies related to multiobjective noncooperative games, we treat multiobjective two-person nonzero-sum games in normal form, and a mathematical programming problem yielding nondominated equilibrium solutions is shown. As for extensive form games, we first provide a game representation of the sequence form, and then formulate a mathematical programming problem for obtaining nondominated equilibrium solutions.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Algebraic and Topological Aspects of Rough Set Theory2330ENThe main purpose of this talk is to show how some widely known and well established algebraic and topological
notions are closely related to notions and results introduced and rediscovered in the rough set literature.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008User's Comment Classifying Method Using Self Organizing
Feature Map on Healthcare System for Diabetic3136ENDiabetes is a metabolic disorder characterized by the
elevation of blood glucose. Glysemic control can delay the onset and slow the progression of vascular complications. Lifestyle modification including weight reduction can contribute significantly to glycemic control. The Health Support Intelligent System for Diabetic Patients (HSISD) can provide guideline-based decision support for lifestyle modifications in the treatment of diabetes. HSISD also provides opportunities for telecounseling (TC) with the use of mobile devices and the Internet. The telecounseling phase inquires about the patient’s condition and the
patient answer in a questionnaire. In the questionnaire, there is a question like “Have you developed any symptoms of anxiety? If yes, tell me the details.” The answer is described freely so the physician should read all of patient’s answer. But it is hard for physicians to read all text carefully because a physician has a lot of
patients. We propose a method to analyze text data from the
patients and classify them into five anxiety types (mental problem, physical problem, diet, physical activity, and medicine) automatically. Related to the classified anxiety type, the method can analyze the patient’s inner emotion to guess serious and emergency degree of the patient. In this method, Self organizing feature map is trained by the distribution of feature words (morphemes) in the input text and also classifies anxiety type and emotion type.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Multi-chromosomal Grammatical Evolution3742ENGrammatical Evolution (GE) is an evolutionary
method for optimizing a program generated by a one-dimensional chromosome and grammatical rules. The grammars consist of terminals, which are items that can appear in the language, and nonterminals, which can be expanded into one or more terminals and nonterminals. The genes are translated into a program based on the grammar. If the genes are used up for generating complete
program, the chromosome is wrapped and reused. GE has an
advantage that illegal individuals are not generated by the genetic operations. When a certain gene changes, however, the successive genes might be used for the different production rule from the rule applied before even if they are not changed. Therefore, it is difficult to preserve the characteristics of parents. To solve this problem, we propose GE using multiple chromosomes. In this method, multiple chromosomes as many as the nonterminal symbols in the grammatical rules are prepared. A chromosome
correspondent to the expanded non-terminal symbol is selected and used for mapping. Moreover, a new technique of the wrapping is also introduced so that the grammatical rules which increase the number of nonterminal symbols can not be applied when the wrapping happens. We performed some experiments, and showed the effectiveness of our proposed method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Particle Swarm Optimization Combining Diversification and Intensification for Nonlinear Integer Programming Problems4347ENIn this research, focusing on nonlinear integer programming
problems, we propose an approximate solution method
based on particle swarm optimization proposed by Kennedy
et al. And we developed a new particle swarm optimization
method which is applicable to discrete optimization problems
by incoporating a new method for generating initial search
points, the rounding of values obtained by the move scheme
and the revision of move methods. Furthermore, we showed the
efficiency of the proposed particle swarm optimization method by comparing it with an existing method through the application of them into the numerical examples. Moreover we expanded revised particle swarm optimization method for application to nonlinear integer programming problems and showed more effeciency than genetic algorithm. However, variance of the solutions obtained by the PSO method is large and accuracy is not so high. Thus, we consider improvement of accuracy introducing diversification and intensification.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Constitution of Ms.PacMan Player with Critical-Situation Learning Mechanism4853ENHisashiHandaWe previously proposed evolutionary fuzzy systems
of playing Ms.PacMan for the competitions. As a consequence
of the evolution, reflective action rules such that
PacMan tries to eat pills effectively until ghosts come close to PacMan are acquired. Such rules works well. However, sometimes it is too reflective so that PacMan go toward ghosts by herself in longer corridors. In this paper, a critical situation learning module is combined with the evolved fuzzy systems, i.e., reflective action module. The critical situation learning module
is composed of Q-learning with CMAC. Location information
of surrounding ghosts and the existence of power-pills are given to PacMan as state. This module punishes if PacMan is caught by ghosts. Therefore, this module learning which pairs of (state, action) cause her death. By using learnt Q-value, PacMan tries to survive much longer. Experimental results on Ms.PacMan elucidate the proposed method is promising since it can capture critical situations well. However, as a consequence of the large amount of memory required by CMAC, real time responses tend to be lost.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Multivariate Analysis for Fault Diagnosis System5458ENE.SayedHanaaA.GabbarHossamShigejiMiyazakiMany multivariate techniques have been applied
to diagnose faults such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fisher’s Discriminant Analysis (FDA), and Discriminant Partial Least Squares (DPLS). However, it has been shown that FDA and DPLS are more proficient than PCA for diagnosing faults. And recently applying kernel on FDA which is called KFDA (Kernel FDA) has showed outperformance than linear FDA based method. We propose in this research work an advanced
KFDA for faults classification with Building knowledge base for faults structure using FSN. A case study is done on a chemical G-Plant process, constructed and experimental runs are done in Okayama University, Japan. The results are showing improving performance of fault detection rate for the new model over FDA.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008A Forecasting Decision Support System5964ENE.SayedHanaaA.GabbarHossamA. FouadcSoheirM. AhmedcKhalilShigejiMiyazakiNowadays forecasting is needed in many fields such as weather forecasting, population estimation, industry demand forecasting, and many others. As complexity and factors increase, it becomes impossible for a human being to do the prediction operation without support of computer
system. A Decision support system is needed to model all demand factors and combine with expert opinions to enhance forecasting accuracy. In this research work, we present a decision support system using winters’, simple exponential smoothing, and regression statistical analysis with a new proposed genetic algorithm to generate operational forecast. A case study is presented using real industrial demand data from different products types to show the improved demand forecasting accuracy for the proposed system over individual statistical techniques for all time series types.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Portfolio Selection Problems with Normal Mixture Distributions Including Fuzziness6570ENIn this paper, several portfolio selection problems with normal mixture distributions including fuzziness are proposed. Until now, many researchers have proposed portfolio models based on the stochastic approach, and there are some models considering both random and ambiguous conditions, particularly using fuzzy random or random fuzzy variables. However, the model including normal mixture distributions with fuzzy numbers has not been proposed yet. Our proposed problems are not well-defined problems due to randomness and fuzziness. Therefore, setting some criterions and introducing chance constrains, main problems are transformed into deterministic programming problems. Finally, we construct a solution method to obtain a global optimal solution of the problem.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Effect of vehicle display information and switch type
on usability -Comparison between young and older adults-7176ENAtsuoMurataRecently, in-vehicle highly intelligent information devices are rapidly widespread. Under such circumstances, the accurate evaluation of the effect of display information and switch type on driving performance is important in order to develop in-vehicle information devices that do not menace the safety. In this article, we present a basic idea to estimate properly the effect of the vehicles display information and the switch system on driving performance. We compared the index such as mean task completion time, subjective rating on usability, tracking error, and NASA-TLX workload between young and older adults.
The results suggest that young will be better than older adults at both abilities on processing displayed information and operating the switch. We were found that there was a significant interaction between the switch types and installation location. On the other hand, the displayed information did not affect the performance.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Development of the evaluation system for automobile
remanufacturing7782ENAtsuoMurataBy 2015, the EU directives required the automobile
manufacturers to produce a vehicle that contains reusable and / or recoverable parts at least 95% of total weight. In the developed countries, the legislative issue the take – back policy which requires the manufacturers to consider the end – of – life (EOL) of their products at early design stage. The goal of this paper is to propose a framework of development methodology that focuses on integrated design for remanufacturing evaluation system. This system supports the automobile product design and development at the early design phase. The proposed method is divided into two phases. The first phase aims to identify the suitable EOL process. The second phase aims to verify the most economical EOL process. The proposed method incorporates the
Case base Reasoning [CBR] into the remanufacturing techniques. It is expected that the proposed method can provide the EOL with decision support during designing the automobile parts at the early design stage.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama200812008Evaluation of Automotive Control-Display System by means of MentalWorkload8388ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaThe effects of age, task difficulty on performance and mental workload were discussed in order to provide design guideline of automobile display that is friendly to older adults from the viewpoints of mental attention, speed and accuracy. A dual-task experiment was conducted in which the
primary task was first order tracking. The secondary
tasks included selection of function (easy condition),
and control of an air conditioner, the operation of a
radio, and the operation of a CD/MD (difficult condition), by means of a steering wheel mounted switch. The display was arranged in front of a participant. Age affected the performance measures and heart rate variability (HRV). As for the young adults, the task completion time did not differ significantly among easy and difficult (one-, two-, and three-layered) conditions. The performance of older
adults was affected by task difficulty. The HRV
measures such as CV (coefficient of variance) and
RRV8-3 during the task showed different tendency
between young and older adults. As for the young
group, the HRV measures did not differ significantly
between the four task levels (easy, one-, two-, and
three-layered). This confirmed that the task difficulty
did not induce different mental workload to young
adults. On the other hand, as for the older adults, the
HRV measures tended to increase with the increase of
task difficulty. Although it appears that mental
workload was lessened with the increase of task
difficulty, such an interpretation was contradictory to
the results on performance. This phenomenon was
interpreted that the difficult task condition was
overloaded for older adults, and was beyond the limit
of mental effort. Based on the results, it could be
concluded that the difficult task condition is not
proper for older adults.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Design of vehicle instrumental panel for older adults
- Effects of viewing distance, display from, and switch arrangement on secondary task performance -8994ENAtsuoMurataSatoshiYamaguchiThe effects of age, viewing distance, arrangement of switches and display form on performance to design of display and control systems friendry to older adults were discussed. A dual-task experimemt was conducted in which the primary task was first-irder tracking. The secondary tasks included control of an air conditioner, the operation of a radio, and the operation of a CD/MD, by means of a steering wheel mounted swich. The switch was either vertical or cross arrangement. In both-hands switch arrangement condition, the operation was carried out with two hands using both left vertical switch and right cross switch. In one-hand swith arrangement condition, the operation was carried out with only one hand using either left or right cross switch. The display was arranged in front of a participant. The display form was either left or right display. The viewing distance conditions were 60, 80, and 100cm. When the right display form was used, both one-hand (using only right cross switch) were selected. When the left display form was used, both one-hand (using only left cross swith) and two-hand arrangements (using both left vertical and right cross switch) were selected. As predicted, age affected the performance measures ( percentage correct, task completion time, and tracking error). The viewing distance also affected performance (percentage correct), Both display form and switch arrangement also affected performance (task completion time). Such results should be taken into account when designing display and control systems in man-vehicle systems.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Evaluation of Drowsiness by EEG analysis
- Basic Study on ITS Development for the Prevention of Drowsy Driving -9598ENAtsuoMurataKazuyukiNishijimaThe aim of this study was to identify a useful measure to estimate an arousal level of drivers, to apply the result to develop ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) that can warn drivers of their low arousal state and to prevent driving under low arousal level from occurring and contribute to the reduction of traffic accidents. The EEG(electroencephalography) during a monotonous task was measured, and it was investigated how these measures change under the low arousal (drowsy) state. The time series of mean power frequency of EEG was plotted on Xbar control chart. Under the low arousal state (drowsy state), the
mean power frequency tended to be lower than central line (CL) and range between CL and lower control limit (LCL). Under the worst case, the mean power frequency was lower than LCL. The ratio of such intervals to total measurement period tended to increase under drowsy state. The mean power frequency was found to be effective for evaluating drowsiness of drivers.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Evaluation of Drowsiness by HRV Measures
- Basic Study for Drowsy Driver Detection -99102ENAtsuoMurataYasutakaHiramatsuThe aim of this study was to identify a useful measure to estimate an arousal level of drivers, to apply the result to develop ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) that can warn drivers of their low arousal state and to prevent driving under low arousal level from occurring and contribute to the reduction of traffic accidents. The EEG (electroencephalography) and ECG(electrocardiography) during a monotonous task was measured, and it was investigated how these measures change under the low arousal (drowsy) state. The time series of mean power frequency of EEG was plotted on X-bar control chart. Heart rate variability (HRV) measures RRV3 and RRV8-3 were derived on the basis of R-R intervals (interbeat intervals) obtained from ECG. Under the low arousal state (drowsy state), the mean power frequency tended to be lower than central line (CL) and range between CL and lower control limit (LCL). In accordance with this, RRV3 and RRV8-3 tended to increase under the low arousal (drowsy) state, which means that the parasympathetic nervous system became dominant under drowsy states.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Web Design that is Friendly to Older Adults
– Effects of Perceptual, Cognitive and Motor Functions and
Display Information on Web Navigation Time –103110ENAtsuoMurataRinaTakahashiOlder internet users are increasing more and more
world widely. The information accessibility standard for Web
contents (JIS X 8341-3) had been established. Although many
researchers are pursuing the usability of Web site, we cannot design a usable Web site only by improving Web pages. One of the reasons is inferred that we didn’t consider perceptual, cognitive, and motor functions especially of older adults in the design of Web pages. The aim of this study was to propose a method to evaluate perceptual, cognitive, and motor ability and
to explore the effect of perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities, and display information on Web navigation. We proposed a method to calculate display information on the basis of number of links. It was explored how display information, age, and the test score of perceptual, cognitive, and motor abilities influenced Web navigation time. This effect was examined using a multiple regression analysis. Display information influenced Web navigation performance for both young and older adults. The more the quantity of display information was, the longer the Web navigation time was. In addition to this tendency, the depth of display layer was found to affect the Web navigation time especially for older adults. We found that
the perceptual, cognitive, and motor abilities of older adults, in particular, the spatial memory, spatial rotation ability, and mouse operation ability, led to longer Web navigation time. These results implies the necessity of designing Web site for older adults that considers the decline of perceptual, cognitive, and motor ability.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Optimal Slope of Touch Panel
−Comparison between Young and Older Adults−111116ENAtsuoMurataRinaTakahashiTouch panels are becoming increasingly common alternatives to traditional indirect devices such as mouse. However, older adults are not willing to utilize touch-panel based ATM or ticket machines, because they feel that using ATM properly is too difficult and annoying for them. The aim of this study was to identify an optimal slope of touch panel interface. Whether using a direct input device by older adults would lead to smaller difference of performance between preferred and non-preferred hands was also examined. For both young and older adults, the slope conditions of 30, 45, and 60 degrees, and the target size
of 60 x 60 pixels were found to lead to higher performance.
With the increase of movement distance d, the movement
velocity tended to increase for both age groups. The
difference of movement velocity between young and older
adults tended to increase with the increase of movement
distance d. The difference of performance between nonpreferred and preferred hands was smaller relative to their young counterparts. Moreover, the difference of
performance between young and older adults was smaller
when using a touch panel than when using a mouse.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Effect of Shape of pen on Usability117120ENAtsuoMurataKensukeMizushimaUsing electromyography (EMG) analysis and psychological rating, the usability of pen was evaluated. The experimental factors wewre the pen diameter (three levels:8mm, 11mm, and 13.8mm). The length of pen tip was fixed to 14mm. Surface EMG was recordes from extensor digitorum and flexxor digitorum superficialis. The EMG before and after a long-hour writing task was measured to evaluate the fatigue of forearm using % MVC (Mean Voluntary Contraction), mean power frequency (MPF) and psychological rating on usability. Concerning % MVC and MPF, the difference before and the experimental task were used for the evaluation. The evaluation value corresponded to subtraction of value after the experimental task from that before the experimental task. As a result of a one-way (pen diameter) ANOVA, no significant main effects of pen diameter were for both EMG evaluation measures. As for the psychological rating on usability, Kruscal-Wallis non-parametric test was carried out. The psychological rating on ease of grip revealed a significant main effect of pen diameter. A pen with a diameter of 11mm was found to have a significant higher rating score.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Usability of Site Map in Web Design
– Design of Site Map that is Friendly to Older Adults-121126ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaThe information or data for Web page design that is useful, in particular, to older adults was provided in this study. The proper design of site map is necessary to enhance the usability and reduce the number of getting lost in Web navigation especially for older adults. However, no design guideline on what site map is proper exists. The usability of six types of site maps was compared as a function of age.
The six types of site maps included (1) vertical tree
type, (2) horizontal tree type (A), (3) horizontal tree
type (B), (4) table type, (5) radial type, and (6)
itemized type. The usability was evaluated using search time, subjective rating of usability, and eye movement characteristics (fixation duration and fixation number). The age affected the evaluation measures. The horizontal type (B) was found to lead to faster search time and fewer fixation numbers. Moreover, this type of site map was found to make the difference of search time, fixation number, and
fixation duration between young and older adults smaller. The result indicated that the vertical arrangement of site map, especially horizontal type (B) was proper for both young and older adults, and this should be incorporated into the Web page design guidelines. The results can be utilized as a universal design guideline for providing a site map that is friendly to both young and older adults.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Effectiveness of Eye-Gaze Input System
-Identification of Conditions that Assures High
Pointing Accuracy and Movement Directional Effect-127132ENAtsuoMurataTakashiMiyakeThe condition under which high accuracy is assured when using an eye-gaze input system was identified.
It was also investigated how direction of eye movement
affected the performance of an eye-gaze input system. Here,
age, the arrangement of targets (vertical and horizontal),
the size of a target, and the distance between adjacent
rectangles were selected as experimental factors. The
difference of pointing velocity between a mouse and an eyegaze input system was larger for older adults than for
young adults. Thus, an eye-gaze input system was found to
be effective especially for older adults. An eye-gaze input
system might compensate for the declined motor functions
of older adults. The pointing accuracy of an eye-gaze input
system was higher in horizontal arrangement than in
vertical arrangement. The distance between targets of more
than 20 pixels was found to be desirable for both vertical
and horizontal arrangements. For both the vertical and
horizontal arrangements, the target size of more than
40pixels led to higher accuracy and faster pointing time for
both young and older adults. For both age groups, it tended
that the pointing time for the lower direction was longer
than that for other directions.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Data Mining by Soft Computing Methods for The Coronary Heart Disease Database133138ENFor improvement of data mining technology, the advantages and disadvantages on respective data mining methods
should be discussed by comparison under the same condition. For this purpose, the Coronary Heart Disease database (CHD DB) was developed in 2004, and the data mining competition was held in the International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (KES). In the competition, two methods based on soft computing were presented. In this paper, we report the overview of the CHD DB and the soft computing methods, and discuss the features of respective methods by comparison of the experimental results.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Analysis using Adaptive Tree Structured Clustering Method for Medical Data of Patients with Coronary Heart Disease139144ENIt is known that the classification of medical data is
difficult problem because the medical data has ambiguous
information or missing data. As a result, the classification method that can handle ambiguous information or missing data is necessity. In this paper we proposed an adaptive tree structure clustering method in order to clarify clustering result of selforganizing feature maps. For the evaluating effectiveness of proposed clustering method for the data set with ambiguous information, we applied an adaptive tree structured clustering
method for classification of coronary heart disease database.
Through the computer simulation we showed that the proposed
clustering method was effective for the ambiguous data set.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Classification results of coronary heart disease database by using the clonal selection method with receptor editing145150ENThe clonal selection principle is used to explain the
basic features of an adaptive immune response to a antigenic
stimulus. It established the idea that only those cells that
recognize the antigens are selected to proliferate and differentiate.
This paper explains a computational implementation of the
clonal selection principle that explicitly takes into account the affinity maturation of the immune response. The clonal selection algorithm by incorporating receptor editing method, RECSA, has been proposed by Gao. This paper tries to classify the medical database of Coronary Heart Disease databases and reports the computational results for 4 kinds of training datasets.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Interactive Mobile Communication System with Facial Expression Extracting Emotion151152ENWe have already proposed a chat system representing a facial expression corresponded to user’s emotion called JavaFaceChat. However it is difficult to use JavaFaceChat
on mobile phone because it requires some complicated tasks,
large databases, and natural language processing. Therefore, we construct a simple version of JavaFaceChat. The system calculates seven types of emotions (angry, disgust, fear, happy, perplex, sadness, and surprise) from appearance of emotion words in the message and the strongest emotion is expressed by a facial expression image.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Mobile Healthcare System for Preventive of Metabolic Syndrome153154ENRecently, metabolic syndrome affects a great number of people in Japan. Glycemic control can delay the onset and slow the progression of vascular complications. Lifestyle modification
including weight reduction can contribute significantly to
glycemic control. This paper describes the mobile application of the healthcare support system for metabolic patients.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008News summary system for Web news site155156ENWe propose the system that offers only the article
that is the relation to topics to the user in this research. When the user wants to read the article that is the relation to topics, the user must click the link to the article. Therefore, it is difficult for the user to read only the article related to topics. Moreover, there is the article that is similar to each other content or article.
Therefore, user must read the article that is similar to other article. We propose the algorithm to find similar articles. For the proposed system, we use the feature of reported articles. There is an outline of the entire article at the beginning of reported articles.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008The Medical Diagnostic Support System Using Extended Neural Network and Multiagent157158ENMultiagent technologies enable us to explore their sociological and psychological foundations. A medical diagnostic support system is built using this. Moreover, We think that the data inputted can acquire higher diagnostic accuracy by sorting out using a determination table. In this paper, the recurrence diagnostic system of cancer is built and the output error of Mul-tiagents learning method into the usual Neural Network and a Rough Neural Network and Genetic Programming be compared. The data of the prostatic cancer offered by the medical institution and a renal cancer was used for verification of a system.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008An approximate solution method based on tabu search for k-minimum spanning tree problems159164ENThis paper considers k-minimum spanning tree
problems. An existing solution algorithm based on tabu search, which was proposed by Katagiri et al., includes an iterative solving procedure of minimum spanning tree (MST) problems for subgraphs to obtain a local optimal solution of k-minimum spanning tree problems. This article provides a new tabu-searchbased approximate solution method that does not iteratively solve minimum spanning tree problems. Results of numerical experiments show that the proposed method provides a good performance in terms of accuracy over those of existing methods for relatively high cardinality k.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Application of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms to Reactive Power Planning Problem165170ENThis paper presents a new approach to treat reactive power (VAr) planning problem using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. Specifically, Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA) and Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) approaches have been developed and successfully applied. The overall problem is formulated as a nonlinear constrained multi-objective optimization problem. Minimizing the total incurred cost and maximizing the amount of Available Transfer Capability (ATC) are defined as the main objective functions. The proposed approaches have been successfully tested on IEEE 14 bus system. As a result a wide set of optimal solutions known as Pareto set is obtained and encouraging results show the superiority of the proposed approaches and confirm their potential to solve such a large scale multi-objective optimization problem.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Multiscale Retinex with Data-dependent Offset171174ENAs one of methods to improve the image quality, there is a method called multiscale retinex (MSR) which has been proposed by D.J. Jobson et al. In MSR, the reection
components of an image are extracted and emphasized, and then
the image with improved quality is obtained. This method is very useful and powerful especially for the visibility improvement of dark regions of the image. However, the resulting image tends to give us the unnatural impression because luminance components are removed, and the global contrast of the image is decreased in the processing. In this paper, a new MSR with a variable offset, which changes dependently on the local luminance information of the image, is proposed in order to overcome the disadvantage of the conventional MSR, and to further improve the image quality. Through the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Fast Color Removal Method Considering Differences between Colors175178ENWhen a color image is converted into a monochrome one, luminance components of the pixels have been used as
gray-levels for the representation of the monochrome image in
HDTV standard. However, saliencies of the image embedded
only in the chrominance components are disappeared in the
monochrome image converted by using luminance components.
To cope with this problem, A.A. Gooch et al. have proposed the salience-preserving color removal method called “Color2Gray.” The monochrome image well reected the impression of an input color image can be yielded by Color2Gray. However, the calculation cost of that algorithm is tremendous, and its utility is not so much. In this paper, fast Color2Gray algorithms are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through the experiments.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Development of a Training-Assist Robotic System Adapting to Individual Motor Abilities in Virtual Tennis Task179184ENThe present paper develops a training-assist robotic
system that can adapt a reference hand motion for a virtual tennis task to individual motor abilities. The system first measures maximum hand force and velocity in reaching arm movements prior to the training, and designs a suitable reference trajectory for teaching motion smoothness and timing in the virtual tennis task based on the measured results. A quantitative index for evaluating task performance and motor functions are then defined with consideration of task dynamics. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed training system is validated through a set of preliminary training experiments with health subjects.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Rule Acquisition for Cognitive Agents by Using Estimation of Distribution Algorithms185190ENTokueNishimuraHisashiHandaCognitive Agents must be able to decide their actions based on their recognized states. In general, learning mechanisms are equipped for such agents in order to realize intellgent behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new Estimation
of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) which can acquire effective
rules for cognitive agents. Basic calculation procedure of the EDAs is that 1) select better individuals, 2) estimate probabilistic models, and 3) sample new individuals. In the proposed method, instead of the use of individuals, input-output records in episodes are directory used for estimating the probabilistic model by Conditional Random Fields. Therefore, estimated probabilistic model can be regarded as policy so that new input-output records are generated by the interaction between the policy and environments. Computer simulations on Probabilistic Transition
Problems show the effectiveness of the proposed method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Effectiveness of Instruction using Electronic Circuit Simulation Software191197ENAtsuoMurataTraditional teaching (lecturing) method on the design of electronic circuit provides learners with little satisfaction, because they cannot check and confirm the validity of electronic circuit they have designed. A better way to acquire design skills is to actually make the designed electronic circuit and test the validity of design. In spite of the usefulness of such a practical approach, it has a disadvantage that there is only limited time for teaching (lecturing) and it is difficult to fabricate electronic circuit, perform electronic measurement, and test the validity of design in the limited lecture period. An alternative to overcome these disadvantages is to use simulation software that enables learners (students) to operate functionally the designed electronic circuit and verify the appropriateness of design. The aim of this study was to examine the usefulness of simulation approach and clarify some problems related to such an approach.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008A PERISHABLE INVENTORY MODEL WITH UNKNOWN TIME HORIZON198203ENAtsuoMurataTraditionally, the time (planning) horizon over which
the inventory for a particular item will be controlled is often assumed to be known (finite or infinite) and the total inventory cost is usually obtained by summing up the cost over the entire time horizon. However, in some inventory situations the period over which the inventory will be controlled are difficult to predict with certainty, as the inventory problems may not live up to or live beyond the assumed planning horizon, thereby affecting the optimality of the model. This paper presents a deterministic perishable inventory model for items with linear trend in demand and constant deterioration when time horizon is unknown, unspecified or unbounded. The heuristic model obtains replenishment policy by determining the ordering schedule to minimize the total cost per unit time over the duration of each schedule. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis are given to illustrate the model.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200812008Care for Home-bound Older Adults and Revitalization of Local Shopping Arcade204209ENAtsuoMurataThe Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced, on Respect-for-the Aged Day in September, 2005, that the population over 65 is over 20 % of the nation’s total population. The Ministry also announced on June 1, 2006, that the special total birth rate in Japan recorded the lowest value of 1.25. If the birth rate continues to decrease faster than estimated, the ratio of older adults to the nation’s total population will increase faster than expected. As new housing and large-scaled supermarkets are planned and constructed in the suburbs, older adults, the poor and the disabled people who cannot afford to drive for utilizing suburb supermarkets are forced into old inactive residential area and shopping arcade. Older adults hope to communicate with others, which can be facilitated by advanced technology. The case studies in this study show that older adults can satisfy such needs by communicating with shop owners in local shopping arcade. The secret for the revitalization of local shopping arcade lies in the care for home-bound older adults. We recommend a concept of cozy compact city where home-bound older adults can actively enjoy their lives in and out of their home and the local shopping arcade can be revitalized.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Rule Induction by EDA with Instance-Subpopulations37ENHisashiHandaIn this paper, a new rule induction method by using EDA with instance-subpopulations is proposed. The proposed method introduces a notion of instance-subpopulation, where a set of individuals matching a training instance. Then, EDA procedure is separately carried out for each instance-subpopulation. Individuals generated by each EDA procedure are merged to constitute the population at the next generation. We examined the proposed method on Breast-cancer in Wisconsin and Chess End-Game. The comparisons with other algorithms show the effectiveness of the proposed method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Evaluation of Drowsiness by HRV Measures - Proposal of prediction method of low arousal state -348353ENAtsuoMurataYasutakaHiramatsuThe aim of this study was to propose a useful prediction method of drowsy state of drivers, so that the result is applicable to the development of ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) that can warn drivers of their low arousal state and to prevent driving under low arousal level from occurring. The EEG (electroencephalography) and ECG (electrocardiography) during a monotonous task was measured, and it was investigated how these measures change under the low arousal (drowsy) state. The EEG measurement was added to in order to monitor arousal level more the time series of mean power frequency of EEG was plotted on X-bar control chart. Heart rate variability (HRV) measure RRV3 were derived on the basis of R-R intervals (interbeat intervals) obtained from ECG. Using a Bayesian probability, we tried to predict the timing when the participant actually felt drowsy. As a result, the prediction accuracy differed by the state of participant. When the drowsiness of participant was remarkable, the prediction method was effective to some extent. On the other hand, the proposed method could not predict the drowsy state reliably when the participant did not feel drowsiness to a larger extent.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Interactive Fuzzy Satisficing Method for Fuzzy Random Multiobjective 0-1 Programming Problems through Probability Maximization Using Possibility813ENIn this paper, we focus on multiobjective 0-1 programming problems under the situation where stochastic uncertainty and vagueness exist at the same time. We formulate them as
fuzzy random multiobjective 0-1 programming problems where coefficients of objective functions are fuzzy random variables. For the formulated problem, we propose an interactive fuzzy satisficing method through probability maximization using of possibility.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Interactive Fuzzy Satisficing Method for Multiobjective Stochastic Integer Programming Problems through Simple Recourse Model1417ENTwo major approaches to deal with randomness or impression involved in mathematical programming problems have been developed. The one is called stochastic programming,
and the other is called fuzzy programming. In this paper, we focus on multiobjective integer programming problems involving random variable coefficients in constraints. Using the concept of simple recourse, such multiobjective stochastic integer programming problems are transformed into deterministic ones. As a fusion of stochastic programming and fuzzy one, after introducing fuzzy goals to reflect the ambiguity of the decision maker's judgments for objective functions, we propose an interactive fuzzy satisficing method to derive a satisficing solution for the decision maker by updating the reference membership levels.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Support Vector Selection for Regression Machines1823ENIn this paper, we propose a method to select support vectors to improve the performance of support vector regression machines. First, the orthogonal least-squares
method is adopted to evaluate the support vectors based on their error reduction ratios. By selecting the representative support vectors, we can obtain a simpler model which helps avoid the over-fitting problem. Second, the simplified model is further refined by applying the gradient descent method to tune the parameters of the kernel functions. Learning rules for minimizing the regularized risk functional are derived. Experimental results have shown that our approach can improve effectively the generalization capability of support vector regressors.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Borderline Over-sampling for Imbalanced Data Classification2429ENTraditional classification algorithms, in many times, perform poorly on imbalanced data sets in which some classes are heavily outnumbered by the remaining classes. For this kind of data, minority class instances, which are usually much more of interest, are often misclassified. The paper proposes a method to deal with them by changing class distribution through over-sampling at the borderline between the minority class and the majority class of the data set. A Support Vector Machines (SVMs) classifier then is trained to predict new unknown instances. Compared to other over-sampling methods, the proposed method focuses only on the minority class instances lying around the borderline due to the fact that this area is most crucial for establishing the decision boundary. Furthermore, new instances will be generated in such a manner that minority class area will be expanded further toward the side of the majority class at the places where there appear few majority class instances. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance than some other over-sampling methods, especially with data sets having low degree of overlap due to its ability of expanding minority class area in such cases.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Development of the NTP Pool Project in Taiwan3034ENAmong the standard time reporting systems, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) provides an easy and accurate way for the accessing the Universal time. The NTP is taking the benefit of the pervasiveness of the computer network during
the recent information-oriented modern world. The NTP Pool Project is the project to provide a distributed framework of the NTP servers. As the ever-increasing amounts of the requests of the standard time, the number of the NTP servers provided by the NTP Pool Project will be extended correspondingly. This paper will provide the detailed introduction on the framework of the NTP Pool Project, the development of the NTP Pool Project in Taiwan at the present time, and the followed by the suggestions of the implementation of the NTP pool project.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Estimation of Hierarchical Emotion in Mental State Transition Learning Network3540ENIn general, emotions are often appeared in the facial expressions, voice pitch, exaggerated gesticulation, and so on. They are outward signals of emotions, internal world in order to serve for human communications. Perlovsky described on aesthetic emotions and analyzed their role within joint functioning of cognition and language. This paper proposes the different method from his idea. The method uses Mental State Transition Network proposed by Ren and Emotion Generation Calculations. Moreover, the transition costs in the network are modified according to the stimulus from external world. The simulation results also are reported.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009State Estimation Method for Sound Environment System with Uncertainty and Its Application to Psychological Evaluation4146ENThe actual sound environment system exhibits various types of linear and non-linear characteristics, and it often contains an uncertainty. Furthermore, the observations in the sound environment are often in the level-quantized form. In this paper, two types of methods for estimating the specific signal for sound environment systems with uncertainty and the quantized observation is proposed by introducing newly a system model of the conditional probability type and moment statistics of fuzzy events. The effectiveness of the proposed theoretical method is confirmed by applying it to the actual problem of psychological evaluation for the sound environment.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Implementation of a Mobile Device Controlled Multi-behavior Interactive Mobile Robot Over MR Technology4752ENThis paper presents a mobile-device controlled multi-behavior interactive mobile robot. The proposed mobile robot is implemented under the technique of mixed reality. The proposed mobile robot has three basic locomotion behaviors that enable the mobile robot moving in a complex environment. The three basic interactive behaviors are: target navigation behavior, face tracking behavior, and obstacles avoidance behavior. The three behaviors are designed by the fuzzy controller, respectively. For people convenience, a hand held mobile device is introduced as a user interface to interactive with the mobile robot. Experiments show that the proposed behaviors are well designed. The proposed robot system and control rules are been conducted in good performance and good reliabilities.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Intelligent Auxiliary Vacuum Brake System5358ENThe purpose of this paper focuses on designing an intelligent, compact, reliable, and robust auxiliary vacuum brake system (VBS) with Kalman filter and self-diagnosis scheme. All of the circuit elements in the designed system are integrated into one programmable system-on-chip (PSoC) with entire computational algorithms implemented by software. In this system, three main goals are achieved: (a) Kalman filter and hysteresis controller algorithms are employed within PSoC chip by software to surpass the noises and disturbances from hostile surrounding in a vehicle. (b) Self-diagnosis scheme is employed to identify any breakdown element of the auxiliary vacuum brake system. (c) Power MOSFET is utilized to implement PWM pump control and compared with relay control. More accurate vacuum pressure control has been accomplished as well as power energy saving. In the end, a prototype has been built and tested to confirm all of the performances claimed above.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Strict Solution Method for Linear Programming Problem with Ellipsoidal Distributions under Fuzziness5964ENThis paper considers a linear programming problem with ellipsoidal distributions including fuzziness. Since this problem is not well-defined due to randomness and fuzziness, it is hard to solve it directly. Therefore, introducing chance constraints, fuzzy goals and possibility measures, the proposed model is transformed into the deterministic equivalent problems. Furthermore, since it is difficult to solve the main problem analytically and efficiently due to nonlinear programming, the solution method is constructed introducing an appropriate parameter and performing the equivalent transformations.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009A Clustering-Based Algorithm for Data Reduction6570ENFinding an efficient data reduction method for large-scale
problems is an imperative task. In this paper, we propose a similarity-based self-constructing fuzzy clustering algorithm to do the sampling of instances for the classification task. Instances that are similar to each other are grouped into the same cluster. When all the instances have been fed in, a number of clusters are formed automatically. Then the statistical mean for each cluster will be regarded as representing all the instances covered in the cluster. This approach has two advantages. One is that it can be faster and uses less storage memory. The other is that the number of new representative instances need not be specified in advance by the user. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method can run faster and obtain better reduction rate than other methods.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Long-term Operation Planning of District Heating and Cooling Plants Considering Contract Violation Penalties7176ENUrban district heating and cooling (DHC) systems operate large freezers, heat exchangers, and boilers to stably and economically supply hot and cold water, steam etc., based on customers demand. We formulate an operation-planning problem as a nonlinear integer programming problem for an actual DHC plant. To reflect actual decision making appropriately, we incorporate contract-violation penalties into the running cost consisting of fuel and arrangements expenses. Since a yearly operation plan is necessary for check whether the minimum gas consumption contract is fulfilled or not, we need to solve long-term operation-planning problems. To fast and approximately solve long-term operation-planning problems, we propose a decomposition approach using coarse (monthly) approximate operation-planning problems.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Tissue Characterization of Coronary Plaque by Using Fractal Analysis-based Features of IVUS RF-signal7781ENWe propose a precise tissue characterization method of coronary plaque by using fractal analysis-based features
which are obtained from radiofrequency (RF) signal employing intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) method. The IVUS method is used for the diagnosis of the acute coronary syndromes (ACS). In the proposed method, the fact that the RF signal reflects the complexity of the structure of tissue is used. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through a series of experiments by using IVUS RF signals obtained from a rabbit and a human patient.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Development of an evaluation tool for a driving seat reducing neck injury based on mechanical impedance8287ENThe importance of developing a driving seat effective for reducing neck injuries caused by rear-end collisions has been increased to produce a safer automobile against vehicle accidents in recent years. The present paper develops a computer simulator based on a mechanical impedance model for analyzing and designing an effective driving seat reducing neck injuries. The simulator can reproduce dynamic behaviors of a dummy doll measured in an actual test of rear-end collision. Effectiveness of an active headrest, which is developed for reducing neck injuries, is quantitatively evaluated through a set of computer simulations.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Analysis of Human Hand Impedance Properties Depending on Driving Conditions8893ENThis paper examines the influence of driving conditions on human hand impedance properties by using an originally developed driving simulator. A set of driving tests combining driving speed and the existence of a road centerline was carried out with five subjects. The results statistically demonstrate that humans steer a vehicle with increasing hand stiffness by activating arm muscles, i.e., under some tension, on the straight load especially at a lower speed with a centerline. In addition, it was confirmed that there was a clear correlation between steering behaviors and human hand stiffness according to the driving conditions. Human impedance measurement in driving would be useful to ascertain not only steering behaviors but also driver's physical and mental conditions for driving conditions, which may be required to develop an intelligent driving support system.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009PLS-based approach for Kansei analysis9498ENA residential garden contributes to mental health in modern life. Gardening is a common recreational activity. From the view of the Kansei engineering, designing the garden is a quite difficult subject. Since garden components such as stones and trees are widely diversified, then number of possible design elements becomes quite large. Meanwhile, evaluation samples that can be used for Kansei Evaluation are limited. Relations between Kansei word evaluation and design elements had been analyzed with Quantification Theory type I, which is a
variation of a multiple regression model. Since QT1 is based on the least square method, number of evaluation samples should be larger than the number of design elements. Thus, QT1 is not applicable in this case. Recently, PLS (Partial Least Squares) is becoming popular in the field of Chemometrics, which deal with extremely large number and interacted predictor variables. In this study, we utilized PLS for analyzing Kansei evaluation on residential gardens and their 89 design elements. Analyzing results of PLS and QT1 are compared. QT1 analyses were done on 5-fold design elements. Even when incorporating 89 variables, PLS's multiple correlation coefficient was much higher than QT1. Analyzing result was made into hand-made virtual reality Kansei engineering system. The system contains two projectors and a PC. 3D models of parts such as trees and stones are dynamically chosen and allocated in the scene. The system was based on originally developed 3D computation and rendering library on Java.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Efficient Web Page Recommendation Based on Preference Footprint to Browsed Pages99104ENThis paper proposes a new scheme for web page recommendation which reflects the preference of each user to the recommended pages in an efficient and effective manner. The basic idea of the scheme is to combine the notion of preference footprint to browsed pages with the collaborative filtering. More concretely, we introduce the notion of "tags" similar to conventional SBS (Social Bookmark Service), and attach all tags associated with a user to a page when it is browsed by him. We implemented a prototype of the proposed scheme, and conducted preliminary experiments to evaluate the performance of the scheme. The result of experiments indicates that it takes less than 0.5 sec to reorder a list of 500 URLs received from a search engine according to the preference of users.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Route Tracking Control of Tractor-Trailer Vehicles based on Fuzzy Controller105110ENHirokiTakenagaMasamiKonishiJunImaiRecently, Factory Automation is actively been carried out in industry. Usually, a single AGV is used to transport products for factory automation. While, a Tractor-Trailer Vehicle can load much more products compared with a single AGV. Addition to this, transportation time can be shortened by separating containers. But, it is not so easy to drive the trailer according to the orbit during running of the Tractor-Trailer Vehicle. In this study, fuzzy control scheme is studied to support satisfactory route tracing of a tractor-trailer vehicle. To extruct the control rules, a fuzzy control system is developed.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Design Support of Transportation Routing for a Multi Layered Factory111116ENKojiNakagawaMasamiKonishiRecently, it becomes important to improve transportation capability to attain high productivity in manufacturing. One of the necessary schemes to attain the purpose is that the floor layout is initially to be optimized. After the floor layout is determined, reasonable equipment position for transportation is decided. Then the design of the transportation route is to be determined. In this paper, design support system for transportation routing, based on agent method is proposed. To optimize the transportation route, the working space by the side of the equipment is to be prepared. Starting from given floor layout of a three layered factory, an appropriate transportation route is pursuit using Ant algorithm. To check the applicability of the proposed method, case studies are carried out under various constraints and objective functions, and its effects were verified.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009A Semantic Similarity Measurement Method Based on Information Quality in the Structure of the Gene Ontology117121ENGene ontology (GO) which described a biological concept of gene has attracted attention as an index for measuring semantic similarity of gene. This paper considers a new method for measuring the semantic similarity of GO through an extension and combination of two existing methods by Resnik and Wang et al. in order to improve their drawbacks of effects of shallow annotation. It is shown that the proposed method is superior to existing methods through experiments with pathway data.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Evaluation of an economic model composed of producer agents122126ENIn recent years, the existence of a "social divide", comprising factors such as income and professional status, has been noted as one significant type of social issue. It has been stated that, among the disparate groups, a member belonging to one group cannot move to any other groups. Such a rigidity in terms of social status results in non-activation of the economy. In this study, we have suggested a dynamic economic model described by a multi-agent system, and have evaluated its dynamics in order to try to understand the mechanisms by which how the social divide emerges within the model. We used Gini's coefficient to evaluate the social divide and its economic efficiency. As a result, it is suggested that economies under conditions of low competitiveness, being a state composed of relatively more consumer agents than producer agents, display a higher negative relationship between Gini's coefficient and economic efficiency than those under conditions of high competitiveness.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Self-Organized Similarity based Kernel Fuzzy Clustering Model and Its Applications127131ENThe purpose of this paper is to improve the performance of the kernel fuzzy clustering model by introducing a self-organized algorithm. A conventional kernel fuzzy clustering model is defined as a model which is an improved additive fuzzy clustering. The purpose of this conventional model is to obtain a clearer result by consideration of the interaction of clusters. This paper proposes a fuzzy clustering model based on the idea of self-organized dissimilarity between two objects.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization-Based Constructive Method for Learning Classifier Systems Adjusting to Non-Markov Environments132136ENLearning Classifier Systems (LCSs) are rule-based systems that automatically build their rule set so as to get optimal policies through evolutionary processes. This paper considers an evolutionary multi-objective optimization-based constructive method for LCSs that adjust to non-Markov environments. Our goal is to construct a XCSMH (eXtended Classifier System - Memory Hierarchic) that can obtain not only optimal policies but also highly generalized rule sets. Results of numerical
experiments show that the proposed method is superior to an existing method with respect to the generality of the obtained rule sets.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Agent-based Simulation Analysis for Network Formation137142ENIn this paper, we conduct agent-based simulation experiments for network formation analysis. In the published papers, Bala and Goyal (2000) have constructed a mathematical model leading a star network to be strict Nash equilibrium. However, Berninghaus et al. (2007) have conducted the laboratory experiments using human subjects basing on the mathematical model, and the result of the experiments indicates that human subjects do not always make decision just as the mathematical model predicted. In this paper, we propose a simulation model using the adaptive artificial agents to clarify the reason of the deviation from the mathematical predictions.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Evolving FPS Game Players by Using Continuous EDA-RL143146ENHisashiHandaThis paper extends EDA-RL, Estimation of Distribution Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning Problems, to continuous domain. The extended EDA-RL is used to constitiute FPS game players. In order to cope with continuous input-output relations, Gaussian Network is employed as in EBNA. Simulation results on Unreal Tournament 2004, one of major FPS games, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Improved Scheme for Interest Mining Based on a Reconfiguration of the Peer-to-Peer Overlay147152ENTan et al. proposed a scheme to improve the quality of a file search in unstructured Peer-to-Peer systems by focusing on the similarity of interest of the participating peers. Although it certainly improves the cost/performance ratio of a simple flooding-based scheme used in conventional systems, the Tan's method has a serious drawback such that a query cannot reach a target peer if a requesting peer is not connected with the target
peer through a path consisting of peers to have similar interest to the given query. In order to overcome such drawback of the Tan's method, we propose a scheme to reconfigure the underlying network in such a way that a requesting peer has a neighbor interested in the given query, before transmitting a query to its neighbors. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation. The result of simulation indicates that it certainly overcomes the drawback of the Tan's method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Variable Gain Type PID Control Using PSO for Ultrasonic Motor153157ENUltrasonic motor exhibits non-linearity that relates the input (Phase difference) and output (Velocity). It also causes serious characteristic changes during operation. PID control has been widely used as the design scheme for USM. However, it is difficult for the conventional PID control to compensate such characteristic changes of the plant and non-linearity. To overcome this problem, we propose a variable gain type PID control in which PID gains are optimized using a particle swarm optimization (PSO).No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An optimal EOQ model for perishable products with varying demand pattern158163ENAtsuoMurataThe demand pattern for most perishable products varies during their life cycle in the market. These variations must be properly reflected in inventory management in order to prevent unnecessary stock-out or excess inventory with associated increase in cost. In this paper, a multi-period economic order quantity (EOQ) model for managing the
inventory of perishable items having varying demand pattern is presented. The model was formulated using a general ramp-type demand function that allows three-phase variation in demand pattern. These phases represent the growth, the steady and the decline phases commonly experienced by the demand for most products during their life cycle in the market. The model generates replenishment policies that guarantees optimal inventory cost for all the phases. Numerical experiments and sensitivity analysis were carried out to demonstrate the
suitability of the model for a wide range of seasonal products. Result of the experiments revealed that the points at which demand pattern changes are critical points in managing inventory of products with ramp type demand.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Production lot size models for perishable seasonal products164169ENAtsuoMurataSeasonal items like fruits, fish, winter cosmetics, fashion apparel, etc. generally exhibits different demand patterns at various times during the season. Production and inventory planning must reflect this property for cost effectiveness and optimization of resources. This paper presents two production-inventory models for perishable seasonal products that minimize total inventory costs. The models obtains optimal production run time and optimal production quantity for cases when the production rate is constant and when it is allowed to vary with demand. The products are assumed to deteriorate at an exponential rate and demand for them follows a three-phase ramp type pattern during the season. Numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are carried out. Production run time and production quantity obtained by the model were found to be independent of cost parameters. The variable production rate strategy was also found to give lower inventory costs and production quantity than the constant
production rate strategy.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009A Proposal for Town Development in Aged Society170175ENTetsukoMatsuoAtsuoMurataAccording to the Aged day commemorative report issued in September of 2007 from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the population of over sixty five years old attained the historical record high of 27.44 million or 21.5% of total population. On the other hand, the many of shopping malls with large parking have been located in suburbs with expanding of suburban residential area and the effect of motorization. In addition, the growth of remote shopping such as internet and catalog one, helps accelerate the decline of old shopping malls. However, these malls give the only one life-line to the elder and disabled population. In this paper, we discuss on the way of maintaining this life-line for elder and disabled one from the study of questionnaire surveys for visitors of two shopping mall in Wakamatsu-ward and Tobata-ward, Kitakyushu, the gate way city to Kitakyushu in Fukuoka Prefecture. Some of methodology is proposed to facilitate
revitalization of local areas as the result of this study.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009The Development of the Computer Aided Remanufacturing System (CARES) Part I: Software Development (Phase I) and a Simulation Study176181ENAtsuoMurataThe environment bills that passed by the legislators triggered a new dimension towards the manufacturers to consider producing eco – friendly product. This paper presents the developed software of the remanufacturing evaluation system so-called "Computer – Aided Remanufacturing Evaluation System (CARES)". The software is developed by integrating an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with case based reasoning (AHP – CBR) approach. The result of the simulation study showed that the maximum similarity between the input case and the retrieve case is 80%. The evaluation system recommended that mirror cover,
mirror base and mirror holder should be remanufactured.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Effects of State of Eye Movements before Saccade on Efficiency of Response to Stimulus - Comparison of Search Efficiency between Fixation and Smooth Pursuit Situations -182185ENAtsuoMurataTakehitoHayamiMakotoMoriwakaIn this study, how the state of eye movement before saccade affected the response to a stimulus was explored. The state of eye movement before saccade was either smooth pursuit or fixation. The smooth pursuit was carried out both clockwise and counter-clockwise. Using an eye-tracking system, the eye movement during the experimental task was monitored. The response time to a stimulus was measured. On the basis of the eye movement data (coordinate), the eye movement velocity, the eye movement acceleration, and the latency of eye movement were obtained. When smooth pursuit was carried out before saccade, the response to a stimulus which appears as a result of saccade was faster. More concretely, the response time of smooth pursuit condition was faster than that of fixation condition. The latency of the smooth pursuit condition tended to be faster than that of the fixation condition. Some implications for the application of the results to the traffic safety or automotive ergonomics were given.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Applying Cluster Ensemble to Adaptive Tree Structured Clustering186191ENAdaptive tree structured clustering (ATSC) is our proposed divisive hierarchical clustering method that recursively
divides a data set into 2 subsets using self-organizing feature map (SOM). In each partition, the data set is quantized by SOM and the quantized data is divided using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. ATSC can divide data sets regardless of data size in feasible time. On the other hand clustering result stability of ATSC is equally unstable as other divisive hierarchical clustering and partitioned clustering methods. In this paper, we apply cluster ensemble for each data partition of ATSC in order to improve stability. Cluster ensemble is a framework for improving partitioned clustering stability. As a result of applying cluster ensemble, ATSC yields unique clustering results that could not be yielded by previous hierarchical clustering methods. This is because a different class distances function is used in each division in ATSC.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009The Medical Diagnosis Support System with Intelligent Multiagent Techniques by Performance Differential Difference192195ENMultiagent technologies enable us to explore their sociological and psychological foundations. A medical diagnostic support system is built using this. Moreover, We think that the data inputted can acquire higher diagnostic accuracy by sorting out using a determination table. In this paper, the recurrence diagnostic system of cancer is built and the output error of Multiagent learning method into the usual Neural Network and a
Rough Neural Network and Genetic Programming be compared.
The data of the prostatic cancer offered by the medical institution and a renal cancer was used for verification of a system. Inspection data of the renal cancer consist of special data. We think improvement of the precision of a system which using the data from initial value of the network.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Community Graph Sequence with Sequence Data of Network Structured Data196201ENRecently, there has been increasing interest in data analysis for network structured data. The network structured data is represented the relation between one data and other data by graph structure. There are many network structured data such as social networks, biological networks in the real world. In this study, we will analysis the network structured data that has dynamic relation and complex interact with each data. And, we will approach the problem that is to extract transition pattern from the history of temporal change in their network structured data. Especially, in this paper, we will apply community graph sequences to graph sequences of network structured data that has large-scale and complex changes, and propose the method of extracting transition pattern of network structured data. We used social bookmark data as the data streams of analysis object and verified that social bookmark data is the network structured data that has large-scale and complex change.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Feature Selection in Large Scale Data Stream for Credit Card Fraud Detection202207ENThere is increased interest in accurate model acquisition from large scale data streams. In this paper, because we have focused attention on time-oriented variation, we propose a method contracting time-series data for data stream. Additionally, our proposal method employs the combination of plural simple contraction method and original features. In this experiment, we treat a real data stream in credit card transactions because it is large scale and difficult to classify. This experiment yields that this proposal method improves classification performance according to training data. However, this proposal method needs more generality. Hence, we'll improve generality with employing the suitable combination of a contraction method and a feature for the feature in our proposal method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Extension of Decision Tree Algorithm for Stream Data Mining Using Real Data208212ENRecently, because of increasing amount of data in the society, data stream mining targeting large scale data has
attracted attention. The data mining is a technology of discovery new knowledge and patterns from the massive amounts of data, and what the data correspond to data stream is data stream mining. In this paper, we propose the feature selection with online decision tree. At first, we construct online type decision tree to regard credit card transaction data as data stream on data stream
mining. At second, we select attributes thought to be important for detection of illegal use. We apply VFDT (Very Fast Decision Tree learner) algorithm to online type decision tree construction.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Real-Time Visal Motion Detection by Spatiotemporal Energy Model Implemented on GPU213218ENThe aim of this study is to develop a real-time visual motion detection system by using physiologically meaningful image processing algorithm. Spatiotemporal energy model has been recognized as the most plausible algorithm corresponding to the jobs in motion detection performed by simple and complex cells existing in area V1 of cats or macaque monkeys. Because of the parallelism of the brain, this algorithm inherently has high parallel performance. Together with the locality, spatiotemporal Gabor filtering and succeeding energy extraction process fit with the architecture of present GPU (Graphic Processing Unit). Enabling real-time motion detection
at each pixel location over the entire input image is fundamental in many applications as for instances in robotics vision and carmounted camera. This system, moreover, is open for further expansion based on the physiological knowledge about mammalian visual system.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009A Morphological Associative Memory Employing A Stored Pattern Independent Kernel Image and Its Hardware Model219224ENAn associative memory provides a convenient way for pattern retrieval and restoration, which has an important role for handling data distorted with noise. As an effective associative memory, we paid attention to a morphological associative memory (MAM) proposed by Ritter. The model is superior to ordinary associative memory models in terms of calculation amount, memory capacity, and perfect recall rate. However, in general, the kernel design becomes difficult as the stored pattern increases because the kernel uses a part of each stored pattern. In this paper, we propose a stored pattern independent kernel design method for the MAM and design the MAM employing the proposed kernel design with a standard digital manner in parallel architecture for acceleration. We confirm the validity of the proposed kernel design method by auto- and hetero-association experiments and investigate the efficiency of the hardware acceleration. A high-speed operation (more than 150 times in comparison with software execution) is achieved in the custom hardware. The proposed model works as an intelligent pre-processor for the Brain-Inspired Systems (Brain-IS) working in real world.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Adaptive Skin Color Prediction Using Multi Skin Color Models225229ENIn this paper, a new skin color detection method, in which a skin color model for a given image is adequately selected from a set of models to realize adaptive detection, is proposed. In the proposed method, multiple skin color models are tuned by a learning based on a concept of self-organizing adaptive controller. The skin color models for various lighting conditions can be obtained from small number of images. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation results.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Simultaneous Optimization of a Wheeled Mobile Robot Structure and a Control Parameter230235ENA wheeled mobile mechanism with a passive and/or active linkage mechanism for traveling in the outdoor environment is developed and evaluated. In our previous research, we developed a wheeled mobile robot which has six wheels and a passive linkage mechanism, and its maneuverability was experimentally verified. The ability to climb over a 0.20 [m] high bump, which is twice height of the wheel diameter of 0.10 [m], was achieved, and the mobile robot can climb up continuous steps of 0.15 [m] high. In this research, we optimized the mobile robot linkage mechanisms and a controller parameter by evolutionary algorithm and dynamics engine in numerical simulations. The evolutionary algorithm employed in this research is Genetic Algorithm, and Open Dynamics Engine is used for dynamics calculation. To optimize the linkage mechanism and a controller parameter, we investigated outdoor environment for the mobile robot, for example obstacles, steps, and stairs. And, we selected typical three kinds of outdoor environments, 0.20 [m] high bump, right angle stairs of 0.15 [m] high, and angled stairs of 0.15 [m] high. In the numerical simulations, though the mobile robot using parameters which express our existing robot could climb up/down the 0.20 [m] high bump, but it could not achieve climbing up/down the two kinds of stairs. On the other hand, the optimized parameter mobile robot could climb up/down the three kinds of typical environments.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Effects of location of information presentation in pedestrian detection system on visibility and performance236241ENAtsuoMurataShinsakuAratamaMakotoMoriwakaA few pedestrian warning systems for automobiles are in practical use. It has not been clarified where is best suited for the location of pedestrian information presentation. The most effective location of information presentation in pedestrian detection system was investigated. In other words, the location that assured the fastest cognition of pedestrian information was clarified. The locations of information presentation in pedestrian detection system were front glass, front display of cockpit module, and left side display of cockpit module (like car navigation system). The participants were required to pay attention to the predetermined front area as well as the randomly presented pedestrian information while carrying out a virtual driving task (tracking task) and a secondary switch pressing task such as selection of wiper function. We also
investigated the effect of alarm sound presented to the participants together with the visual pedestrian information on the cognition time of pedestrian information. As a result, the front glass was most
suitable for the presentation of pedestrian information. The presentation of pedestrian information to the front glass led to high visibility and faster pedestrian cognition time.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Basic study on effectiveness of tactile interface for warning presentation in driving environment242247ENAtsuoMurataKohkiTanakaMakotoMoriwakaThe aim of this study was to get insight into the development of tactile interface for automobile warning system. In other words, it was investigated whether the important driving information in the right and left peripheral visual fields can be recognized faster using tactile warning system as compared with auditory warning system. The participants were required to simultaneously carry out a tracking task (main task), a switch pressing task such as selection of light-on function, and a judgment task of important information which randomly appeared to the right or left peripheral visual field. The tracking error, the number of lane deviation, the percentage correct of switch pressing, and the response time to right and left peripheral stimulus were measured. It was examined how age, the modality of alarm presentation (no alarm, auditory, and tactile), the addition of direction in alarm presentation, and the existence of disturbance sound, and the location of tactile sensor (steering or foot) affected the measures above. The young adults performed better than older adults. The response time was not affected by the modality of alarm presentation, and the disturbance sound. The
addition of direction of alarm presentation affected the performance. The tactile sensor attached to the foot led to faster response than that attached to the steering wheel.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Prevention of drowsy driving by means of warning sound248253ENAtsuoMurataYusukeMatsudaMakotoMoriwakaTraffic accidents occur due to inattentive driving such as drowsy driving. A variety of support systems that make an attempt to prevent inattentive driving are under development. The development of a system to prevent drowsy driving using auditory or tactile alarm system is undertaken. It is essential to detect the low arousal state and warn drivers of such a state so that drowsy can be prevented. EEG (Electroencephalography) was used to evaluate how an arousal level degraded with time for eight participants under a low arousal level. Mean power frequency (MPF) was calculated to evaluate an arousal level. The value of MPF was compared between high and low arousal levels. The difference of arousal effect among four warning sounds was examined. As a result, there was no significant difference of arousal effect among four alarm sounds. The alarm sound was found to temporarily heighten participants' arousal level.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Visual information processing characteristics of drivers in prediction of dangerous situation - Comparison among novice, expert and non-licensed person -254257ENAtsuoMurataTakehitoHayamiMakotoMoriwakaThe aim of this study was to examine the difference of visual information processing in KYT (Kiken Yochi Training) among novice, expert and non-licensed persons. In KYT tasks, participants were required to search for a potentially dangerous part using a static image under driving situations. The location of fixation point and the time series change of eye gaze were measured using an eye
camera. In order to detect the difference of visual
information processing among three groups above, an important area that the participants must pay attention to with the highest priority was set for each static image. The time until the eye gaze fixates to the important area, and the ratio of the fixation time to the total search time were detected. Using these measures, the difference of visual information processing among three groups was clarified. Moreover, for novice and non-licensed participants, it was also explored whether a lecture related to KYT would improve the efficiency of visual information processing. The time until the eye gaze fixates to the important area was longer for the non-licensed participants than for the experienced participants. The learning effect by means of a KYT lecture was also observed.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Design method of Cockpit module in consideration of switch type, location of switch and display information for older drivers258263ENAtsuoMurataKeitaYamadaMakotoMoriwakaIn this paper, the effects of switch type, location of switch, and display information on the primary driving task and the secondary switch operation were investigated. The switch type included an integrated and a non-integrated switch. These switches were located on the front left, on the left side, or around a steering wheel. We prepared three displays with different display information (2.0, 4.1, and 5.9 bit). The tracking error, the mean operation time, the percentage of correct answer, NASA-TLX mental workload, and the subjective evaluation of
usability were measured in order to analyze how these measures were affected by experimental factors above. The results suggested that young adults are better than older adults at both abilities on processing displayed information and operating switches. The integrated switch was found to affect driving performance than the non-integrated switch, and had little influence on switch operation. In addition, it was clarified that the switch located around a steering wheel had little influence on driving performance. Low display information was also found not to affect the performance.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Set containment characterization and mathematical programming264266ENRecently, many researchers studied set containment characterizations. In this paper, we introduce some set containment characterizations for quasiconvex programming. Furthermore, we show a duality theorem for quasiconvex programming by using set containment characterizations. Notions of quasiconjugate for quasiconvex functions, especially 1, -1-quasiconjugate, 1-semiconjugate, H-quasiconjugate and R-quasiconjugate, play important roles to derive characterizations of the set containments.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Set optimization theory and its applications267269ENWe study an optimization problem which is called a set optimization problem. We investigate the dual space of an ordered vector space in which the set optimization problem is embedded, and characterize the dual problem.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Asymptotic convergence analysis of the proximal point algorithm for metrically regular mappings270273ENThis paper studies convergence properties of the proximal point algorithm when applied to a certain class of nonmonotone set-valued mappings. We consider an algorithm for solving an inclusion 0 ∈ T(x), where T is a metrically regular set-valued mapping acting from R(n) into R(m). The algorithm is given by the follwoing iteration: x(0) ∈ R(n) and x(k+1) = α(k)x(k) + (1 - α(k))y(k), for k = 0, 1, 2, ..., where {α(k)} is a sequence in [0, 1] such that α(k) ≤ α < 1, g(k) is a Lipschitz mapping from R(n) into R(m) and y(k) satisfies the following inclusion 0 ∈ g(k)(y(k)) - g(k)(x(k)) + T(y(k)). We prove that if the modulus of regularity of T is sufficiently small then the sequence generated by our algorithm converges to a solution to 0 ∈ T(x).No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009On a generalization of concavity by some aggregation functions274277ENIn this paper, we discuss the generalization of concavity on the subclass of the set of all membership functions, each function belonging to the subclass characterizes one convex fuzzy set respectively. The generalization is based on conjunctive aggregation functions. And the properties are investigated.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Creating Singing Vocal Expressions by means of Interactive Evolutionary Computation278283ENToday, researches for singing by computer have attracted attention. VOCALOID is an application to realize that aim. By inputing lyrics and melody, users can make songs sung by the computer. In order to make the singing voice more "human", users must control frequency curve very carefully. Comparing with inputing lyrics or melody, this controlling presents heavy overhead for users. In this research, we propose a system for easily optimizing frequency curves. This system searches for parameters with a type of GA called Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC). On the other hand, the system using IEC has a phase for users to evaluate, we need to consider the tiredness of users. This tiredness is connected to the effectiveness of the search with GA. In this research, for the analysis of the tiredness of users, we evaluated the convergence performance of GA to fit the goal which is known in advance. As a result, we found that our method has better convergence performance than a previous method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009An Extended ISM for Globally Multimodal Function Optimization by Genetic Algorithms284289ENWhen attempting to optimize a function where exists several big-valley structures, conventional GAs often fail to find the global optimum. Innately Split Model (ISM) is a framework of GAs, which is designed to avoid this phenomenon called UV-Phenomenon. However, ISM doesn't care about previously-searched areas by the past populations. Thus, it is possible that populations of ISM waste evaluation cost for redundant searches reaching previously-found optima. In this paper, we introduce Extended ISM (EISM) that uses search information of past populations as trap to suppress overlapping searches. To show performance of EISM, we apply it to some test functions, and analyze the behavior.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Rule Extraction by Genetic Programming with Clustered Terminal Symbols290295ENWhen Genetic Programming (GP) is applied to rule extraction from databases, the attributes of the data are often used for the terminal symbols. However, in the case of the database with a large number of attributes, the search space becomes vast because the size of the terminal set increases. As a result, the search performance declines. For improving the search performance, we propose new methods for dealing with the large-scale terminal set. In the methods, the terminal symbols are clustered based on the similarities of the attributes. In the beginning of search, by reducing the number of terminal symbols, the rough and rapid search is performed. In the latter stage of
search, by using the original attributes for terminal symbols, the local search is performed. By comparison with the conventional GP, the proposed methods showed the faster evolutional speed and extracted more accurate classification rules.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Automatic Construction of Accurate Image Processing using AdaBoost296301ENImage processing and recognition technologies are required to solve various problems. We have already proposed the system which automatically constructs image processing
with Genetic Programming (GP), Automatic Construction of
Tree-structural Image Transformation (ACTIT). However, it is difficult to construct an accurate image processing for all training image sets if they have various characteristics. In this paper, we propose ACTIT-Boost which automatically constructs an accurate image processing by employing Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) to ACTIT. It learns training image sets and their areas which are difficultly approximated to target images in particular. We show experimentally that ACTIT-Boost is more effective in comparison with ordinary ACTIT.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Educational plans in nursing departments The current state of nurse development326329ENAtsuoMurataWith the recent diversification of career paths in nursing, the establishment of a career development plan (CDP) system for nurses is becoming more important for improving the quality of nursing. The present study, conducted on chief nurses in general hospitals in Japan, aimed to ascertain how nursing education fosters the individual career development of nurses. As a result, We understood the next matter. 1) Training for mid-level nurses is provided by most hospitals, primarily in the form of in-hospital training. 2) More than 90% of the hospitals surveyed provided individual counseling for career development, either as needed or periodically. 3) The proportion of hospitals with fewer than 200 nurses that prepared individual educational plans was 7%; the proportion of hospitals with more than 210 nurses that prepared individual educational plans was 24% on average.4) By taking into account "nurse development", job rotation is viewed as part of nursing education. Next, we proposed the new method for evaluation of CDP to individual nurses using N-S table.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Basic Study for Development of Web Browser suitable for Eye-gaze Input System - Identification of Optimal Click Method -302305ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaIn this study, alternative methods of mouse click operation were discussed. The eye-gaze input system was used. The effectiveness was compared among three alternative methods of mouse click operation. The alternative methods in the eye-gaze input system included the eye fixation, the press of space button, and the wink (blink). The percentage correct recognition, the pointing time, the subjective evaluation of usability was used as evaluation measures. The arrangement of targets (vertical or horizontal) and the age were also considered as experimental factors, and it was explored how these factors affected the pointing performance. The percentage correct recognition of the horizontal direction was higher than that of the vertical direction. The pointing time became longer as follows: eye-gaze input system with eye fixation, mouse, eye-gaze input system with press of space button, and eye-gaze input system with wink. The age factor was found not to affect the pointing time so
remarkably.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Effectiveness of the menu selection method for eye-gaze input system - Comparison between young and older adults -306311ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaAlthough the opportunity of older adults to use personal computer is increased more and more, the operation of a personal computer with a mouse is very annoying for older adults who cannot move his or her arm smoothly and effectively due to declined motor function. An attempt to move a cursor by an eye-gaze input system has been carried out as one solution to this problem. Until now, a menu selection method suitable for an eye-gaze input system has not been clarified. In this study, an effective menu selection for the eye-gaze input system was identified as a basic design parameter to develop a Web browser using an eye-gaze input system. Concretely, a menu selection method, that is, improved quick glance menu selection (I-QGMS) was proposed. The effectiveness was evaluated by means of the pointing accuracy, the pointing time, and the psychological rating on usability. On the basis of the evaluation experiment, the proposed I-QGMS was found to be
effective especially for older adults.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Basic study on relationship between SI, EI and human error characteristics312315ENAtsuoMurataKoheiYamamotoMakotoMoriwakaRecently, accidents or scandals due to organizational violation-based error frequently occur. One of the causes might be maladjustment to environmental changes surrounding organization from relief to global society. In this study, the following proposition was hypothesized: Social intelligence (SI), ability to evaluate appropriately the reliability of others, ability to carry out communication smoothly in organization, and emotional aspects (behavior on the basis of emotion or reasonability) are important factors and keys to prevent violation-based organizational error. A questionnaire which included items related to social intelligence (SI: social awareness and social facility), emotional intelligence (EI), ability to evaluate the reliability of others, ability to communicate smoothly in organization, behavioral characteristics (emotional- or reasonability-based behavior), and ability to make decisions and judge situations. An attempt was made to verify the hypothesis above by a survey using the questionnaire.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Skill of Eye-Hand Coordination in Calligraphy - Difference of Skill of Hand-Eye Coordination between Expert and Novice -316319ENAtsuoMurataGoshiroYamamotoMakotoMoriwakaA system that can simultaneously measure the movement of a brush tip and the eye-gaze position during a calligraphy task has been developed. The system consisted of a device to measure the location of a brush tip and an eye tracker. Using this system, the skill of hand-eye coordination was measured for an expert and novices. It has been clarified that an expert of calligraphy distributes the eye-gaze over a wider area and gazes in advance a part that should be written next. In other words, an expert does not gaze at the brush tip but at the part that should be written at the next stage.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Fundamental study for constructing a system to assist the left visual field of older drivers - Effectiveness of the alternative of the left front side-view mirror by the central visual field -320325ENAtsuoMurataYoheiUchidaMakotoMoriwakaThe purpose of this paper is to establish the basics of the systems that assist visibility of the left visual field for older drivers. The display was located either the left which corresponded to a left side mirror, or within the central effective visual field. Participants performed multiple tasks where tracking task using a steering wheel was a primary task, and judgment of situations using a left or front display was a secondary task. How the display location affected the judgment performance was explored for both young and older adults. We counted the number of the warning during the tracking task and measured the percentage correct reaction to displayed stimulus and reaction sensitivity. We investigated how these measures ware affected by age and display location. Mean warning number during the tracking tasks, the percentage correct recognition of situations and d' was affected age and display location. The central display was found to increase the percentage correct recognitions of situations.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Development of Thumb-Operated Dial-Type Integrated Switch for Automobile and its Effectiveness330335ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaA thumb-operated dial-type integrated switch for automobile use was developed, and the task completion time for this type of integrated switch was compared with that for a traditional integrated switch. The rotation torque of an encoder and the rotation diameter were selected as experimental parameters. An attempt was made to identify the optimal and recommended condition of rotation torque and diameter. It was demonstrated that the thumb-operated dial-type integrated switch lead to faster task completion time as compared with the traditional integrated switch. As for the thumb-operated dial-type integrated switch, the
following combination of the rotation torque and the rotation diameter were not proper: diameter of 20mm for the rotation torque of 12.9mN・m and 9.2mN・m, and diameters of 20mm and 40mm for the rotation torque of 8.6 mN・m. It was also suggested that the optimal condition cannot be identified using the condition of the rotation force only, and that the optimal condition must be determined taking into account the combination of the rotation torque and the rotation diameter.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Comparison of Performance among Different Situations of Operation in Web Display - Comparison of Behavioral Features between Young and Older Adults -336341ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaIn order to clarify the situation where older adults feel inconvenient when carrying out various Web operations, the differences of Web search behavior between young and older adults were examined using Web sites with different layered structures. The following two situations were used to address the issue above: (1) operation of a "Back" button, and (2) operation of a hyperlink. When the operation of "Back" button was necessary, the task completion time of older adults was 2.3 times as long as that of young adults. Such a difference must be obtained, because older adults need more time to recognize and understand the layered structure. When operation "Back" button in a raw, the task completion time of older adults was 3.9 times as long as that of young adults. Moreover, the task completion time of older adults increased in case of searching in the deep layered Web site due to the slower and declined cognition and judgment. When selecting a hyperlink, the task completion time of older adults was 12.1 times as long as that of young adults. On the basis of this tendency, we inferred that older adults took more time and became more careful when selecting a hyperlink.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE SMC Hiroshima ChapterActa Medica Okayama1883-3977200912009Effects of Image and Layered Structure on Web Search Performance -Evaluation on the Basis of Movement Distance of Mouse Pointer-342347ENAtsuoMurataMakotoMoriwakaTakehitoHayamiThe aim of this paper was to explore the effects of image addition and layered structure on Web search performance on the basis of the search time and the movement trajectory of mouse pointer. The difference of search characteristics between young and older adults was also examined. Older adults tended to take more time to search for the linked item especially when the layered structure was deep. For the deep layered structure, both young and
older adults allocate more time to think which items should be selected than to operate a mouse. For all participants, less mouse movement was observed for the image-based link condition than for the character-based link condition. This tendency was more remarkable for older adults. Moreover, it was clarified that more mouse movement was observed with the increase of the number of hyperlinks per Web page. When the layered structure was shallow, the following difference of mouse operation
characteristics between young and older adults was observed: Older adults made an attempt to locate the
search item while moving a mouse simultaneously. On
the other hand, young adults began to move a mouse
after locating the search item.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama1550-61852005Coordination of appearance and motion data for virtual view generation of traditional dances118125ENYujiKamonRyoYamaneYasuhiroMukaigawaTakeshiShakunaga<p>A novel method is proposed for virtual view generation of traditional dances. In the proposed framework, a traditional dance is captured separately for appearance registration and motion registration. By coordinating the appearance and motion data, we can easily control virtual camera motion within a dancer-centered coordinate system. For this purpose, a coordination problem should be solved between the appearance and motion data, since they are captured separately and the dancer moves freely in the room. The present paper shows a practical algorithm to solve it. A set of algorithms are also provided for appearance and motion registration, and virtual view generation from archived data. In the appearance registration, a 3D human shape is recovered in each time from a set of input images after suppressing their backgrounds. By combining the recovered 3D shape and a set of images for each time, we can compose archived dance data. In the motion registration, stereoscopic tracking is accomplished for color markers placed on the dancer. A virtual view generation is formalized as a color blending among multiple views, and a novel and efficient algorithm is proposed for the composition of a natural virtual view from a set of images. In the proposed method, weightings of the linear combination are calculated from both an assumed viewpoint and a surface normal.</p>No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama2004Robust face recognition by combining projection-based image correction and decomposed eigenface241247ENTakeshiShakunagaFumihikoSakaueKazumaShigenariThis work presents a robust face recognition method, which can work even when an insufficient number of images are registered for each person. The method is composed of image correction and image decomposition, both of which are specified in the normalized image space (NIS). The image correction [(F. Sakaue and T. Shakunaga, 2004), (T. Shakunaga and F. Sakaue, 2002)] is realized by iterative projections of an image to an eigenspace in NIS. It works well for natural images having various kinds of noise, including shadows, reflections, and occlusions. We have proposed decomposition of an eigenface into two orthogonal eigenspaces [T. Shakunaga and K. Shigenari, 2001], and have shown that the decomposition is effective for realizing robust face recognition under various lighting conditions. This work shows that the decomposed eigenface method can be refined by projection-based image correction.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama2005A protection method against massive error mails caused by sender spoofed spam mails384390ENNariyoshiYamaiKiyohikoOkayamaTakuyaMiyashitaShinMaruyamaMotonoriNakamuraWide spread of spam mails is one of the most serious problems on e-mail environment. Particularly, spam mails with a spoofed sender address should not be left alone, since they make the mail server corresponding to the spoofed address be overloaded with massive error mails generated by the spam mails, and since they waste a lot of network and computer resources. In this paper, we propose a protection method of the mail server against such massive error mails. This method introduces an additional mail server that mainly deals with the error mails in order to reduce the load of the original mail server. This method also provide a function that refuses error mails to these two mail servers to save the network and computer resources.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersActa Medica Okayama1997Visual tracking of redundant features5151ENKoichiHashimotoAtsuhitoAokiToshiroNoritsuguThis paper presents how the control performance of the feature-based visual servo system is improved by utilizing redundant features. Effectiveness of the redundant features is evaluated by the smallest singular value of the image Jacobian which is closely related to the accuracy in the world coordinate system. An LQ control scheme is used to resolve the controllability problem. Usefulness of the redundant features is verified by the real time experiments on a PUMA 560 manipulator.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama1550-61852005Further improving geometric fitting213ENKenichiKanatani<p>We give a formal definition of geometric fitting in a way that suits computer vision applications. We point out that the performance of geometric fitting should be evaluated in the limit of small noise rather than in the limit of a large number of data as recommended in the statistical literature. Taking the KCR lower bound as an optimality requirement and focusing on the linearized constraint case, we compare the accuracy of Kanatani's renormalization with maximum likelihood (ML) approaches including the FNS of Chojnacki et al. and the HEIV of Leedan and Meer. Our analysis reveals the existence of a method superior to all these. </p>No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersActa Medica Okayama1999Development of a video-rate range finder using dynamic threshold method for characteristic point detection932937ENYutakaTanakaAkioGofukuNobuoTakedaIsakuNagaiThis study develops a video-rate stereo range finding circuit to obtain the depth of objects in a scene by processing video signals (R, G, B, and brightness signals) from binocular CCD cameras. The electronic circuit implements a dynamic threshold method to decrease the affect of signal noise in characteristic point detection, where a video signal from each CCD camera is compared with multiple thresholds, shifting dynamically by feeding back the previous comparison result. Several object depth measurement experiments for simple indoor scenes show that the dynamic threshold method gives high acquisition and correct rates of depth data compared with those by a fixed threshold method for the video signals and a relative method for R, G, and B signals utilized in the authors' previous range finders.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersActa Medica Okayama21996Development of a tactile sensing flexible actuator723728ENYutakaTanakaAkioGofukuYujiFujino<p>The disadvantages of flexible artificial fingers have been improved. The finger is provided with the tactile sense by two types of sensors to detect when the finger tip touches an object and to estimate both the finger force and object size. The rigidity is enhanced by equipping the finger with a reinforcing material similar to that of human bone. A prototype robot hand with four fingers has been manufactured for experiments and mounted on an industrial articulated robot. The effectiveness of the improved robot hand finger was confirmed throughout experimental tests of grasping action</p>No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2003Evaluating object and region of concentric electrode in bio-electrical impedance measurement282283ENYoshitakeYamamotoKiyokoShiraiNorikoGodaTakaoNakamuraToshimasaKusuharaHiroyukiOkudaConcentric electrode is easy to use and used widely for measuring bio-electrical impedance. But, its evaluating region was not investigated in detail. Then, the characteristics of concentric electrode were studied from various points of view. In case of use without electrode paste, impedance is determined with the contacting condition between electrode and skin surface over all frequency range. In case of use with electrode past, impedance is composed of stratum corneum in the frequency range of 20 Hz-1 kHz and is mainly composed of subcutaneous tissue in the range of 200 kHz-1 MHz. In the high frequency range, evaluating region of concentric electrode is the area less than the radius or the gap of center electrode.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama2003A proposal of a minimal-state processing search algorithm for isochronous channel reuse problems in DQDB networks229232ENNobuoFunabikiAyakoSuganoTeruoHigashinoThe IEEE 802.6 MAC standard protocol defines the distributed-queue dual bus (DQDB) for metropolitan area networks (MANs). The isochronous channel reuse problem (ICRP) has been studied for the efficient use of DQDB. Given a set of established connections and a set of connection requests, the goal of ICRP is to maximize the number of satisfied requests by finding a proper channel assignment, such that no established connection is not only reassigned a channel, but also any pair of active connections does not interfere each other. We propose a minimal-state processing search algorithm for ICRP (MIPS/sub -/ICRP). The simulation results show that MIPS/sub -/ICRP always provides near-optimum solutions.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama1550-445X12005Optical-drop wavelength assignment problem for wavelength reuse in WDM ring metropolitan area networks9991004ENNobuoFunabikiMegumiIsogaiToruNakanishiTeruoHigashinoThis paper presents a formulation of the optical-drop wavelength assignment problem (ODWAP) and its heuristic algorithm for WDM ring networks. The wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology has been popular in communication societies for providing very large communication bands by multiple lightpaths with different wavelengths on a single optical fiber. Particularly, a double-ring optical network architecture based on the packet-over-WDM technology such as the HORNET architecture has been studied as a next generation platform for metropolitan area networks (MANs). Each node in this architecture is equipped with a wavelength-fixed optical-drop and a tunable transmitter so that a lightpath can be established between any pair of nodes without wavelength conversions. In this paper, we formulate ODWAP for efficient wavelength reuse under heterogeneous traffic in this network. Then, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm for ODWAP. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing waiting times for packet transmissions when a small number of wavelengths are available to retain the network cost for MANs.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (1) 岡山県倉敷市北方の花崗岩について13ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (2) 三朝温泉附近の花崗岩に就て46ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (3) 広島・島根県下花崗岩類の時代に関する資料78ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (4) 花崗岩中の放射能分布915ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (5) 日本花崗岩類のRa含有量および岩漿進化におけるU, Thの行動1626ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (6) 北九州新白亜紀花崗岩類の進化とジルコン2732ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (8) 山陰地方産花崗岩質岩石について(第1報)3451ENKenjiYamaguchiIn this paper, the petrology of the granitic rocks from the district of San-in,
especially from the province of Izumo, is described with some references on the mineral resources associated in these rocks. The granitic ro:ks of which the Chugoku-Mountainland in the Izumo province is mainly composed may be classified mineralogically and chemically into next seven kinds. Their names and the respective average silica contents are as follows: (1) Hornblende-biotite granodiorite·········SiO(2) 66.18% (2) Hornblende-biotite granite········· SiO(2) 69.28% (3) Biotite granite·········SiO(2) 74.91% (4) Fine-grained biotite granite and
biotite granite porphyry·········SiO(2) 73.47% (5) Aplite ·········SiO(2) 75.96% (6) Gabbro and diorite·········SiO(2) 56.05% (7) Quartz porphyry· ·SiO(2) 73.79% Among the various mineral resources found in the granitic rocks in this region, the iron sand and the molybdenum ore seem to have more ecconomical value and are indeed wrought respectively in several localities in farely large scale. The iron sand is collected either from the decomposition product of the hornblendebiotite granite (2) and from that of the diorite (6). The former, so-called "Masa",
is superior in quality for the production of steel, but it is inferior in its quantity. On the other hand, the latter, so-called "Akome", can be gathered in quantity in larger amount than the former, but it is inferior to the former in quality. For this reason, both sorts of sand are in practice mixed in some definite amounts. The ore deposits of molybdenite contained in the quartz vein traversing the granitic rocks are found in several localities and some of them are wrought. In such cases the parent rock of the ore seems to be invariably confined to the rock type of the fine-grained biotite granite or of the aplite. Besides the rocks stated above, some descriptions are given to the rocks, such as quartz porphyry and basalt, which are found in several places in the granite region. However they seem to have no genetic relation with the underlying granites.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957花崗岩に関する諸問題 (9) 日本の花崗岩と鉱床との関係5256ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957ウラン鉱物及びウラン資源に関する諸問題 (3) Torbernite group の鉱物6162ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957ウラン鉱物及びウラン資源に関する諸問題 (4) 北投石を水に浸した場合のラドンの出かた6368ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957ウラン鉱物及びウラン資源に関する諸問題 (7) 三吉鉱山の鉱床7778ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957ウラン鉱物及びウラン資源に関する諸問題 (8) 岐阜県苗木地方のウラン・トリウム鉱床について7981ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957ウラン鉱物及びウラン資源に関する諸問題 (10) 数種の変成岩及び塩基性岩の放射能8488ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142191957ウラン鉱物及びウラン資源に関する諸問題 (11) リン鉱石の塩素処理によるウランの揮発回収方法の研究(第1報)8993ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (2) 三朝附近の花崗岩の放射能的特徴と三朝温泉沈殿物の放射能310ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (3) 温泉の物理探査1116ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (4) 道後温泉の湧出機構について1718ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (5) 二三の熱水変質帯の生成温度1921ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (6) 別府温泉十万地獄に於けるGe, Liの分布2223ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (7) 2,3の放射能泉におけるRnとRaBの関係2425ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (8) 温泉を支配する基本法則2627ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山大学温泉研究所Acta Medica Okayama0369-7142181957温泉に関する諸問題 (9) 本邦の温泉沈澱物,特に放射性沈澱物について2831ENNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama22010A kinesthetic-based collaborative learning system for distributed algorithms97101ENHiroyukiNagatakiTaichiFujiiYukikoYamauchiHirotsuguKakugawaToshimitsuMasuzawaIn this paper, we present a learning support system DASE-E to help students understand fundamental concepts of distributed algorithms in computer science. DASE-E is a collaborative learning system, in which the task of students is
to devise a distributed algorithm. DASE-E offers a set of small wireless terminals with accelerometers. Each student plays the role of a process with a terminal, according to the algorithm that students devised. Each terminal enables a student to take physical actions that control the behavior of a process in the simulator. After the role playing simulation is finished, students discuss their activity played back on a screen. We implemented the system for learning distributed leader election algorithms, had a trial exercise in our research group, and we confirmed that it is effective to learn the critical part of distributed systems and algorithms.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.SciTePressActa Medica Okayama12011A DISTANCE LEARNING SYSTEM WITH CUSTOMIZABLE SCREEN LAYOUTS FOR MULTIPLE LEARNING SITUATIONS94102ENHiroyukiNagatakiKojiNoguchiRyoKatsumaYukikoYamauchiNaokiShibataKeiichiYasumotoMinoruItoIn this paper, we propose a new distance learning system that can adapt to various styles of learning activity. We assume that the system is used in distance classes with multiple live-streaming videos. Our system has functions to change the screen layout to best suit for the current learning situation for each of the participants in a class. The system also has a function to efficiently monitor the behavior of many students at a time. These functions enable us to adapt various learning activities in distance learning classes. We implemented
a prototype of the proposed system and evaluated it in experimental classes. We confirmed that our system improved the activities in the experimental classes.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2007A Fault Injection Method for Generating Error-correction Exercises in Algorithm Learning200205ENRyotaItohHiroyukiNagatakiFukuhitoOoshitaHirotsuguKakugawaToshimitsuMasuzawaIn this paper we propose a method for generating errorcorrection exercises for undergraduate students in computer science who learn algorithms. Our main goal is to inject faults automatically into a correct source code that implements an algorithm to be studied. The proposed method utilizes design paradigm of the algorithm to determine effective fault types and positions in
a source code.<br>
We have developed a prototype system and evaluated
the appropriateness of the generated exercises to algorithm study. We carried out error-correction exercises in an algorithm class, and most students evaluated that the exercises are effective for algorithm study.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.日本材料学会Acta Medica Okayama132013コンクリートの耐久性に及ぼす高炉スラグ細骨材の影響16ENTakashiFUJIIPaweenaJARIYATHITIPONGKazuyoshiHOSOTANIToshikiAYANO本研究は,高炉スラグを用いたコンクリートの中性化,耐硫酸塩性および凍結融解
抵抗性の検討を行ったものである.高炉スラグを細骨材に用いることで,細骨材周辺に集
積する水酸化カルシウムがなくなり,骨材表面とペーストとの界面が強固なものとなるた
め,コンクリートの中性化および耐硫酸塩性が向上する.また,結合材の一部を高炉スラ
グ微粉末に置き換えるか,または,細骨材に高炉スラグ細骨材を用いたコンクリートでは,
AE 剤を用いることなく,また,蒸気養生を行っても,十分な凍結融解抵抗性が得られる.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2013THE SULFURIC ACID RESISTANCE OF CONCRETE WITH BLAST FURNACE SLAG581586ENPaweenaJARIYATHITIPONGKazuyoshiHOSOTANITakashiFUJIIToshikiAYANOThe deterioration of concrete by sulfuric acid attack in sewage environments has become a serious problem. In this
study, it was shown that the resistance to sulfuric acid of mortar and concrete can be improved by using a
blast-furnace slag fine aggregate to the total amount of fine aggregate. When mortar or concrete reacts to sulfuric
acid, dihydrated gypsum film is formed around the particulate of the fine aggregate. This dihydrated gypsum film
could retard the penetration of sulfuric acid, thus improving the resistance to sulfuric acid. However, the resistance
to sulfuric acid depends on the hardness of the dihydrated gypsum film.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2013Effect of chemical admixture on property of fresh mortar using sludge waterW1-7 3ENTakashiFUJIITadashiSAITOToshikiAYANOAddition of sludge water as a part of mixing water had little influence on strength and
durability of hardened concrete, but caused a slump decrease of fresh concrete. The decrease
of slump was improved by addition of a certain set retarder such as gluconate into sludge
water due to control of cement hydration. Some of polymers were also effective in
improvement of slump. However hydration of cement was observed in those cases of
polymers. Therefore it is presumed such the polymers improve slump not by hydration
control effect but by another one.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2013Strength and Durability of Concrete with Blast Furnace SlagT4-6 2ENPaweenaJARIYATHITIPONGKazuyoshiHOSOTANITakashiFUJIIToshikiAYANOThe properties of concrete using blast furnace as binder and fine aggregate have been
investigated in this study. The experiments focus on the properties of concrete such as
compressive strength and young's modulus, carbonation, diffusion of chloride ions,
resistance to sulfate attack and resistance to freeze and thaw. The experimental results show
that when blast furnace slag is used in concrete, it improves the durability properties of
concrete. However, the combination of using both blast furnace slag as binder and fine
aggregate shows a greater improvement of those properties of concrete.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2013A Visual Learning Tool for Database Operation3940ENHiroyukiNagatakiYoshiakiNakanoMidoriNobeTatsuyaTohyamaSusumuKanemuneIn this paper we propose sAccess, a web-based learning tool
for database education. It focuses on introductory computer
science education for high school and college. sAccess has
an easy-to-use query interface for manipulating databases.
Using this tool, students can learn the fundamental knowl-
edge of relational database practically. In this paper, we
will explain the overview of design and implementation of
sAccess.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEE Robotics & Automation SocietyActa Medica Okayama2015Path Tracking by a Mobile Robot Equipped with Only a Downward Facing Camera60536058ENIsakuNagaiKeigoWatanabeThis paper presents a practical path-tracking
method for a mobile robot with only a downward camera facing the passage plane. A unique algorithm for tracking and searching ground images with natural texture is used to localize the robot without a feature-point extraction scheme commonly used in other visual odometry methods. In our tracking algorithm, groups of reference pixels are used to detect the relative translation and rotation between frames. Furthermore, a reference pixel group of another shape is registered both to record a path and to correct errors accumulated during localization. All image processing and robot control operations are carried out with low memory consumption for image registration and fast calculation times for completing the searches on a laptop PC. We also describe experimental results in which a vehicle developed by the proposed method repeatedly performed precise path tracking under indoor and outdoor environments.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2014Learning computer science by watching video games134135ENHiroyukiNagatakiThis paper proposes a teaching method that utilizes video games in computer science education. The primary characteristic of this approach is that it utilizes video games as observational materials. The underlying idea is that by observing the computational behavior of a wide variety of video games, learners will easily grasp the fundamental architecture, theory, and technology of computers. The results of a case study conducted indicate that the method enhances the motivation of students for deeper learning of computer science concepts.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2015A Spoken Dialog System with Redundant Response to Prevent User Misunderstanding223226ENMasakiYamaokaSunaoHaraMasanobuAbeWe propose a spoken dialog strategy for car navigation systems to facilitate safe driving. To drive safely, drivers need to concentrate on their driving; however, their concentration may be disrupted due to disagreement with their spoken dialog system. Therefore, we need to solve the problems of user misunderstandings as well as misunderstanding of spoken dialog systems. For this purpose, we introduced a driver workload level in spoken dialog management in order to prevent user misunderstandings. A key strategy of the dialog management is to make speech redundant if the driver’s workload is too high in assuming that the user probably misunderstand the system utterance under such a condition. An experiment was conducted to compare performances of the proposed method and a conventional method using a user simulator. The simulator is developed under the assumption of two types of drivers: an experienced driver model and a novice driver model. Experimental results showed that the proposed strategies achieved better performance than the conventional one for task completion time, task completion rate, and user’s positive speech rate. In particular, these performance differences are greater for novice users than for experienced users.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2016Sound collection systems using a crowdsourcing approach to construct sound map based on subjective evaluationENSunaoHaraGraduate school of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityShotaKobayashiGraduate school of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityMasanobuAbeGraduate school of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityThis paper presents a sound collection system that uses crowdsourcing to gather information for visualizing area characteristics. First, we developed a sound collection system to simultaneously collect physical sounds, their statistics, and subjective evaluations. We then conducted a sound collection experiment using the developed system on 14 participants. We collected 693,582 samples of equivalent Aweighted loudness levels and their locations, and 5,935 samples of sounds and their locations. The data also include subjective evaluations by the participants. In addition, we analyzed the changes in sound properties of some areas before and after the opening of a large-scale shopping mall in a city. Next, we implemented visualizations on the server system to attract users’ interests. Finally, we published the system, which can receive sounds from any Android smartphone user. The sound data were continuously collected and achieved a specified result.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama2016Green Infrastructure Implementation Case Study in Asia Monsoon Climate- In case of ABC Water Design Guideline in Singapore with Sustainable Stormwater Management Concept14ENTakanoriFukuokaGraduate School of Engineering, Dept. of Architecture, Sustainable Living Environmental Design Program, Kobe UniversitySadahisaKatoInternational Strategy Section, Okayama UniversityNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.American Institute of PhysicsActa Medica Okayama0094-243X17072016Numerical study on anaerobic digestion of fruit and vegetable waste: Biogas generation050017ENPuteri KusumaWardhaniGraduate School of Environmental and Life Science, Okayama UniversityMasajiWatanabeGraduate School of Environmental and Life Science, Okayama University The study provides experimental results and numerical results concerning anaerobic digestion of fruit and vegetable waste. Experiments were carried out by using batch floating drum type digester without mixing and temperature setting. The retention time was 30 days. Numerical results based on Monod type model with influence of temperature is introduced. Initial value problems were analyzed numerically, while kinetic parameters were analyzed by using trial error methods. The numerical results for the first five days seems appropriate in comparison with the experimental outcomes. However, numerical results shows that the model is inappropriate for 30 days of fermentation. This leads to the conclusion that Monod type model is not suitable for describe the mixture degradation of fruit and vegetable waste and horse dung.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.American Institute of PhysicsActa Medica Okayama0094-243X17072016Mathematical Formulation and Numerical Simulation of Bird Flu Infection Process within a Poultry Farm050013ENArrival RincePutriGraduate School Environmental and Life Science, Okayama UniversityTertia DeliaNovaAndalas UniversityMasajiWatanabeGraduate School Environmental and Life Science, Okayama University Bird flu infection processes within a poultry farm are formulated mathematically. A spatial effect is taken into account for the virus concentration with a diffusive term. An infection process is represented in terms of a traveling wave solutions. For a small removal rate, a singular perturbation analysis lead to existence of traveling wave solutions, that correspond to progressive infection in one direction.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported. International Speech Communication AssociationActa Medica Okayama1990-97722018Naturalness Improvement Algorithm for Reconstructed Glossectomy Patient's Speech Using Spectral Differential Modification in Voice Conversion24642468ENHirokiMurakamiSunaoHaraGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityMasanobuAbeGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityMasaakiSatoGraduate School of Medicine Dentistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama UniversityShogoMinagiGraduate School of Medicine Dentistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Okayama University In this paper, we propose an algorithm to improve the naturalness of the reconstructed glossectomy patient's speech that is generated by voice conversion to enhance the intelligibility of speech uttered by patients with a wide glossectomy. While existing VC algorithms make it possible to improve intelligibility and naturalness, the result is still not satisfying. To solve the continuing problems, we propose to directly modify the speech waveforms using a spectrum differential. The motivation is that glossectomy patients mainly have problems in their vocal tract, not in their vocal cords. The proposed algorithm requires no source parameter extractions for speech synthesis, so there are no errors in source parameter extractions and we are able to make the best use of the original source characteristics. In terms of spectrum conversion, we evaluate with both GMM and DNN. Subjective evaluations show that our algorithm can synthesize more natural speech than the vocoder-based method. Judging from observations of the spectrogram, power in high-frequency bands of fricatives and stops is reconstructed to be similar to that of natural speech.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.言語処理学会Acta Medica Okayama242018小論文自動採点データ構築と理解力および妥当性評価手法の構築368371ENMasayukiOhnoKoichiTakeuchiMasahiroTaguchiYoshihikoInadaMasayaIizukaNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.言語処理学会Acta Medica Okayama232017小論文の自動採点に向けたオープンな基本データの構築 および現段階での自動採点手法の評価839842ENKoichiTakeuchiMasahiroTaguchiYoshihikoInadaMasayaIizukaTatsuhikoAboHitoshiUedaNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.情報処理学会Acta Medica Okayama792017統計的学習モデルを利用した日本語慣用句の意味的曖昧性解消599600ENKoichiTakeuchiNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.情報処理学会Acta Medica Okayama792017HTML内の並列構造を利用したWebページ上のイベント情報抽出607608ENKoichiTakeuchiNo potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山実験動物研究会Acta Medica Okayama352019色素細胞系 : 生命機能発現機構解明の1モデルシステム28ENHiroakiYamamotoFaculty of Bioscience Nagahama Institute of Bio-Science and Technology There are two cell lineages of mammalian melanin pigment cells, one that leads to retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells in the eye from the optic cup and the other leading to melanocytes from vertebrate-specific neural crest cells. Melanocyte precursors have high mobility and migrate and settle into various tissues and organs, including the skin, choroid, inner ear, heart, brain, adipose tissue, lung, etc. It is well known that RPE cells are essential for visual acuity and that melanocytes in the skin provide protection against UV-damage. So, what is the function of extracutaneous melanocytes that are distributed elsewhere in the body where only very small amounts of light illuminate their existence? Here I would like to briefly introduce our research history and then discuss the important roles of melanocytes in the inner ear that are indispensable for hearing ability and those in the choroid where they seem to contribute to maintaining the structures of their habitats.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.岡山実験動物研究会Acta Medica Okayama352019分泌型免疫グロブリンA の腸内細菌への結合活性は 高脂肪食の摂取により弱まる911ENTakeshiTsurutaGraduate school of Environmental and Life Sciences, Okayama UniversityTeresia AluochMUHOMAHGraduate school of Environmental and Life Sciences, Okayama UniversityKeiSonoyamaResearch Faculty of Agriculture, Hokkaido UniversityNaokiNishinoGraduate school of Environmental and Life Sciences, Okayama University Secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA) is predominant antibody secreted into the gut relating to maintain gut homeostasis. In the present study, we focused on the SIgA coating of gut bacteria as a mucosal immune response affecting the gut bacteria following a high-fat diet (HFD). This study newly showed that the level of SIgA coating of gut bacteria was significantly decreased in HFD-fed mice than normal-fat diet (NFD)-fed mice. Furthermore, we found that the relative abundances of gut bacteria were significantly negatively or positively correlated with the level of SIgA coating of gut bacteria in NFD-fed and HFD-fed mice. Our observations suggest that a decrease in the level of SIgA coating of the gut bacteria through a HFD might relate to HFD-induced changes in bacterial composition.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2640-009X20192019Speech-like Emotional Sound Generator by WaveNet143147ENKentoMatsumotoOkayama UniversitySunaoHaraOkayama UniversityMasanobuAbeOkayama UniversityIn this paper, we propose a new algorithm to generate Speech-like Emotional Sound (SES). Emotional information plays an important role in human communication, and speech is one of the most useful media to express emotions. Although, in general, speech conveys emotional information as well as linguistic information, we have undertaken the challenge to generate sounds that convey emotional information without linguistic information, which results in making conversations in human-machine interactions more natural in some situations by providing non-verbal emotional vocalizations. We call the generated sounds “speech-like”, because the sounds do not contain any linguistic information. For the purpose, we propose to employ WaveNet as a sound generator conditioned by only emotional IDs. The idea is quite different from WaveNet Vocoder that synthesizes speech using spectrum information as auxiliary features. The biggest advantage of the idea is to reduce the amount of emotional speech data for the training. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps. In the first step, WaveNet is trained to obtain phonetic features using a large speech database, and in the second step, WaveNet is re-trained using a small amount of emotional speech. Subjective listening evaluations showed that the SES could convey emotional information and was judged to sound like a human voice.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2640-009X20192019DNN-based Voice Conversion with Auxiliary Phonemic Information to Improve Intelligibility of Glossectomy Patients' Speech138142ENHirokiMurakamiOkayama UniversityIn this paper, we propose using phonemic information in addition to acoustic features to improve the intelligibility of speech uttered by patients with articulation disorders caused by a wide glossectomy. Our previous studies showed that voice conversion algorithm improves the quality of glossectomy patients' speech. However, losses in acoustic features of glossectomy patients' speech are so large that the quality of the reconstructed speech is low. To solve this problem, we explored potentials of several additional information to improve speech intelligibility. One of the candidates is phonemic information, more specifically Phoneme Labels as Auxiliary input (PLA). To combine both acoustic features and PLA, we employed a DNN-based algorithm. PLA is represented by a kind of one-of-k vector, i.e., PLA has a weight value (<; 1.0) that gradually changes in time axis, whereas one-of-k has a binary value (0 or 1). The results showed that the proposed algorithm reduced the mel-frequency cepstral distortion for all phonemes, and almost always improved intelligibility. Notably, the intelligibility was largely improved in phonemes /s/ and /z/, mainly because the tongue is used to sustain constriction to produces these phonemes. This indicates that PLA works well to compensate the lack of a tongue.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.AIP PublishingActa Medica Okayama0094-243X21802019Consideration to Display Operator Support Information to Human Operators under High Mental Pressure020028ENAkioGofukuGraduate School of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in Health Systems, Okayama University Operator support systems are extensively studied and developed to support human operators for their activities in especially an abnormal condition of a nuclear power plant. By the advancement of computer technology and artificial intelligence, an operator support system can provide detailed support information based on detailed models and utilizing detailed simulation of plant dynamics and/or complicated inference algorithms. However, human operators may not understand the detailed support information under high mental pressure in an abnormal plant condition. In such a case, it is important how to provide essential and understandable support information. This paper deals with a technique to simplify functional models in order to display operator support information that is generated based on detailed functional models. This paper defines eight cognitive states of human operators from the viewpoint of cognitive abilities of human. In addition, three ways to simplify functional models are identified.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.SpringerActa Medica Okayama2020Improvement and Evaluation of a Function for Tracing the Diffusion of Classified Information on KVM338349ENHideakiMoriyamaNational Institute of Technology, Ariake CollegeToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityMasayaSatoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityHideoTaniguchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityThe increasing amount of classified information currently being managed by personal computers has resulted in the leakage of such information to external computers, which is a major problem. To prevent such leakage, we previously proposed a function for tracing the diffusion of classified information in a guest operating system (OS) using a virtual machine monitor (VMM). The tracing function hooks a system call in the guest OS from the VMM, and acquiring the information. By analyzing the information on the VMM side, the tracing function makes it possible to notify the user of the diffusion of classified information. However, this function has a problem in that the administrator of the computer platform cannot grasp the transition of the diffusion of classified processes or file information. In this paper, we present the solution to this problem and report on its evaluation.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.SpringerActa Medica Okayama2020MKM: Multiple Kernel Memory for Protecting Page Table Switching Mechanism Against Memory Corruption97116ENHirokiKuzunoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityCountermeasures against kernel vulnerability attacks on an operating system (OS) are highly important kernel features. Some kernels adopt several kernel protection methods such as mandatory access control, kernel address space layout randomization, control flow integrity, and kernel page table isolation; however, kernel vulnerabilities can still be exploited to execute attack codes and corrupt kernel memory. To accomplish this, adversaries subvert kernel protection methods and invoke these kernel codes to avoid administrator privileges restrictions and gain complete control of the target host. To prevent such subversion, we present Multiple Kernel Memory (MKM), which offers a novel security mechanism using an alternative design for kernel memory separation that was developed to reduce the kernel attack surface and mitigate the effects of illegal data manipulation in the kernel memory. The proposed MKM is capable of isolating kernel memory and dedicates the trampoline page table for a gateway of page table switching and the security page table for kernel protection methods. The MKM encloses the vulnerable kernel code in the kernel page table. The MKM mechanism achieves complete separation of the kernel code execution range of the virtual address space on each page table. It ensures that vulnerable kernel code does not interact with different page tables. Thus, the page table switching of the trampoline and the kernel protection methods of the security page tables are protected from vulnerable kernel code in other page tables. An evaluation of MKM indicates that it protects the kernel code and data on the trampoline and security page tables from an actual kernel vulnerabilities that lead to kernel memory corruption. In addition, the performance results show that the overhead is 0.020μs to 0.5445μs, in terms of the system call latency and the application overhead average is 196.27 μs to 6,685.73 μs , for each download access of 100,000 Hypertext Transfer Protocol sessions.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.SpringerActa Medica Okayama2019Region of Interest Growing Neural Gas for Real-Time Point Cloud Processing8291ENYuichiroTodaOkayama UniversityXiangLiOkayama UniversityTakayukiMatsunoOkayama UniversityMamoruMinamiOkayama UniversityThis paper proposes a real-time topological structure learning method based on concentrated/distributed sensing for a 2D/3D point cloud. First of all, we explain a modified Growing Neural Gas with Utility (GNG-U2) that can learn the topological structure of 3D space environment and color information simultaneously by using a weight vector. Next, we propose a Region Of Interest Growing Neural Gas (ROI-GNG) for realizing concentrated/distributed sensing in real-time. In ROI-GNG, the discount rates of the accumulated error and utility value are variable according to the situation. We show experimental results of the proposed method and discuss the effectiveness of the proposed method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama20082008Design and Evaluation of a Bayesian-filter-based Image Spam Filtering Method4651ENMasahiroUemuraGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroTabataGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityIn recent years, with the spread of the Internet, the number of spam e-mail has become one of the most serious problems. A recent report reveals that 91% of all e-mail exchanged in 2006 was spam. Using the Bayesian filter is a popular approach to distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mails. It applies the Bayes theory to identify spam. This filter proffers high filtering precision and is capable of detecting spam as per personal preferences. However, the number of image spam, which contains the spam message as an image, has been increasing rapidly. The Bayesian filter is not capable of distinguishing between image spam and legitimate e-mails since it learns from and examines only text data. Therefore, in this study, we propose an anti- image spam technique that uses image information such as file size. This technique can be easily implemented on the existing Bayesian filter. In addition, we report the results of the evaluations of this technique.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2013Access Control to Prevent Attacks Exploiting Vulnerabilities of WebView in Android OS16281633ENJingYuGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityAndroid applications that using WebView can load and display web pages. Furthermore, by using the APIs provided in WebView, Android applications can interact with web pages. The interaction allows JavaScript code within the web pages to access resources on the Android device by using the Java object, which is registered into WebView. If this WebView feature were exploited by an attacker, JavaScript code could be used to launch attacks, such as stealing from or tampering personal information in the device. To address these threats, we propose a method that performs access control on the security-sensitive APIs at the Java object level. The proposed method uses static analysis to identify these security-sensitive APIs, detects threats at runtime, and notifies the user if threats are detected, thereby preventing attacks from web pages.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.SpringerActa Medica Okayama20162016HeapRevolver: Delaying and Randomizing Timing of Release of Freed Memory Area to Prevent Use-After-Free Attacks219234ENToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityYutaIkegamiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityRecently, there has been an increase in use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities, which are exploited using a dangling pointer that refers to a freed memory. Various methods to prevent UAF attacks have been proposed. However, only a few methods can effectively prevent UAF attacks during runtime with low overhead. In this paper, we propose HeapRevolver, which is a novel UAF attack-prevention method that delays and randomizes the timing of release of freed memory area by using a memory-reuse-prohibited library, which prohibits a freed memory area from being reused for a certain period. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of HeapRevolver in Linux and Windows, and report its evaluation results. The results show that HeapRevolver can prevent attacks that exploit existing UAF vulnerabilities. In addition, the overhead is small.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.USENIX AssociationActa Medica Okayama232009SEEdit: SELinux Security Policy Configuration System with Higher Level Language107117ENYuichiNakamuraHitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd.YoshikiSameshimaHitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd.ToshihiroTabataOkayama UniversitySecurity policy for SELinux is usually created by customizing a sample policy called refpolicy. However, describing and verifying security policy configurations is difficult because in refpolicy, there are more than 100,000 lines of configurations, thousands of elements such as permissions, macros and labels. The memory footprint of refpolicy which is around 5MB, is also a problem for resource constrained devices. We propose a security policy configuration system SEEdit which facilitates creating security policy by a higher level language called SPDL and SPDL tools. SPDL reduces the number of permissions by integrated permissions and removes label configurations. SPDL tools generate security policy configurations from access logs and tool user’s knowledge about applications. Experimental results on an embedded system and a PC system show that practical security policies are created by SEEdit, i.e., describing configurations is semiautomated, created security policies are composed of less than 500 lines of configurations, 100 configuration elements, and thememory footprint in the embedded system is less than 500KB.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IOP PublishingActa Medica Okayama1755-13074652020Animal Biotechnology Roles in Livestock Production012001ENHiroakiFunahashiDepartment of Animal Science, Graduate School of Environmental and Life Science, Okayama UniversityCurrently, meat and milk productions are significantly increasing especially in Asia. The supply of these products is vital to people's health and well-being, whereas the efficiency of beef production appears to be still lower than other meat productions. Improvements in the quality and functionality of their livestock products, as well as their production efficiency, are required for further production. Animal biotechnologies have contributed to genetic improvement, genetic diversity maintenance of domestic animals, etc. Basic animal biotechnologies, such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer, have been well established and applied as powerful tools for genetic improvement of livestock. In the applications of artificial insemination techniques, the use of sexed semen has been now widely spread, and also efforts are also made in the development of the technology using a small amount of sperm. For embryo transfer, several types of vitrification technologies have been applied to improve pregnancy rates and contributed to the international/domestic supply of livestock embryos. Conventional animal biotechnologies, such as in vitro fertilization and intracellular sperm injection, have been applied to not only livestock production and also human-assisted reproductive medicine. For in-vitro production of embryos in domestic animals, currently, oocytes have been collected from medium or large follicles (3-6 mm or larger in diameter) of ovaries. Although the oocytes derived from small follicles (less than 3 mm in diameter) exist more on the surface of ovaries, the developmental competence of the oocytes has been known to be significantly lower than those from medium follicles. If we could improve the competence of oocytes derived from small follicles significantly, we may be able to increase the number of female gamete resources for in vitro embryo production. Also, the development of techniques for producing transgenic and cloned animals has greatly contributed to the creation of pharmaceuticals and organs for xenotransplantation. Recently, furthermore, genome editing technologies, such as combined use of CRISPR/Cas9 and PiggyBac, have been developed and have made it possible to correct specific parts of the genome and introduce mutations by homologous recombination. In this review, I would like to discuss the application and progress of the above biotechnologies, including our recent research results.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Conference Publishing Services, IEEE Computer SocietyActa Medica Okayama2021Analysis of commands of Telnet logs illegally connected to IoT devices913915ENToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology Okayama UniversityRyotaYoshimotoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology Okayama UniversityTakahiroBabaGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology Okayama UniversityKatsunariYoshiokaGraduate School of Environment and Information Sciences / Institute of Advanced Sciences Yokohama National UniversityMirai is an active malware that targets and poses constant threats to IoT devices. IoT malware penetrates IoT devices illegally, makes them download other malware such as bots, and infects them. Therefore, to improve the security of IoT devices, it is important to analyze the behaviors of IoT malware and take countermeasures. In this study, to analyze the behaviors of IoT malware after entering IoT devices and propose new security functions for operating systems to prevent activities such as IoT malware infection, we analyze Telnet logs collected by a honeypot of IoT devices. Thereafter, we report the analysis results regarding IoT malware input commands. The results show that many commands related to shell execution, file download, changing file permissions, and file transfer, are often executed by IoT malware.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.ACMActa Medica Okayama2016Plate : persistent memory management for nonvolatile main memory18851892ENToshihiroYamauchiOkayama University, Okayama, JapanYutaYamamotoOkayama University, Okayama, JapanKengoNagaiOkayama University, Okayama, JapanTsukasaMatonoKyushu University, Fukuoka, JapanShinjiInamotoKyushu University, Fukuoka, JapanMasayaIchikawaKyushu University, Fukuoka, JapanMasatakaGotoKyushu University, Fukuoka, JapanHideoTaniguchiOkayama University, Okayama, JapanOver the past few years, nonvolatile memory has actively been researched and developed. Therefore, studying operating system (OS) designs predicated on the main memory in the form of a nonvolatile memory and studying methods to manage persistent data in a virtual memory are crucial to encourage the widespread use of nonvolatile memory in the future. However, the main memory in most computers today is volatile, and replacing highcapacity main memory with nonvolatile memory is extremely cost-prohibitive.
This paper proposes an OS structure for nonvolatile main memory. The proposed OS structure consists of three functions to study and develop OSs for nonvolatile main memory computers. First, a structure, which is called plate, is proposed whereby persistent data are managed assuming that nonvolatile main memory is present in a computer. Second, we propose a persistent-data mechanism to make a volatile memory function as nonvolatile main memory, which serves as a basis for the development of OSs for computers with nonvolatile main memory. Third, we propose a continuous operation control using the persistent-data mechanism and plates. This paper describes the design and implementation of the OS structure based on the three functions on The ENduring operating system for Distributed EnviRonment and describes the evaluation results of the proposed functions.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2379-18882016Memory Access Monitoring and Disguising of Process Information to Avoid Attacks to Essential Services635641ENMasayaSatoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityHideoTaniguchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityTo prevent attacks on essential software and to mitigate damage, an attack avoiding method that complicates process identification from attackers is proposed. This method complicates the identification of essential services by replacing process information with dummy information. However, this method allows attackers to identify essential processes by detecting changes in process information. To address this problems and provide more complexity to process identification, this paper proposes a memory access monitoring by using a virtual machine monitor. By manipulating the page access permission, a virtual machine monitor detects page access, which includes process information, and replaces it with dummy information. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the proposed method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2016KRGuard: Kernel Rootkits Detection Method by Monitoring Branches Using Hardware Features2226ENYoheiAkaoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityAttacks on an operating system kernel using kernel rootkits pose a particularly serious threat. Detecting an attack is difficult when the operating system kernel is infected with a kernel rootkit. For this reason, handling an attack will be delayed causing an increase in the amount of damage done to a computer system. In this paper, we discuss KRGuard (Kernel Rootkits Guard), which is a new method to detect kernel rootkits that monitors branch records in the kernel space. Since many kernel rootkits make branches that differ from the usual branches in the kernel space, KRGuard can detect these differences by using hardware features of commodity processors. Our evaluation shows that KRGuard can detect kernel rootkits with small overhead.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama1550-445X2017Access Control for Plugins in Cordova-Based Hybrid Applications10631069ENNaokiKudoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityThomas H.AustinSan Jose State UniversityHybrid application frameworks such as Cordova allow mobile application (app) developers to create platformindependent apps. The code is written in JavaScript, with special APIs to access device resources in a platform-agnostic way. In this paper, we present a novel app-repackaging attack that repackages hybrid apps with malicious code; this code can exploit Cordova’s plugin interface to tamper with device resources. We further demonstrate a defense against this attack through the use of a novel runtime access control mechanism that restricts access based on the mobile user’s judgement. Our mechanism is easy to introduce to existing Cordova apps, and allows developers to produce apps that are resistant to app-repackaging attacks.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.ACMActa Medica Okayama2018Web access monitoring mechanism for Android webview1ENYutaImamuraOkayama University, Okayama, JapanHiroyukiUekawaOkayama University, Okayama, JapanYasuhiroIshiharaOkayama University, Okayama, JapanMasayaSatoOkayama University, Okayama, JapanToshihiroYamauchiOkayama University Okayama, JapanIn addition to conventional web browsers, WebView is used to display web content on Android. WebView is a component that enables the display of web content in mobile applications, and is extensively used. As WebView displays web content without having to redirect the user to web browsers, there is the possibility that unauthorized web access may be performed secretly via Web-View, and information in Android may be stolen or tampered with. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor and analyze web access via WebView, particularly because attacks exploiting WebView have been reported. However, there is no mechanism for monitoring web access viaWebView. In this work, the goals are to monitor web access via WebView and to analyze mobile applications using Web-View. To achieve these goals, we propose a web access monitoring mechanism for Android WebView. In this paper, the design and implementation of a mechanism that does not require any modifications to the Android Framework and Linux kernel are presented for the Chromium Android System WebView app. In addition, this paper presents evaluation results for the proposed mechanism.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2018Mitigating Use-after-Free Attack Using Library Considering Size and Number of Freed Memory398404ENYuyaBanToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityUse-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities, which are abused by exploiting a dangling pointer that refers to a freed memory, execute an arbitrary code. The vulnerability is caused by bug in a program. In particular, it is contained in a large scale program such as browser. HeapRevolver [1] [2], which prohibits freed memory area from being reused for a certain period, has been proposed. HeapRevolver in Windows uses the number of the freed memory areas for prohibiting as a trigger to release the freed memory area. In other words, HeapRevolver uses the number of the freed memory areas as a threshold for releasing. However, when the size of individual freed memory areas is large, the HeapRevolver on Windows increases the memory overhead. In this paper, we propose improved HeapRevolver for Windows considering the size and number of the freed memory areas. Improved HeapRevolver enables to prohibit the reuse of the certain number of the freed memory areas at any time via the size and number of the freed memory areas as a threshold. The evaluation results show that the improved HeapRevolver can prevent attacks that exploiting UAF vulnerabilities. In particular,
when the size of individual freed memory areas is small in the programs, it is effective to decrease the attack success rate. No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.IEEEActa Medica Okayama2020Method of Generating a Blacklist for Mobile Devices by Searching Malicious Websites20489448ENTakashiIshiharaGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityMasayaSatoGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityToshihiroYamauchiGraduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama UniversityAs mobile devices have become more popular, malware and attacks directed at them have significantly increased. One of the methods to attack mobile devices is redirecting a user to unwanted websites by unwanted page transition. One of the countermeasures against such attacks is to generate a blacklist of URLs and hostnames, which can prevent access to malicious websites. To generate a blacklist, first, malicious websites are collected in the web space. Then, URLs and hostnames of the malicious websites are added to the blacklist. However, URLs of the malicious websites are typically changed frequently; thus, it is necessary to keep track of the malicious websites and update the blacklist in a timely manner. In this study, we proposed a method to generate blacklists for mobile devices by searching malicious websites. The method collects many HTML files from the web space using a crawler and searches for HTML files that are highly likely to be malicious using keywords extracted from the known malicious websites to discover the new ones. Thus, new malicious websites can be added to the blacklist in a timely manner. Using the proposed method, we discovered malicious websites that were not detected by Google Safe Browsing. Moreover, the blacklist generated using the method had a high detection rate for certain malicious websites. This paper reports the design process and the results of the evaluation of the new method.No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.