11th Informatics Symposium: Lectures
Keynote Lecture
Speaker and Content
Makoto NAGAO, President of the National Diet Library
National Diet Library : The Mission and The Present status
The mission of the National Diet Library is to collect all the materials published in Japan, preserve them for a long time, and provide them as they are requested. The construction of a digital library is essential to realize the remote service which is as convenient as possible by introducing advanced natural language processing technologies. Our efforts to keep and provide our cultural assets by information technologies will be presented.
Biography
Dr. Nagao graduated from Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University and received his Ph.D in Information Engineering from Kyoto University in 1966.
He was appointed the President of Kyoto University in 1997 and became Emeritus Professor in 2003. He took up the position of President of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in 2004 and has been acting as the President of the National Diet Library since April 2007.
He also served as the President of the Japan Association of National Universities; as the founder President of International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) and the Association for Natural Language Processing (NLP); and as the President of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), and Japan Library Association (JLA).
Dr. Nagao’s research activities cover a variety of topics, including natural language processing, image processing, machine translation, information engineering, digital library system, and intelligence information science.
His academic contributions were recognized through the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1993) and the Medal with Purple Ribbon honored by the Japanese Government (1997). He was Japan Prize Laureate in the prize category of Information and Media Technology (2005), and Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur, France (2005). He was appointed as the Person of Culture Merit in 2008.
Keynote Lecture
Speaker and Content
Taiichi YUASA, Kyoto Univ.
Cultures in Programming
Although programming may seem dry and inhuman activity, we sometimes find cultural aspects and programmer's personality appearing in programming. Conversely, programming may sometimes create cultures within a limited community. To computer systems, computer programs are nothing but a sequence of commands or machine instructions. But since the programs are created by human intelligence, it is not hard to imagine that the cultural aspects of the programmer may affect the style of programming. In this talk, rather than introducing cultural theories of programming, I would like to give hints for finding out the relationship between cultures and programming, through concrete examples that were found in my personal experiences.
Biography
Professor Taiichi Yuasa received the Bachelor of Mathematics degree in 1977, the Master of Mathematical Sciences degree in 1979, and the Doctor of Science degree in 1987, all from Kyoto University. He joined the faculty of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University, in 1982. Since 1998, he has been a Professor at Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. His current area of interest include symbolic computation and programming language systems. Dr. Yuasa has been the convener of SC22/WG16, the working group in ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) where the international standardization of the programming language Lisp is discussed. He is an IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) fellow and is currently the president of Japan Society for Software Science and Technology.
Joint Talk: "Intercultural Collaboration"
Speaker and Content
Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, Alelo Inc.
Using Immersive Simulations to Develop Intercultural Competence
Intercultural competence involves awareness of the differences between cultures, knowledge about the beliefs, values, and practices of other cultures, and the skill to apply that knowledge effortlessly and effectively in interpersonal interactions. Developing such competence can require effort as well as extensive amounts of time immersed in the culture. We address the problem of intercultural competence by means of computer-based serious games designed to help learners quickly acquire job-related linguistic and cultural proficiency. Videogame technology is used to create immersive simulations populated by non-player characters that speak and understand the target language, and behave in accordance with the norms of the culture. Conversational artificial intelligence technology enables learners to engage in spoken conversations with the non-player characters. Learners must speak the target language, and behave in a culturally competent manner, in order to succeed at the game.
Biography
Dr. W. Lewis Johnson is co-founder, president, and chief scientist of Alelo Inc., a company dedicated to to the development of technology-based learning products that promote intercultural communication skills. Prior to that he was Research Professor in computer science at the University of Southern California / Information Sciences Institute. Enabling better intercultural communication is his passion and life calling. To this end Alelo has developed a number of advanced language and culture learning environments, which are widely used and are recipients of multiple awards. He is former President and member of the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society, and also serves on the governing boards of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Dr. Johnson received his A.B. in Linguistics from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University.
Toru ISHIDA, Kyoto Univ.
Language Infrastructure for Intercultural Collaboration
To increase the accessibility and usability of online language services, this talk explains the Language Grid, which facilitates the creation of composite language services for various intercultural collaboration activities. The Language Grid is an initiative to build an infrastructure that allows end users to create new language services for their intercultural / multilingual activities. To this end, language resources (including data and programs) are wrapped as web services so that users can easily combine these services to create workflows that suit their own activities. Thus, the Language Grid can be seen as collective intelligence based on language services. Fundamental software for the Language Grid has been developed at NICT from April 2006. Non-profit Language Grid has been operated by Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University from December 2007. Various types of application activities are ongoing at the Language Grid Association, a user group of the Language Grid: NPOs and universities collaboratively support intercultural collaboration in hospitals, schools, and so on.
Biography
Toru Ishida is a professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University and a leader of the NICT Language Grid Project. Until 1993, he was a research scientist of NTT Laboratories. He spent some time at Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Le Laboratoire d’Informatique, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies of University of Maryland, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Computer Science and Technology Department of Tsinghua University as a visiting scholar/professor. He is an IEEE fellow from 2002. He has been working on autonomous agents and multiagent systems for twenty years. He also studies social informatics and is running research projects related to digital cities and intercultural collaboration. His professional services include an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, an associate editor of Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, a co-editor in chief of Elsevier Journal on Web Semantics, a program co-chair of International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-96), and a general co-chair of the first international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-02).
Joint Talk: "Digital Humanities and New Trends in the Study of Japanese Culture"
Speaker and Content
Dr. Ellis Tinios, University of Leeds, UK.
Widening Access to Edo-period Illustrated Books
Digital Humanities offer new ways to access and study well-known aspects of Japanese culture. They also possess the potential to widen access to hitherto neglected cultural resources. Prof Akama and Dr Tinios explore the role of Digital Humanities in increasing access to one neglected resource: illustrated woodblock printed books of the Edo period (1615-1868). These books represent a remarkable national achievement; no comparable sustained tradition of artistically significant illustrated printed books existed in China or the West. This great resource remains largely unknown to students of Edo art, popular and elite cultures, society, material culture, and literature. The books, now scattered in institutional and private collections throughout the world, are difficult to access. The speakers will consider the challenges involved in digitising this material and making it widely and freely accessible.
Biography
Dr Ellis Tinios taught Chinese and Japanese history in the School of History, University of Leeds (UK) for twenty-four years. In 2002 he took early retirement and since then he has devoted himself to the study of Edo-period illustrated woodblock printed books. He seeks to widen knowledge and understanding of these books through teaching and lecturing. He also seeks to make the content of these books widely accessible by promoting the use of digital technologies. He studied traditional bibliography at the National Institute for Japanese Literature in 2006, and since 2004 has worked with colleagues engaged in the Digital Humanities at the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University.
Ryo AKAMA, Ritsumeikan Univ.
Construction of Archives by Humanities Researchers Themselves
Ritsumeikan University is now conducting the Global COE Program to build up a “Digital Humanities Center” in Japan. One of the key issues of the project is how to utilize the potentiality of information technology and the Internet in the study of Humanities. The feature of the project is in the point that researchers in the field of Humanities themselves are developing "Digital Humanities" literally. This time, I will mainly deal with the topic of sharing digitized resources of two-dimensional materials such as paintings or documents. The resources for studies of Japanese culture is spread in all over the world already, but I will introduce specific cases of "digital archives", which would never realized by researchers with no skills in digital technology or researchers in the field of information technology who are not interested in "contents" of research resources in the Humanities field.
Biography
He finished a course in Art Studies Major at Graduate school of Letters, Waseda University. He joined College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University in 1991 after working several years as a research assistant in Theatre Museum, Waseda University. Currently he is a director of Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, and also a leader of Global COE program "Digital Humanites Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures" supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. After establishing the Art Research Center in 1998, he has been putting the effort into the research and graduate school education on Japanese culture using digital technology. His area of specialty is history of Kabuki and Ukiyoe, paintings. He is developing a database of materials related to Kabuki play as well as integrated digital archives of Ukiyoe. He has developed an image database of over 47,000 Ukiyoe paintings owened by Waseda University. He is now conducting the digital archives projects overseas, especially in Europe, for instance 38,000 and 20,000 Ukiyoe paintings in Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Musuem, respectively.
Joint Talk: "Web Media and e-culture"
Speaker and Content
Dr. Julien Masanes, European Archive
Big data, with hindsight
Building a memory of the huge mass of information from the Web will create a tremendous source of data for future analysis and research. It is however a challenge because of the nature and scale of information at stake. How can we build such an infrastructure widely open for research to avoid leaving only to a few companies (mainly search engines) the ability to access and do research on this type of data? How can a balance be achieved between acceptance by society and the need of research in this new area of large data mining? This talk will offer a review of the challenges and opportunities that building such corpus could bring for research, mainly by introducing the possibility of analysing trends and evolutions in the large spectrum of data that today's web contains.
Biography
The European Archive Foundation is building an open archive of the Web, in collaboration with heritage institutions in Europe. This shared platform aims at preserving this new media for cultural and research purposes. Julien Masanes is Director of the European Archive. Before this he directed the Web Archiving Project at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France since 2000. He also actively participated in the creation of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), which he has coordinated during the first two years. He contributes in various national and international initiatives and provides advices for the European Commission as an expert in the domain of digital preservation and web archiving. He has also launched and presently chairs the International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) series, the main international rendezvous in this field.
Katsumi TANAKA, Kyoto Univ.
Information Archive: Technology, Policy, and Utilization
This talk addresses the importance, technologies, policy and utilization of information archives, including born-digital information archive such as Web arichive. First, the speaker explains a survey research of Web information archive conducted by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and a discussion report by Special Interest Group of Web media and Social Infrastructure of the Science Council of Japan. Technological, social and polictical issues concerned with information archive are addressed. As for utilization of Web archive, potential applications will be also shown. Next, the speaker introduces recent research on browsing/searching information archive and knowledge extraction from Web information archives.
Biography
Professor Katsumi Tanaka received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in Information Science from Kyoto University, in 1974, 1976 and 1981, respectively. In 1986, he joined Dept. of Instrumentation Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at Kobe University, as an associate professor. In 1994, he became a professor at Dept. of Computer and Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kobe University. Since 2001, he has been a professor of Dept. of Social Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. His research interests include Web search and mining, multimedia retrieval, database theory and systems. Dr. Tanaka is a member of the ACM, IEEE, Database Society of Japan (DBSJ) and Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ). He is currently a vice president of DBSJ and the fellow of IPSJ.
Joint Talk: "Cultural Computing"
Speaker and Content
Ryohei NAKATSU, University of singapore
Biography
He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from Kyoto University in 1969, 1971 and 1982, respectively. After joining NTT (Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Cooperation) in 1971, he mainly worked on speech recognition technology. Since 1994 until 2002, he was the president of the ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories. In the spring of 2002 he became a professor at the School of Science and Technology, Kwansei Gakuin University. At the same time he established a venture company, Nirvana Technology Inc., and became the president of the company. In March of 2008 he moved from Kwansei Gakuin University to National University of Singapore (NUS) and now he is a Professor of NUS and the Director of Interactive & Digital Media Institute (IDMI) of NUS.
In 1978, he received Young Engineer Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J), also in 1996, the best paper award from the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia, in 1999 and 2000, Telecom System Award from Telecommunication System Foundation, in 1999 and 2000, the best paper award from Virtual Reality Society of Japan, and in 2000 the best paper award from the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J). He is also a member of the Information Processing Society of Japan, and Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, and others. Also he is a chair of IFIP Technical Committee on Entertainment Computing (IFIP TC14).
Naoko TOSA, Kyoto Univ.
Cultural Computing: Creative Power Integrating Culture, Unconsciousness and Software
In this session we want to introduce and discuss the still unveiled possibilities of Cultural Computing which would express in the interactive way such substantial cultural issues such as sensitivity, memory,spirituality, storytelling, racial characteristics, etc. that have not treated in computer science and engineering so far. There are various possibilities in this area. From art point of veiw, Cultural Computing can go beyond the present day media art by treating cultural issues described above. From technology aspect, it would opena new area in computer technologies which so far has been only treatingthe digitization of cultural heritages/contents to preserve them. The digitization of cultural issues would make it possible for people to understand different cultures filling the gaps of time and place differences and consequently to create new cultures. We particularly examine Japanese culture, although it is only a small subject of computing.
- Japanese tastes for simple and quiet surroundings(WabiSabi)
- Relations between Japanese and Asian cultures
- Assuming the separation of Buddhism and Shintoism as a basis of Japanese cultural structure
- Peculiar features of Japanese literature such as the 31- syllable poem, Haiku poem, and Noh play
- Japanese designs (crests, textile, color, form, Noh play and Kabuki)
Biography
Naoko Tosa is Japanese media artist and Professor. She received aPh.D. in engineering for Art and Technology research from theUniversity of Tokyo. She is professor at Kyoto University from 2005. She was Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Centerfor Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) 2002-2004. She was a researcher atthe ATR (Advanced Technology Research Labs) Media Integration & Communication Lab. 1995-2001. Her work has been exhibited at theMuseum of Modern Art New York, the NewYork Metropolitan Art Museum,ACM SIGGRAPH, ARS ELECTRONICA, the Long Beach Museum, InternationalBerlin Film Festival New media Division and other locationsworldwide. Her works are also part of the collections at the Japan Foundation, the American Film Association, the Japan Film CultureCenter, The National Museum of Art, Osaka and the Toyama PrefectureMuseum of Modern Art. In 1996, she received the best paper award fromthe IEEE International Conference on Multimedia. In 1997, theL'Oreal Grand Prix for research combining art and science awarded her Firstprize. In 2000, she received prizes from the Interactive Art sectionin ARS Electronica, as well as a 2nd Prize for Nabi DigitalStorytelling Competition of Intangible Heritage, Organized by UNESCO2004. She received a research funding from the agency for culturalaffairs in Japan 2000, from Japan Science and Technology Agency2001-2004, from France Telecom R & D 2003-2005, from one of thebiggest game company, Taito Corp. (they built "Space Invaders")2005-2008, from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) 2005-2008.