Research on Community Computing
Overview
I have been working on community computing, which
is to support the process of organizing diverse and amorphous people who are
willing to share knowledge and experiences. Compared to groupware studies, community computing focuses on an earlier
stage of collaboration: group formation from a wide variety of people. The
community metaphor can create five different functions as follows:
Knowing
each other;
Sharing
preference and knowledge;
Generating
consensus;
Supporting
everyday life;
Assisting
social events.
I
have been working on FreeWalk with Hideyuki Nakanishi for knowing each other,
conducted Mobile Assistant Project for assisting social events. I
recently initiated Digital City Kyoto Project and currently working on social
agents in digital cities.
3D
Interaction Space
Meetings are not always of a business or formal nature.
Casual meetings such as chatting at a coffee break or in a passageway enrich
our life. Though casual meetings also take an important role in collaboration,
research has tended to ignore this aspect. He thought that conventional desktop
conferencing systems, which multicast pictures and voices, cannot support
casual meetings.
FreeWalk, a common three-dimensional (3D) space just like
a real life park or lobby, enables people to experience accidental encounters
in a network. In conventional desktop conferencing systems, participants turn
on the system when they start a meeting. Since the participants are listed up
before the meeting starts, an accidental encounter with an unpredictable
participant cannot occur. FreeWalk provides a 3D virtual space wherein
participants can move and meet by themselves to provide maximum freedom to the
participants' activity. We designed FreeWalk to naturally reproduce human
behavior in a 3D virtual space so that many people can meet without confusion.
In FreeWalk, participants have locations and view directions and can change them freely according to their own will.
In real life, a meeting often consists of many people. In
meetings such as parties, several tens of participants simultaneously exist in the
same space. In such cases, it is almost impossible to use conventional desktop
conferencing systems that try to display the faces of all participants at once,
since it is hard to show the faces of so many people in a screen of limited
size, and even if it is possible, it is very hard for users to comprehend the
situation.
Mobile
Assistant Project
I
planned to clarify the role of mobile computing in network support at
international conferences. He conducted the experiment called ICMAS'96 (the
second international conference on multiagent systems) Mobile Assistant
Project. This conference was held in Kyoto, Japan from December 9th to 13th in
1996. The project provided (a) E-mail and Internet access services, (b)
conference, personal and tourist information services, and (c) forum and
meeting arrangement services. In this experiment, around 100 personal digital
assistants (PDAs) with wireless phones were loaned to conference participants
without any charge to try out the system. To our best knowledge, it was the
worldfs first experience of applying mobile computing to international
conference support
After
the conference, he has analyzed a large amount of log data and obtained the
following results.
People
continuously use PDAs not only at the conference site but also in their hotel
rooms after dinner. Compared to desktop computing, they tend to use PDAs more
frequently but shorter for each time.
E-mail
services are used independently of the conference structure, while the load of information
services peaks reflecting the progress of the conference.
No
correlation is observed between the use of E-mail and information services, and
the combination of their usage varies depending on each user.
Digital
City Kyoto
As
a platform for community networks, information spaces using the city metaphor
are being developed around the world. I started working on digital cities to
create a social information infrastructure for urban everyday life (including
shopping, business, transportation, education, welfare and so on). I am in the
middle of a long term project to develop a digital city for Kyoto, the old
capital and cultural center of Japan, based on the newest technologies
including GIS, 3D, animation, agents and mobile computing.
Kyoto
was the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, and has been a
cultural center of Japan for even longer. To begin a digital city project for
Kyoto, he started with its design policies. The first policy for designing
Digital City Kyoto is to make it real by
establishing a strong connection to physical Kyoto. Digital city Kyoto
complements the corresponding physical city, and provides an information center
for everyday life for actual urban communities. We think digital and
physical make things real. We are thus working on a digital part of the
real city. The second design policy is to make the digital city live by dynamically integrating WEB
archives and real-time sensory information created in the city. Digital City
Kyoto does not produce contents nor select them. He provided a tool for viewing
and reorganizing digital activities created by people in the city. He proposed
the three layer architecture for
digital cities: a) the information layer
integrates both WWW archives and real-time sensory information related to the
city, b) the interface layer provides
2D and 3D views of the city, and c) the interaction
layer assists social interaction among people who are living/visiting in/at
the city.
The
project for Digital City Kyoto was established in October of 1998. In August
1999, the Digital City Kyoto Experiment Forum was launched. The forum includes
several universities, local authorities, leading computer companies, as well as
local companies, temples, photographers, volunteers and so on. Researchers and
designers from overseas have joined the project. Besides technological
problems, he has encountered numerous non-technical research issues such as
security, privacy, and intellectual property rights. To gain a better
understanding of the big picture of digital cities, I held the International
Workshop on Digital Cities. The attendees include Helsinki, Amsterdam, Antwerp,
Shanghai, Turin, Bristol, Oulu, and Kyoto.
Social
Agents
Social agents, rather than merely being
communicative, directly facilitate a range of human-human social interactions
and other human social activities. Social agents are a natural evolution of the
personal interface agent concept. In contrast to personal agents, however,
social agents fill broader social roles and are community oriented - not
dedicated to serving a particular person. I defined the notion of social agents
with Katherine Isbister and David Kinny from three different perspectives. From
the technological aspect, a social agent is a persistent, secure object that can
traverse the Internet, and has the capability to learn and adapt to social
rules. From the theoretical view, social agents know about social conversation
and the conventions of social systems. From the psychological aspect, a social
agent is anything a human perceives and treats as a social entity, interpreting
and reacting to it as though it were a social being.
As
the first step towards social agents, I worked on an interface agent prototype
with Katherine Isbister and Hideyuki Nakanishi that is designed to support
human-human communication in virtual environments. The prototype interacts with
users strategically during conversation, spending most of its time listening.
The prototype mimics a party host, trying to find a safe common topic for
guests whose conversation has lagged. We performed an experimental evaluation
of the prototypefs ability to assist in cross-cultural conversations. We
designed the prototype to introduce safe or unsafe topics to conversation
pairs, through a series of questions and suggestions. The agent made positive
contributions to participantsf experience of the conversation, influenced
their perception of each other and of each othersf national group, and even
seemed to effect their style of behavior. From this experience, he discussed
the implications of our research for the design of social agents to support
human-human interaction.
1.
Yoshiyasu Nishibe,
Hiroaki Waki, Ichiro Morihara, Fumio Hattori, Toru Ishida, Toshikazu Nishimura,
Hirofumi Yamaki, Takaaki Komura, Nobuyasu Itoh, Tadahiro Gotoh, Toyoaki
Nishida, Hideaki Takeda, Atsushi Sawada, Harumi Maeda, Masao Kajihara, Hidekazu
Adachi. Mobile Digital Assistants for Community Support. AI Magazine,
Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 31-49, 1998.
2.
Toru Ishida. Towards
Communityware. New Generation Computing. Invited Paper, Vol. 16, No. 1,
pp. 5-21, 1998. (Invited Talk at International Conf. on Practical Application
of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM-97), pp. 7-21, 1997).
3.
Toru Ishida Ed. Community Computing:
Collaboration over Global Information Networks. John Wiley and Sons,
1998.
4.
Toru Ishida Ed. Community
Computing and Support Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
State-of-the-Art Survey, 1519, Springer-Verlag,
1998.
5.
Hideyuki Nakanishi,
Chikara Yoshida, Toshikazu Nishimura and Toru Ishida. FreeWalk: A 3D Virtual
Space for Casual Meetings. IEEE Multimedia,
Vol.6, No.2, pp.20-28, 1999.
6.
Toru Ishida and
Katherine Isbister Eds. Digital Cities:
Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, State-of-the-Art Survey,
1765, Springer-Verlag,
2000.
7.
Toru Ishida. Digital City
Kyoto: Social Information Infrastructure for Everyday Life. Communications
of the ACM (CACM), Vol. 45, No. 7, pp. 76-81, 2002.
8.
Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar and Toru
Ishida Eds. Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, State-of-the-Art Survey, 2362,
Springer-Verlag, 2002
9.
Toru Ishida. Q: A
Scenario Description Language for Interactive Agents. IEEE Computer,
Vol.35, No. 11, pp. 54-59, 2002.
10.
Toru Ishida Ed. Understanding
Digital Cities: Cross-Cultural
Perspectives. MIT Press, 2003.