Every individual lives in daily lives in own unique tempo, called Personal Tempo. Tempo is also highly important in dialogue situations, and it is thought that if the tempo can be matched with the conversational partner, it will lead to smoother communication with a higher level of comprehension. Spoken-dialogue systems have been used in many situations, and by personalizing dialogue on the basis of the user’s tempo, it is thought that dialogue will be able to make it easier to speak and make people want to speak. Previous research has focused on methods for encouraging users to change their tempo to be in tune with the tempo of their dialogue partner. However, a conversation that differs from the user’s tempo can be stressful and burdensome for the user in the process of tuning in. Therefore, we define personal tempo as speech speed, which is the number of moras divided by the duration of speech and propose a speech-speed control method for spoken-dialogue systems. We implemented our method in a spoken-dialogue system that synchronizes speech with the user. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed method by analyzing its impact on the comprehension of speech and user impressions of the spoken-dialogue system. The results indicate that significant differences were obtained with the proposed method between impression and comprehension of the speech content.

Eyes play a significant role in human-human interaction, and blinking is particularly important as it can indicate a pause in the conversation and even lead to eye blink entrainment. However, most communication robots cannot reproduce eye blink movements due to cost constraints. Thus, our aim is to create a low-cost robot that can physically reproduce eye blink movements and induce eye blink entrainment. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the robot and evaluate the subjective impression of the robot’s eye blink movements. Our results suggest that the robot’s blinking behavior at pauses in the conversation facilitated the participants’ understanding of the robot’s speech. Our findings also suggest that simulating eye blink entrainment movement can increase the participant’s affinity and acceptance towards the robot in certain cases, and if the blinking is not well designed, affinity may be adversely affected.

Building common ground with users is essential for dialogue agent systems and robots to interact naturally with people. While a few previous studies have investigated the process of building common ground in human-human dialogue, most of them have been conducted on the basis of text chat. In this study, we constructed a dialogue corpus to investigate the process of building common ground with a particular focus on the modality of dialogue and the social relationship between the participants in the process of building common ground, which are important but have not been investigated in the previous work. The results of our analysis suggest that adding the modality or developing the relationship between workers speeds up the building of common ground. Specifically, regarding the modality, the presence of video rather than only audio may unconsciously facilitate work, and as for the relationship, it is easier to convey information about emotions and turn-taking among friends than in first meetings. These findings and the corpus should prove useful for developing a system to support remote communication.

Telepresence robots using traditional video chats do not yet fully represent the presence of a remote user. To enhance that presence, we propose a novel approach that replaces the background of the remote user with a real-time captured image of the area behind the robot. We assumed that the background of the remote user, which was visible on the telepresence robot's display, was one reason for the reduction in presence because it might remind local viewers that the remote user is in another place. We found that our approach effectively enhanced the presence of remote user and reduced the negative impression of a delay. In this paper, we describe the new approach, its implementation, and an evaluation of the system. We evaluated the subjective impressions of communication through the proposed system. This approach also protects the privacy of the remote user and makes it more acceptable to people using telepresence robots from private places, e.g., a sickroom in a hospital.

In the future, communication robots are expected to join many-to-many human-robot interactions. Thus, robots must handle interruptions requesting a new task outside of the current conversation. In this paper, we propose a novel scheduler which decides switch timing of conversational tasks when a robot is interrupted. The model grasps the structure of the conversation and finds its breakpoints based on adjacency pairs. In order to decide whether to switch conversational tasks on each breakpoint or not, the model prioritizes conversational tasks considering an importance of its topic and a length as contexts of each conversational task. The model also uses human relationships and emotional behaviors to decide priority of conversational tasks. The result of an evaluation experiment shows that our proposed scheduler could impress subjects more favorably than that which always prioritizes an interrupter.

Inadequate variety of personalities for communication robots may cause unnatural interaction with them and reduction in attachment. This paper proposes C2AT2HUB, where communication robots are characterized by changing tendency of affect transition based on long-term interaction with users. In C2AT2HUB, robots' affect is defined as two types; “interpersonal affect” and “emotions”, and transition of each type of affect is adjusted by history of users' actions to robots in order to characterize robots gradually. Evaluation experiment revealed our approach characterizes robots naturally and improves impression of robots.

In current society, there are numerous robots made for various purposes, including manufacturing, cleaning, therapy, and customer service. Other robots are used for enhancing H2H communication. In this research, we proposed a robotic system which detects the user's emotions and enacts them on a humanoid robot. By using this robotic avatar, users with motor disabilities are able to extend their methods of communication, as a physical form of expression will be added to the conversation.

Our research focuses on creating a robotic system that aids human-to-human communication. The robot acts as a personal companion that understands the user's emotions and helps express them alongside the user. First, the user's facial expression is detected through a connected camera device and relays the retrieved information to a humanoid robot. The humanoid robot then performs physical gestures that match the detected emotion. By using this system, those who are unable to freely move their own bodies can add a physical component to their communication method. In this paper, we have determined the efficacy of translating detected facial expressions into robot movements. Through experiments and surveys, we determined whether our proposed 'Ex-Amp Robot' helped enhance the communication of a hypothetically tetraplegic user.

Recent technological trends in mobile/wearable devices and sensors have been enabling an increasing number of people to collect and store their "lifelog" easily in their daily lives. Beyond exercise behavior change of individual users, our research focus is on the behavior change of teams, based on lifelogging technologies and lifelog sharing. In this paper, we propose and evaluate six different types of lifelog sharing models among team members for their exercise promotion, leveraging the concepts of "competition" and "collaboration." According to our experimental mobile web application for exercise promotion and an extensive user study conducted with a total of 64 participants over a period of three weeks, the model with a "competition" technique resulted in the most effective performance for competitive teams, such as sports teams.

Recent technological trends on mobile/wearable devices and sensors have been enabling increasing number of people to collect and store their “life-logs” easily in their daily lives. Beyond exercise behavior change of individual user, our research focus is on the behavior change of teams, based on life-logging technologies and information sharing. In this paper, we propose and evaluate six different types of information sharing model among team members for their exercise promotion, leveraging concepts of “competition” and “collaboration”. According to our experimental mobile web application for exercise promotion and extensive user study among 64 total users for three weeks, the model with “external competition” technique resulted the most effective performance for competitive teams such as sport teams.

Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) securely still requires users to have certain skills and exert effort. In the near "sensor everywhere" future, a much simpler method for deploying WSN will be necessary for end-users. We propose LiDSN(Light Communication for Deploying Secure Wireless Sensor Networks) which enables users to achieve deployment tasks via simple interaction. LiDSN leverages light-based communication between an LED and a light sensor in order to add a new sensor node securely into existing WSN. Through touching interaction, a new sensor node ID and secret key can be transmitted to the WSN, and then the WSN is able to identify which node should be added while maintaining the security of the WSN.

This paper proposes the information access method that is based on the distance between users and objects. In Addition, demonstrate Lupe system, which visualizes WSN status information utilizing our method. The evaluative experiment shows that our method is useful in where a number of sensors are setup. As a result our method and Lupe system enable to easily brows WSN status information for end-user.

This paper presents u-Photo Mobile a clickable digital still image to visualize and operate ubiquitous services. U-Photo Mobile is designed and implemented to be executed on smart phones e.g. Apple's iPhone. Users shoot the ubiquitous services attached with a two-dimensional bar-code. The u-Photo Mobile system decodes the ID and finds functions of the service. The touch screen of u-Photo Mobile lets users check and control the service. The operation of ubiquitous services are realized by making a network connection between u-Photo Mobile and the services. With this intuitive method, the users can interact with ubiquitous service through the metaphor of “taking and tapping a photograph.” The u-Photo provides users with an instinctive technique, which realizes a seamless interaction between user's mobile phones and intelligent environments.

During day-to-day activities, a user refers to various data items on a PC, such as documents, images, and audio clips. However, when the number of items in the history increases, locating the data becomes more complicated. We propose a novel system called "OreDesk" to retrieve particular data items from the history. OreDesk calculates the "active index" and "relation index" values for each data item based on the user operations. Active index indicates the interest of a user in the data. Relation index indicates how closely one data item is related to another. By using these indices, data can be retrieved on the basis of the association of user experiences. OreDesk also provides users with facilities such as "searching tool for related data" and "timeline viewer"

This paper describes a snapshot-based interface for networked appliances operations that allows users to store and reproduce the conditions of media contents in those appliances by means of photographed image data of the networked appliances. The conditions of the appliances are stored as metadata in photographed image data and displayed over a display of each appliance. A user can reproduce the state of the appliances with those image data. Furthermore, such a reproduction can be made on other appliances with the same function. Storing the information as image data makes it easy for a user to refer to an exact data out of an enormous amount of data. One of advantages of this system is that, by photographing many appliances at the same time, one image data can hold various appliances conditions. We have developed a prototype system to realize the proposed interface and some applications to confirm its effective usage. We have also confirmed its possibility for practical use through an evaluation of the system's performance.