It is said to be more difficult to concentrate in online lectures than in face-to-face lectures. Working towards an increase in desire to view lecture video, in this research we changed the appearance of a lecturer using virtual avatars (of which there are four kinds: young man & woman, older man & woman) and investigated whether a lecture participant’s viewing motivation was affected by video image of a lecturer made to look like their preferred avatar. In this experiment, in which 154 participants took part, participants were asked to select lecturers (including avatars) according to the participants’ preferences regarding appearance. Then, participants were divided into a group that watched their favorite avatar and a group that watched their least favorite avatar, before viewing the lecture video. In addition to subjective evaluation indices such as degree of comprehensibility and boredom, viewing desire was also investigated through objective indices, such as the result of a short test and a record of the time at which participants felt they wanted to stop watching the lecture. As a result, in every evaluation index, the participants who viewed an avatar for which they had a high degree of preference obtained a more affirmative result than the participants who viewed an avatar for which they had a low degree of preference, implying that viewing a preferred avatar has an influence on increase in viewing desire.

During recruitment interviews, the facial impressions of the interviewers likely affect the nervousness of the interviewees and make it difficult to conduct fair and consistent interview processes. To minimize the difference in facial impressions among interviewers, we have investigated a method to convert an interviewer’s face into an avatar. In this study, we used a digital full-face mask display capable of replacing the wearer’s face with an avatar in the real world. By reproducing the interviewer’s facial expression with an avatar in real time, we investigated the effect of avatar appearance on interviewee’s nervousness during interviews. Two types of avatars (a dignified face and a gentle face) were applied to three male interviewers in different age groups (10s, 20s and 60s). We compared the level of interviewee’s nervousness between before and after augmenting interviewer’s face with avatar. 172 college students were recruited as interviewees to assess the variation in the level of nervousness. Our experimental results show that avatar appearance can elicit more unique and consistent impressions than the interviewer’s real face and reduce the variation in interviewee’s nervousness level across interviewers.

This paper presents a thin digital full-face mask display that can reflect an entire facial expression of a user onto an avatar to support augmented face-to-face communication in real environments. Although camera-based facial expression recognition technology has enabled people to augment their faces with avatars, application was limited to face-to-face communication in virtual environments. To enable digital facial augmentation with an avatar in a real space, we propose a digital face mask display system that integrates a lightweight flexible display with a thin facial expression recognition system. The thin wearable facial expression recognition system was implemented with photo reflective sensor arrays which can measure facial expressions at 40 feature points distributed across an entire face. We investigated a ten-class facial expression identification model based on an SVM training algorithm. The trained model achieved an average accuracy of 79% when identifying the facial expressions of multiple users. User experiments indicated that the proposed thin digital full-face mask display allows the wearer to control the facial expression of the avatar with a fast response rate and create a positive sense of self-agency and self-ownership toward the augmented avatar face.

The purpose of this research is to propose a calligraphy learning support system focusing on brushstrokes. In conventional calligraphy, the learner imitates and writes characters while looking at a model placed next to the writing paper. However, it is difficult for the learner to learn the brushstroke characteristics, such as correct pressure and speed of brush movement, just by looking at a model. Therefore, we added an onomatopoeia utterance function to the conventional system to solve these problems. The onomatopoeia represents the brushstroke characteristics, such as pressure and speed. We compare the proposed method with the function to the comparative method without the function. As a result, it became clear that, when using the proposed method, correct brushstroke method could certainly be learned in a shorter time than with the comparison method, thus confirming the possibility of improving the calligraphy of proposed method.

This research leads to the development of a system that generates minutes while the system and user interactively structure and summarize the discussion. The system can look back on a meeting from a specific viewpoint or purpose by sending an inquiry to the minutes, receiving the result, and performing a new operation. To improve the reusability of the minutes, it is necessary to understand the semantic relationships among utterances at a deep level. We therefore propose a novel tree structure called the discussion time-span tree for representing a hierarchical discussion based on the relative importance of utterances derived from the meeting. The discussion time-span tree is a binary tree, each leaf of which corresponds to an utterance. Adjacent relevant utterances are hierarchically grouped, and the most important utterance becomes a head. In this way, the tree represents the implicit meaning and intention contained in meeting records, and can be used for summarization. Our system aims to grasp the main point of the meeting by interactively manipulating this tree structure and giving different viewpoints to each system user. An evaluation of the important utterance extraction using the proposed system showed that the score of ROUGE-2 was higher than that of the existing document summarizing technique. In a subsequent user evaluation conducted with ten participants, we found that the system can be used to grasp conference contents efficiently. The results of both evaluations demonstrate the usefulness of the system.

This paper presents TransDrums, which is a system that transfers drum patterns from a drum-pattern-source song (D-song) to a base song (B-song) and synthesizes the audio with the substituted drum pattern. Typical drum parts consist of multiple drum patterns that are concatenated to form a structure by, for example, inserting fill-in patterns at structural boundaries. The previous system that replaced the drum parts was not able to form such a structure. Therefore, we propose TransDrums, which extracts and transfers multiple drum patterns to form the structure. It takes two songs as the input and extracts multiple typical drum patterns from each song. It then makes pairs of those patterns between B-song and D-song and replaces them using the counterpart drum patterns to synthesize audio with the altered drum pattern. To achieve the key idea of properly replacing a drum phrase in B-song with that in D-song, it is necessary to model the structure of the drum parts by analyzing the transition probabilities between the typical drum patterns. The appropriate pairs are determined so that the sum of the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the transition probabilities is minimized. Our experimental results show that TransDrums can generate audio to change by altering the drum patterns with the structure.

Previous research has shown that tracking technologies have the potential to help family caregivers optimize their coping strategies and improve their relationships with care recipients. In this paper, we explore how sharing the tracked data (i.e., caregiving journals and patient's conditions) with other family caregivers affects home care and family communication. Although previous works suggested that family caregivers may benefit from reading the records of others, sharing patients' private information might fuel negative feelings of surveillance and violation of trust for care recipients. To address this research question, we added a sharing feature to the previously developed tracking tool and deployed it for six weeks in the homes of 15 family caregivers who were caring for a depressed family member. Our findings show how the sharing feature attracted the attention of care recipients and helped the family caregivers discuss sensitive issues with care recipients.

This research leads to the development of a system that generates minutes by using repeated questions and answers between a user and the system. The aim of the research is to provide the user with an interactive analysis of meeting records, with a specific purpose or viewpoint. To realize the system, we propose a novel tree structure dedicated to representing the hierarchical discussion structure of a meeting based on the relative importance of utterances underlain by the semantic structure of meeting records. The system uses flexible extraction methods, such as extracting intention, summarizing, and switching viewpoints, to extract the required information from the meeting records. The results of a user experiment demonstrate that the system contributes effectively to exploratory information retrieval. Furthermore, it was found that system users improved their comprehension degree significantly, compared to when not using the system.

Previous research on healthcare technologies has shown how health tracking promotes desired behavior changes and effective health management. However, little is known about how the family caregivers' use of tracking technologies impacts the patient-caregiver relationship in the home. In this paper, we explore how health-tracking technologies could be designed to support family caregivers cope better with a depressed family member. Based on an interview study, we designed a simple tracking tool called Family Mood and Care Tracker (FMCT) and deployed it for six weeks in the homes of 14 family caregivers who were caring for a depressed family member. FMCT is a tracking tool designed specifically for family caregivers to record their caregiving activities and patient's conditions. Our findings demonstrate how caregivers used it to better understand the illness and cope with depressed family members. We also show how our tool improves family communication, despite the initial concerns about patient-caregiver conflicts.

This paper presents a probabilistic formulation of music language modelling based on the generative theory of tonal music (GTTM) named probabilistic GTTM (PGTTM). GTTM is a well-known music theory that describes the tree structure of written music in analogy with the phrase structure grammar of natural language. To develop a computational music language model incorporating GTTM and a machine-learning framework for data-driven music grammar induction, we construct a generative model of monophonic music based on probabilistic context-free grammar, in which the time-span tree proposed in GTTM corresponds to the parse tree. Applying the techniques of natural language processing, we also derive supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms based on the maximal-likelihood estimation, and a Bayesian inference algorithm based on the Gibbs sampling. Despite the conceptual simplicity of the model, we found that the model automatically acquires music grammar from data and reproduces time-span trees of written music as accurately as an analyser that required elaborate manual parameter tuning.

Depression is one of the most common disabilities in developed countries. Despite its often devastating impact on families, scant research has focused on how to facilitate the well-being of family caregivers. The aim of this paper is to uncover the challenges faced by family caregivers and support their well-being with the use of technologies. To understand the emotional and social burden of caregivers and how they handle their stress, we conducted in-depth interviews with 15 individuals who have cared for a depressed family member. Our findings reveal the multifaceted dilemma of caring for a depressed family member as well as the various strategies engaged in by caregivers to improve their own situations. Based on our findings, we suggest design implications for healthcare technologies to improve the wellness of caregivers who are looking after depressed family members.

In this study, we examine how remote collaborators' upper body view affects collaboration when people engage in multiparty fluid tabletop activities across distances. We experimentally investigated the effects of upper body view on four-person group tabletop collaboration, two-by-two at identical locations: shared tabletop vs. shared tabletop plus upper body view. Although previous research has often failed to illustrate the advantages of showing remote participants' upper body view, our study showed that task performance was significantly higher in conditions with upper body view. Furthermore, participants with upper body view tended to take a step away from their remote partners to effectively glance at them while taking a comparable perspective of the tabletop objects. Detailed analysis of the video recordings revealed that upper body view was effective for fluid tabletop collaboration because it helped achieve joint perspective and helped estimate the timing and rough location of subsequent tabletop activity.

Collaborative distributed tabletop activities involving real objects are complicated by invisibility factors introduced into the workspace. In this paper, we propose a technique called "remote lag" to alleviate the problems caused by the invisibility of remote gestures. The technique provides people with instant playback of remote gestures to recover from the missed context of coordination. To examine the effects of the proposed technique, we studied four-person groups who engaged in two mentoring tasks using physical objects with and without remote lags. Our results show that remote lags effectively alleviated the invisibility problems, resulting in fewer questions/confirmations and redundant instructions during collaboration. The technique also decreased the overall workload of workers as well as the temporal demands for both helpers and workers.

Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of providing users with a coherent environment across distant sites. To date, it remains unclear how such an environment affects people's gestures and their comprehension. In this study, we investigate how a coherent environment across distant sites affects people's hand gestures when collaborating on physical tasks. We present video-mediated technology that provides distant users with a coherent environment in which they can freely gesture toward remote objects by the unmediated representations of hands. Using this system, we examine the values of a coherent environment by comparing remote collaboration on physical tasks in a fractured setting versus a coherent setting. The results indicate that a coherent environment facilitates gesturing toward remote objects and their use improves task performance. The results further suggest that a coherent environment improves the sense of co-presence across distant sites and enables quick recovery from misunderstandings.

没入型VCSにおいて，座席配置とディスプレイとの相対位置の違いによって，話者の体躯の向きが変わることが観察され，それが話者交代，遠隔ユーザとの一体感，議論の満足度に深く影響を及ぼすことを発見した．

In this paper, we present t-Room, the next generation video communication system we are developing. Our approach is to build rooms with identical layouts, including walls of display panels on which users and physical or virtual objects are all shown at life-size. In this way, the user space enclosed by t-Room's surrounding displays can be shared as a common space at any other site. In other words, the enclosed spaces overlap each other. This configuration effectively provides symmetric reproduction of the audio-visual information surrounding local and remote users and objects. The feeling provided by t-Room is different from that by conventional videoconferencing systems, since there is no spatial barrier separating users such as the video screen of a conventional videoconferencing system. Furthermore, t-Room benefits in every way from Next Generation Network (NGN) technology: QoS, service productivity, and security. We view t-Room as a future form of telephone service.