According to current estimates, the population of Japan will continuously decrease to be less than 100 million from currently 126.4 million by 2053 [1]. In order to supplement the decreasing labor force, the Japanese government has stated to relax the regulations on introducing foreignworkers. Thus, an increase of foreignerworkers in Japanese society can be expected in the near future. In such a situation, foreigner workers are the minority and have to collaboratively work with Japanese colleagues who are the majority. Our project is aiming at developing an environment for both foreigner and Japanese people to practice collaborative work in an unbalanced situation, that is, Japanese people are the majority and the task itself is Japanese favored. This paper describes our design of an experiment to acquire multimodal sensory data in collaborative tasks with unbalanced composition of cultural backgrounds. These data are supposed to be used for developing foreigner / Japanese behavior generation / detection models in a training environment with virtual agents. From our knowledge, there is no such dataset available and we believe the data collected can provide valuable resources for developing tools in supporting unbalanced groups.

In the training programs for student teachers, the opportunity to practice teaching skills is often limited due to the lack of resources in preparing a rehearsal environment. We are developing a virtual rehearsal environment for teaching practicing with multiple virtual students. In order to provide feedbacks to the student teachers and allow them to improve their skills, automatic assessment on their performance is required. However, it is hard to assess on teaching because the assessment is subjective and often depends on the tacit knowledge of experienced teacher trainers. In this work, we proposed an automatic assessment model based on human assessment done by experienced high school teachers.

This paper presents our proposal of platform with virtual classroom and virtual students which allows to build a flexible system such as autonomous system and evaluation system with combination of modules.

The training program of high school teachers in Japan lacks the chance to practice teaching skills and the admission of classes. The result is, many young teachers left their jobs in the first year due to frustration and other mental issues. In order to relieve this issue, we are running a project to develop a platform of virtual school environment and virtual students which allows the teacher trainees to practice with. As part of this platform, in order to send feedbacks to the trainee to stimulate them to improve their performance, we propose the use of the whole group of virtual students to generate per- ceivable atmospheres. Three research issues then emerge:(1) Whether the atmospheres in a classroom can be expressed in a computational (parameterized) model? (2) If the answer to (1) is 'yes', what are the elements to construct atmospheres? (3) The perception of atmospheres can be considered as very subjective, how to make the model objective becomes the last research issue. This paper presents our investigation on these issues and propose a parameterized atmosphere generation model based on empirical results.

In recent years, companies are seeking for communication skill from their employers. More and more companies adopt group discussions in employer recruitment to evaluate the ap- plicants' communication skill. However, the opportunity to improve communication skill in group discussion is limited due to the lack of partners. In order to solve this issue, our ongoing project is aiming to build a virtual agent or a robot that can participate group discussion, so that its users can re- peatedly practice group discussion with it. In this paper, we propose the models in directing the agent's attention toward the other participants in three situations:when the agent is speaking, when the agent is listening, and when no partic- ipant is speaking. First, we gathered a data corpus of the discussion of 10 four-people groups. We then use low-level non-verbal features including attention of other participant, voice prosody, head movements, and speech turn extracted in the 10-hour corpus to train support vector machine models to determine the agent's attention on the other participants, or the material. The performance of the detection models in F-measure range between 0.4 and 0.6.

While the environment of schools become more and more complicated, the improvement of teachers' skills in teaching and management is required. In this study, we focus on the development of a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) platform of simulated school environment, which can be utilized for teacher training or the examination of teacher recruitment from remote. This system is comprised of two front ends, one is a simulated classroom for the trainee, the other one is the interface for the system operator / investigator. The virtual classroom contains a number of virtual students who are controlled by the operator from the remote. The operator can observe the trainee from a dedicated interface and control the behaviors of any individual student as well as the atmosphere of the whole class. The whole-class atmosphere created by relatively large number of students is modeled as a concentration-arousal two dimensional space. The prototype system is evaluated with subject experiment and the results are reported.

Knowledge is integral to an intelligent system. However, constructing a knowledge base often involves great cost and substantial effort on the part of human experts in the target domain. In this paper, we present an approach that harnesses the power of casual users to construct the knowledge base. The users answer a simple series of questions and, by aggregating their answers, we obtain the information necessary to augment and refine the knowledge base. To motivate the users to engage in the process, we presented the questions via a gamification approach. Our experiments with the knowledge base of an Apartment FAQ system substantiate the potential of our proposed approach.

Reminiscence therapy, which is effective for increasing the selfesteem of and for reducing behavioral disturbances in individuals with dementia, is usually conducted in a group led by experienced staff. However, due to the shortage of care attendants, only a limited number of patients at home can receive the benefits of this therapy. To provide this therapy for patients anytime or anywhere, we have developed a networked reminiscence therapy system that combines IP videophones with a photo- and video-sharing mechanism based on Web technology. First, we prepared the experimental setup in a hospital and examined whether dementia patients could communicate with therapists by videophone. Then we conducted a field trial of networked reminiscence therapy with a more realistic situation where remote volunteers communicated with dementia sufferers in the care home by IP videophones connected by broadband network. In this paper, we describe our developed system. Then, we present experimental results showing that dementia sufferers could communicate with therapists by videophone and that networked reminiscence sessions were generally as successful for individuals with dementia as face-to-face reminiscence sessions.

We present recent results we have obtained in the design of a wireless tactor system for use in virtual as well as real environments. We describe a system we have designed that uses vibration motors wired to a body-worn control box, which in turn communicates with a host computer using a wireless connection. Though we have successfully integrated this system into an existing VR-based dismounted infantry simulator, it is clear that expanding the body coverage and number of vibration points requires a solution that is completely wireless. To this end, we describe a working prototype we have built that, though still somewhat large and feature-limited, has convinced us of the merit of our approach.

In this paper, we present and discuss Community Organizer, a system designed to support network communities. The main characteristic of Community Organizer is the use of spatial representations for the relationships among community members including the communications exchanged among these members. These spatial representations reflect the degree of closeness of interests and concerns among the members, and are intended to provide users with clues on how to form network communities. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed spatial representations, we conducted experiments with two different versions of the software. One version offered meaningful spatial representations while the other version did not. The subjects who used the former software version felt a greater sense of ‘community’, enjoyed using the software more, and actively used it longer than the subjects using the latter software version (control condition). These results indicated that the proposed spatial representations are effective in supporting network community formation.

We develop a formalism called a distributed constraint satisfaction problem (distributed CSP) and algorithms for solving distributed CSPs. A distributed CSP is a constraint satisfaction problem in which variables and constraints are distributed among multiple agents. Various application problems in distributed artificial intelligence can be formalized as distributed CSPs. We present our newly developed technique called asynchronous backtracking that allows agents to act asynchronously and concurrently without any global control, while guaranteeing the completeness of the algorithm. Furthermore, we describe how the asynchronous backtracking algorithm can be modified into a more efficient algorithm called an asynchronous weak-commitment search, which can revise a bad decision without exhaustive search by changing the priority order of agents dynamically. The experimental results on various example problems show that the asynchronous weak-commitment search algorithm is, by far more, efficient than the asynchronous backtracking algorithm and can solve fairly large-scale problems.

Presents the basic concepts behind AgenTalk, a language used for describing coordination protocols in multiagent systems. Many coordination protocols, such as the contract net protocol, have been proposed, and many application-specific coordination protocols are expected to be required as soon as the building of more software agents begins. Thus, a language for defining and implementing such coordination protocols plays a crucial role in the development of multiagent systems. By incorporating an inheritance mechanism, AgenTalk allows coordination protocols to be incrementally defined and easily customized to suit various application domains. Its capability is demonstrated by describing the contract net and multistage negotiation protocols in AgenTalk using its inheritance mechanism.

Viewing cooperative distributed problem solving (CDPS) as distributed constraint satisfaction provides a useful formalism for characterizing CDPS techniques. This formalism and algorithms for solving distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DCSPs) are compared. A technique called asynchronous backtracking that allows agents to act asynchronously and concurrently, in contrast to the traditional sequential backtracking techniques used in constraint satisfaction problems, is presented. Experimental results show that solving DCSPs in a distributed fashion is worthwhile when the problems solved by individual agents are loosely coupled.>

A cooperation paradigm and coordination protocol for a distributed planning system consisting of a network of semi-autonomous agents with limited internode communication and no centralized control is presented. A multistage negotiation paradigm for solving distributed constraint satisfaction problems in this kind of system has been developed. The strategies presented enable an agent in a distributed planning system to become aware of the extent to which its own local decisions may have adverse nonlocal impact in planning. An example problem is presented in the context of transmission path restoration for dedicated circuits in a communications network. Multistage negotiation provides an agent with sufficient information about the impact of local decisions on a nonlocal state so that the agent may make local decisions that are correct from a global perspective, without attempting to provide a complete global state to all agents. Through multistage negotiation, an agent is able to recognize when a set of global goals cannot be satisfied, and is able to solve a related problem by finding a way of satisfying a reduced set of goals.>