Ambiguous words in software requirements specifications (SRSs) can cause serious misunderstanding, confusion and/or troubles between software purchasers and developers due to differences in interpretation of the words. This paper quantitatively analyzes existing SRSs to clarify (1) how many ambiguous words are actually included in SRSs and (2) how many these words require correction. This paper targets the Request For Proposals (RFPs), which describes initial requirements, of ten local government systems and ten library systems in Japan. As candidates of ambigous words, we analyzed ten Japanese words: (1) Ippanteki (common, commonly used, widely used), (2) Juudai (serious, seriously, critical, severe), (3) Juubun (sufficient, sufficiently), (4) Tekido (adequate, adequately, appropriate, reasonable), (5) Kouritsuteki (efficient, efficiently), (6) Juuyou (important), (7) Shunji (immediate, immediately), (8) Sugu (im-mediate, immediately), (9) Sokuji (immediate, immediately) and (10) Tadachi (immediate, immediately). As a result of the analysis, we found that among ten words, juubunnna (sufficient) was most frequently appeared in SRSs, and 43% of cases required correction when this word appeared. In addition, we also found that the number of ambiguous words varied greatly among the SRSs, and that larger SRSs did not necessarily contain more ambiguous words.

In recent years, desktop applications are often ported to the Web. This is because Web applications running in a cloud environment have many advantages, for example, they can be used by a wide variety of clients over the Internet and can dynamically allocate computing resources according to demand. Such porting is also very important in terms of effectively utilizing existing software assets in a modern environment. However, porting to the Web involves numerous considerations that are not easy for those without the knowledge and skills to perform. In this paper we describe in detail our experience of porting a desktop Python application, which uses the image processing library OpenCV and the GUI library PySimpleGUI, into a web application, which uses the web framework Django, the CSS framework Bootstrap, the database management system MySQL and phpMyAdmin. We also employed Docker and Docker Compose for flexible development and deployment. Through our experience, we have identified six key aspects to consider when porting a desktop application to the web. This paper will elaborate on these aspects and how to deal with them. This paper also reports which parts of source code could be reused, which parts had to be newly developed, and the size and time required to conduct reuse, modification, and additional development.

Quantum computers are the first computers based on a different paradigm since the establishment of classical computers. Quantum algorithms that run on quantum computers are created based on a fundamentally different way of thinking than algorithms that run on classical computers. Therefore, visualisation to support the understanding of quantum algorithms needs to be different from visualisation to support the understanding of conventional algorithms. In this paper, the differences between quantum algorithms and conventional algorithms are discussed from the perspective of visualisation.

An appropriate quantum algorithm is needed for each problem to achieve the full performance of a quantum computer. It is necessary to understand the principles of quantum computation to implement quantum algorithms. Quantum computation simulators can assist in understanding the principles and behavior of quantum computation. Combining this with explanations of quantum algorithms using visualization techniques and interactions can further aid learning. In this study, to support the understanding of quantum computation, a difficult concept for beginners, we develop an interactive system in which diagrams and graphs are added to a quantum computation simulator to support the explanation and understanding of qubits and quantum algorithms. To verify the effectiveness of the interaction in supporting learning, a subject experiment is conducted to compare the amount of knowledge understood by a group of novice quantum computer students who learned using the developed system with a group who learned using paper-based materials.

The ability to see and find things is very important in our daily lives. For example, when looking for mistakes in debugging a program, or when looking for misspellings in documents, etc., the visual sense is mainly used. The search may or may not be successful. Is there any difference in the way of searching when the search is successful or unsuccessful? The aim of this study is to analyse the gaze while searching and to clarify the differences between successful and unsuccessful searches, using ‘spot the difference’ as a subject. We have developed an experimental application to measure people's gaze while they are looking ‘spot the difference'. In the experiment conducted in this study, 29 subjects have asked to perform ‘spot the difference’ of multiple problems and their gaze have been measured. Analysis of the data obtained from this experiment shows that in many cases, subjects who could not find a difference were not looking at the location of the difference. On the other hand, the existence of ‘cases of looking but not finding’, in which the difference is not detected even though the difference is fully looked at, is also identified. In the present experiment, ‘looking but not finding’ cases account for 15% of all non-correct responses in all questions.

In this paper, we report a piloting study before to confirm the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) on education, especially grasping a new concept. Quantum programming is a new field of programming which is basically unknown to conventional programmers. Therefore, we select quantum programming as a topic in which we check the effectiveness of VR. We develop two education support systems on quantum programming, one with VR and the other without VR. Subjects use both systems and we compare the results. There are two limitaions of this study. One is that we cannot say the experiment condition is carefully controlled because the two systems are different at many parts, not only the part we want to test. The other is the number of subjects for the experiment is very small. So we need an additional study with improvement the limitations. Even with the liitations, the results as a pilot study show that VR can be effective in helping people grasp new concepts.

Explaining a program to others helps get others to find bugs and for the explainer him/herself to find bugs. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no quantitative evidence that explaining a program to others helps the explainer find bugs. This study aims to show quantitatively, using an experimental evaluation, that the explainer himself can find new bugs by explaining the program to others. In the experiment, subjects first review a program that contains many bugs and try to find as many bugs as possible. Next, they are required to explain the program aloud to others. We see if they notice any new bugs themselves during the explanation. As a result of the experiment, five out of the six subjects could find new bugs when explaining the program to others. According to the questionnaire to the subjects, the subjects who find many bugs feel that they can understand the program better by explaining it to others.

In school, there are many situations where face-to-face classes are not possible, such as student mental status, student physical status, and school locked down by disease outbreak like COVID-19. For such situations, we propose a system of school classes in virtual reality (VR). We record a classroom lesson at school with the students as a 360-degree 3D video and show them as VR. Using this system, students can read letters, numbers and figures written on the blackboard and take notes in a virtual space. In this paper, we report the result of the experiment that students watch classes in VR with the system. As a result, about three-quarters of the students answer that classes in VR feel like a real class. Since this number is better than 2D monitor lessons, we think students will feel more like a real classroom than a regular 2D video with the system.

E-learning offers many advantages like being economical, flexible and customizable, but also has challenging aspects such as lack of – social-interaction, which results in contemplation and sense of remoteness. To overcome these and sustain learners’ motivation, various stimuli can be incorporated. Nevertheless, such adjustments initially require an assessment of engagement level. In this respect, we propose estimating engagement level from facial landmarks exploiting the facts that (i) perceptual decoupling is promoted by blinking during mentally demanding tasks; (ii) eye strain increases blinking rate, which also scales with task disengagement; (iii) eye aspect ratio is in close connection with attentional state and (iv) users’ head position is correlated with their level of involvement. Building empirical models of these actions, we devise a probabilistic estimation framework. Our results indicate that high and low levels of engagement are identified with considerable accuracy, whereas medium levels are inherently more challenging, which is also confirmed by inter-rater agreement of expert coders.

Quantum algorithms which are performed on quantum computers are hardly developed, because the principle of quantum computers are totally different from classical computers. We would like to discuss the way of visualization to assist understanding quantum algorithms. As the first step, we have developed visualization system of the Bloch sphere, which is the popular way to show the status of one quantum bit. In the system, we can see the Bloch sphere as 3DCG and interact with it. Next, we discuss the problems of visualizing multiple quantum bits and quantum algorithms.

Output devices to view Virtual Reality (VR), like Head Mount Displays, are getting common lately. However, there is no standard input devices to tell computers user's intention in VR yet. According to the naive intuition, using real objects that has similar shapes as in VR is the better way than using controllers like mouses or game controllers to manipulate objects showed in VR. But is it true? To make it clear, we develop an game system like tower defense. Users played the game in two ways, one is using real objects, the other is using mouse to place "Towers". As the result of questionnaire after game plays, "easy to use" factor was lower for the real objects operation mainly because of the technical difficulties like object detection failure. But the "fun to use" factor was still higher for the real objects than the controllers. It show that using real objects has high potential for interaction between users and the VR system.

In this paper, we propose visual interface and interaction designs for self-ordering systems such as in conveyor belt sushi restaurants. We try to design an interaction in which all people can order foods from their seats at a time without touching any devices, but with a three-dimensions motion sensor, Leap Motion Controller. We design three kinds of interactions and have an experiment to compare them. As a result, it is hard to decide which interaction is best because of false recognition by Leap Motion Controller. However, we found a possibility of interaction for using a three-dimensions motion sensor. We discuss the result of the experiment in detail.

This position paper aims at setting a new semantics for multi-modal mu-calculus to represent interactive states where abstract actions may be applied to. A least fixed point formula may be available to denote states allowing interaction. A simple algebraic representation for interactive states can be definable. For communication between human and machinery, a modality is reserved. In applicative task domains, knowledge construction is focused on with respect to interactive action applications through communications. Panel touch behaviour on iDevice as practice, URL references as functions and grammatical rule applications for sequential effects are studied, as knowledge construction technologies. These views coherent with abstract state machine are finally related to recent trends as semiring in algebraic structure and coalgebra for streams as sequential knowledge structures. A refinement of interactive techniques is positioned into a formal approach to multi-modal logic, applicable to some practices.

Computers have been used for language therapy for aphasia persons. It is known that the usage of computer is effective for it. There are many problems for it but our interests are especially about the aspect of information visualization and interaction between computers and aphasia persons. In this paper, we report a prototype of rehabilitation system and the evaluation of the system by aphasia persons and speech therapists (STs). Aphasia persons have troubles to understand language. Most of them have troubles to read sentences. Also most of them have troubles to write characters and also lines in hand because the cause of aphasia is damages to the left part of brain. The proposed rehabilitation system allows aphasia persons to undergo treatment without writing characters or lines. Since they are not good at reading sentences, the user interface is designed especially using information visualization, as few characters. The evaluation of the system by aphasia persons and STs results good grade and both of them want to use the rehabilitation system by tablet computers much further.

We propose "flip visualization" system which quickly changes a shown image from many images and allows users to find difference of images easily by the effect of the persistence of vision. In the system users can manipulate "flip animation" interactively, such as flip forward or backward, increase or decrease flipping speed, and stop flipping. The system can also divide images into clusters by manual operation of users, if they found a difference of images. In order to check the effect of flip visualization, we develop a web-based demographic simulation system for archaeology which simulates ancient society. It generates images as results, and shows them by flip visualization.

We have developed an Origami system in which we can fold a sheet of paper freely. In mathematical model, two held sides of paper can be overlapped flatly. However, in real paper, the sides often make a gap between them because of physical restrictions. In this paper, we formalize “folding” in Origami and discuss how to make such “gap” in 3D Origami simulation system to make it more realistic. We apply a biphase model, which consists of two models. One of them is mathematical model for managing folding, and the other is graphical gap-model for representing Origami with gaps. We show Origami figures made by the two models and discuss the effect of the method we applied and some problems to be solved.

In this paper, we report two methods to visualize migration of people in an artificial society. The artificial society system we target have been developed for simulating demographic changes in prehistoric and protohistoric periods in Japan. The system is capable of long term simulation of demographic changes in and migration between areas. We visualize migration from two perspectives: global view and family view. Global view focuses on the flow of people in migration. Family view focuses family relations in migration and visualizes it with a graph.

It is not very intuitive to manipulate objects visualized in 3-dimension by a mouse, because a mouse can only move in 2-dimension space. We propose an interaction technique to manipulate 3D objects by mobile devices with acceleration sensors. We have developed a 3D molecular visualization system which displays results of a simulation of the molecular dynamics method. In the system, we can rotate 3D objects by leaning a mobile device and change a viewing location by moving a mobile device. We discuss how we implement the interaction technique in this paper.

We propose a new interaction way that uses mobile devices to input and output devices of computers. The idea is simple but powerful, because 1) mobile devices are popular, 2) people can use them easily, 3) people carry them at all times, 4) two displays one of which is a big display for a computer and another is a small display of a mobile device may make new interaction and visualization and 5) a user can store parts of public data in physically independent device, that is his/her mobile device. We expect that our idea may make psychological barrier lower than now so that users can access and modify all data around the world more easily. In this paper, we show an example application based the idea we propose and discuss its possibilities.

In this paper, we propose a visual interface which assist managing educational courses in e-Learning systems. Educational courses in e-Learning systems can be represented as graphs. We design a simple interface which specializes in manipulation of educational courses only by movements of mouse. The feature of the interface is that we can manipulate graphs without pull down menus and buttons. We specify operations by drawing lines in the canvas window. For example, we can add an edge to a graph by drawing an arrow, and delete nodes and edges by drawing crossing lines on them. Since this is an application-dependent small system, we carefully select the operations and design the simple interface. We show which operations can be used in the interface and how we detect them from mouse movements.

E-learning systems have become important in higher education, especially in universities. An adaptive e-learning system, which dynamically generates suitable courses for each student, is one of the most remarkable research fields. In this paper, we propose a general framework for adaptive e-learning systems, and discuss the role of information visualization in adaptive e-learning systems.

We propose an interactive environment in which we can generate sequential information. Sequential information is a sequence of movements which makes changes of situations. The system allows a user to construct an environment for generating sequential information. We provide interactions and visualization for sequential information generation based on theoretical grounds

There are some systems called supply chain management system or value chain management system that manages production. It is a powerful tool in normal cases, but in a problem such that some parts are out of stock, it can solve the problem only by simple solutions, like postponing shipping of the product because it does not have enough information about production and functions to use the various information. Our research is concerned with a system to integrate information about production and show a solution to help users to judge which way is better to solve the problem. We implemented a prototype system. It takes inputs of some information that were not integrated in one place in former systems, but distributed among systems, people, or sections. It shows a solution for a problem making use of the information integrated in the system. The solution comes as process of reasoning to help user to judge what is the best to do in the case. We also implemented the user interface to show the process of reasoning.

This work is concerned with an application of drawing hierarchically structured trees. The tree drawing is applied to an explanation reasoning system. The reasoning is based on synthetic abduction (hypothesis) that gets a case from a rule and a result. In other words, the system searches a proper environment to get a desired result. In order that the system may be reliably related to the amount of rules which are used to get the answer, we visualize a process of reasoning to show how rules have concern with the process. Since the process of reasoning in the system makes a hierarchically structured tree, the visualization of reasoning is a drawing of a hierarchically structured tree. We propose a method of visualization that is applicable to the explanation reasoning system.

In order to understand the behaviour of distributed program environments, we describe a three-dimensional visualization of communications. Most previous visualizations presented communications by means of the two dimensions of time and process, however, three dimensions are required to represent a message intermediary with visualization functions. We make use of a semantic configuration of messages, which is constructed by the quantities for three parametric factors: (i) time sequence, (ii) identifications of processors, and (iii) message exchanges.

We describe a visualization method for general logic clauses as the first step of a visualization of logic programs. Since we think inclusion is essential to represent an outline of knowledge, we propose a method based on Euler diagrams to visualize inference rules represented as a set of general logic clauses which consist of literals with no variable. We develop a prototype system and show that complex rules which are hard to understand in text are easy to understand by diagrams.