This study presents a voice assistant system to support cooking by utilizing smart speakers in Japanese.This system not only speaks the procedures written in recipes point by point but also answers the common questions from users for the specified recipes.The system applies machine comprehension techniques to millions of recipes for answering the common questions in cooking such as "人参はどうした らよいですか(How should I cook carrots?)".Furthermore, several machine-learning techniques are applied to generate better responses to users.

In this paper, network maintenance costs are evaluated quantitatively to confirm the effectiveness of a scheduled maintenance scheme for optical networks. Numerical simulations show that truck-roll maintenance is drastically reduced with 2 redundant links. The scheduled maintenance scheme is cost effective when the truck-roll cost exceeds about 5 times that of scheduled maintenance and the transponder cost is less than about 20 times as much as the scheduled maintenance cost.

The accuracy and precision of time synchronization in Ethernet must be enhanced since Ethernet is becoming a critical component of telecommunication networks. This paper investigates a precise time synchronization technique that supports Gb/s Ethernet. To obtain accurate time synchronization, delay variation in message transfer and processing must be minimized. For this purpose, the paper first describes an implementation of preemptive priority queuing, which decreases the message delay variation of Ethernet. The paper then proposes a time synchronization method that is performed in the lower protocol layer and then describes its implementation on FPGA-based hardware. The proposed method achieves superior time accuracy and precision through the low message transfer/processing delay variation provided by preemptive priority, lower layer execution, and hardware implementation. The effectiveness of the method is confirmed through experiments.

We constructed a rack-mounted prototype photonic ATM switch based on the FRONTIERNET architecture. The advantages of the architecture are that its output-buffering scheme overcomes the bottlenecks that can occur when receiving and storing concurrent high-speed cells, and that there is no need to deal with contention resolution between input highways. The prototype has 16 input/output ports and 2.5 Gb/s transmission speed. Actually, six input ports and one output port are mounted in two racks. We demonstrated successful cell routing and buffering, and its stable operation, with 24-h bit-error-free switching operation. We also discussed problems to be solved in increasing the throughput of FRONTIERNET.

This paper describes large-capacity photonic ATM switching systems being developed that use FDM (or WDM) techniques. Our system is based on a simple star architecture with a modular structure. We show that it is possible to obtain a 320-Gb/s system that has enough S/N margin and can tolerate the polarization and frequency dependencies of optical devices. Our experiments using rack-mounted prototype modules to demonstrate the feasibility of our system, as well as successful 10-Gb/s 4/spl times/4 broadcast-and-select and 2.5-Gb/s 16/spl times/16 frequency-routing switch operations.