This position article summarizes the panelists’ presentations and discussions at the panel “Fake News, Misinformation, and Privacy: How COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Our Society,” held at the 15th International Conference on Information Resources Management (Conf-IRM 2022) on October 18, 2022. The panel discussed their views on (1) how to stop the spreading of health misinformation; (2) how information sources affect online health information behavior; (3) how news literacy increases people's desire to seek out information by increasing their skepticism; and (4) how political beliefs, trust, and privacy concerns affect people's decisions during COVID-19. This article also discusses how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can help tackle the fake news and misinformation problem.

Automated program repair (in short, APR) is a truly desired technique because it can reduce debugging costs drastically. A well-known technique in APR is a reuse-based approach, which inserts existing program statements in a given program to suspicious code for an exposed bug. Some reports show the reuse-based approach was able to fix many bugs in open source software. However, the existing approach often takes very long time to fix bugs. Its main factor is that so many variant programs are generated by insertions and so many test cases are executed for the variant programs before a fixed program is generated. In order to shorten fixing time with the reuse-based approach, a fixed program must be generated much more efficiently. In this paper, we propose two strategies to generate a fixed program more efficiently. We also implement the two strategies and confirm that there are real bugs which the two strategies contribute to shortening fixing time.

In the RoboCup Mixed Reality Soccer League, the location and direction of each micro robot on the field are detected by a camera positioned above the field. However, setting and adjusting the camera to achieve greater accuracy takes a very long time. Besides, the detection process is influenced by the surrounding environment, including illuminance of the room and location of the field. Therefore, while the robots are in play, accuracy gradually decreases as the illuminance changes over time and eventually, the robots become invisible to the camera. In these situations, changes in illuminance and motion blur can cause serious issues. To solve this problem, we apply a rotation search method in the detection system, which is a “vision tracking system”. In addition, we implement a redesigned vision tracking system and evaluate the new system. Our results confirm that the new system is effective.

It is often difficult for visually impaired persons to walk outside to his or her destination. In this paper, we develop a cane with a built-in haptic interface for use by visually impaired persons. The cane is paired with IC tags buried underground (e.g., under street pavement). The haptic interface is controlled with a position and velocity control system that accurately indicates four directions (forward, backwards, right and left). After evaluating the vibration in the haptic interface, we determined the optimal vibration frequencies indicating a specific direction were combinations of 5 (Hz) and 1 (Hz). Furthermore, the optimal repetition of vibrations was determined to be two times. By using these conditions, the four directions were recognized more than 95% of the time. It was also confirmed that the visually impaired person recognized the presented direction even when an IC tag was buried underground. In the future, a mechanism will be developed that will allow visually impaired persons to recognize directions more accurately even if they swing the cane in a controlled manner. In addition, we will integrate a route decision system into the cane equipped with the haptic interface.

As a method to evaluate delay test quality of test patterns, SDQM (Statistical Delay Quality Model) has been proposed for transition faults. In order to derive better test quality by SDQM, the following two things are important: for each transition fault, (1) to find out the accurate length of the longest sensitizable paths along which the fault is activated and propagated, and (2) to generate a test pattern that detects the fault through as long paths as possible. In this paper, we propose a method to calculate the length of the potentially sensitizable longest path for detection of a transition fault. In addition, we develop a procedure to extract path information that helps high quality transition ATPG. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only derives more accurate SDQL (Statistical Delay Quality Level) but also enhances the test quality of generated test patterns.

In current speaker-independent speech recognition, it is impossible to attain a high recognition ratio for general purpose applications. However, it is possible to obtain a reasonable recognition ratio for specific applications. A programming language has the specific syntax and vocabularies specified by the language specification based on these characteristics. A C program editor by voice input is implemented.

This paper describes a High-speed Prolog Machine (HIM) architecture and its hardware structure, which are developed as a product of Fifth Generation Computer System (FGCS} project in Japan.HIM realizes high performance and provides a practical programming environment.A major HIM feature is a large memory capacity and specialized hardware for unification and stack operations.HIM has a compiler-oriented architecture with high-level stack-control instructions.Furthermore, the HIM architecture provides side-effect operations, nonlocal-exit control and multiprocess support primitives, which are effective to develop system programs.The performance is estimated at 280 KLIPS (Kilo Logical Inferences Per Second) in executing a deterministic "concatenate" Prolog program.The HIM processor is implemented with high-speed CCML {Current Mode Logic) chips and with I00 nanosecond machine cycle.