Business people and academia are now excited about Big Data and Cloud Computing as the new and most innovative means for enhancing productivity and customer satisfaction. Simultaneously, there are strong concerns about privacy not only among privacy advocates but among consumers in general, and how to strike a right balance is the main theme in every field of science. However, it is quite strange that very little attention has been paid to the concept of confidentiality, which must be the core element of privacy. This paper first tries to analyze the following two dichotomies as a basis for possible policy considerations: (1) privacy approach in the United States versus confidentiality approach in the United Kingdom, though they share the same common law tradition, and (2) clear demarcation between Information Service and Telecommunications in the United States, dating back to the Computer Inquiry in the 1970s. This paper also analyzes the features of the Cloud and discusses the possibility of treating it as a new type of Public Utility, namely Information Utility. This hypothesis should be rejected, because there are crucial differences in market structures, regardless of clear similarities in service features. Instead, this paper emphasizes the necessity of protecting confidentiality as an industrial norm. Taking into account the long tradition of free market for computing industries, self-regulation is basically preferable to government regulation. But from a different viewpoint of "nudge", a hybrid combination of libertarianism and paternalism, this paper concludes by proposing five short recommendations including fair contract terms as well as unbundling confidentiality from privacy.

The purpose of this research is to develop an intuitive interface to control rescue robots. We propose a new image stabilization system for easy operation of rescue robots. A promising method to search victims in rubble, is the use of teleoperated rescue robots. In the rescue activities with such robots, operators remotely control the robots through images captured by cameras mounted on the robots. Since the orientation of the robots change intensively while they move in rubble, image stabilization is necessary so that the operators can search victims without suffering from fatigue nor motion sickness. However, the orientation changes of the rescue robots are so intensive that conventional methods may not be capable of stabilizing the camera images. In this paper, we propose a new image stabilization system which can cancel the camera motion due to the intensive changes of the robot’s orientation on an uneven terrain. After a preliminary experiment, a 3-DOF camera system was designed based on the newly proposed mechanism. To verify the performance of the camera system, we conducted three experiments. The result of the experiments confirmed that the proposed mechanism shows good performance in motion stabilization as well as good performance in tracking the commanded head motion. Finally, we verified that the camera system works properly even when it was mounted on a crawler running on an uneven terrain.

In order to search and rescue the victims in rubble effectively, a 3-D map of the rubble is required. As a part of the national project of rescue robot system, we are investigating a method for constructing a 3-D map of rubble by teleoperated mobile robots. We are also planning to build an intuitive user interface for teleoperating robots and navigating in a virtualized rubble model using the obtained 3-D model. In this paper, some preliminary research results are introduced. We did some design studies of laser range finders that can be mounted on a mobile robot and can get the range data of the rubble around the robot. Then, we formulated a 3D SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Map Building) algorithm and conducted some simulation studies. Lastly, we proposed a novel motion canceling camera system and confirmed its validity by experiment.