This study focused on Twitter, which is expected to become an increasingly influential tool of political communication, and sought to validate public opinion formation process theories such as the concentration of opinions and announcement effects. We analyzed tweets about the Osaka Metropolis Plan, which was the subject of a referendum in May 2015. We classified tweets and accounts based on support for or opposition to the plan, using a natural language process and latent Dirichlet allocation, and by comparison with newspaper articles. We analyzed changes in the number of posts and active accounts based on the results. We found that the spiral of silence theory did not apply. We also investigated retweet networks using social network analysis, and found that support and opposition were clearly divided in a network structure. Moreover, we found several accounts with extremely high degree centrality and betweenness centrality, thereby indicating possible validation of an opinion leader effect and the announcement effect.

Your face is one of the most important factors in communicating with people. At present, the TV-phone, which can transmit face information, is becoming a part of modern life. In order to transfer more realistic face information, we propose the face shape robot WD-1 (Waseda-Docomo face robot No.1), which can express various face shapes by morphing an average mask (made of SEPTON) through 19 facial control-points. In this study, an average face mask is made in order to express a wide range of shapes with few control points. The position, number and movement range of the control-points are optimized. In addition, we introduce 3-DOFs drive units and control each control-point on a plane, not at a point. In order to evaluate the performance of WD-1, we measure the shape error between the faces of three subjects and the WD-1 equivalents. We elucidate the weaknesses of the current WD-1 implementation: a paucity of control points on the face line and wrinkling of the mask due to excessive local stress

Vocal movement is not only a movement of the vocal organs, it is also a movement that produces acoustic signals received by hearing as linguistic information through hydroacoustic phenomena along with the formation of the vocal way. The purpose of this research is to study the human vocal mechanism from the engineering point of view by simulating the vocal movement with a robot, and to create the dynamic model. The authors developed an anthropomorphic talking robot WT-1 (Waseda Talker-No.1) in 1999. It simulates human vocal movement, and has articulators (a 6-DOF tongue, 4-DOF lips, 1-DOF teeth, a nasal cavity and 1-DOF soft palate) and vocal organs (1-DOF lungs and 1-DOF vocal cords); the total DOF of the robot is 14. We experimented with it on Japanese vowels. However, the voice produced was not natural. In this paper we describe an improvement of the mechanisms for the realization of natural vowels and consonant sounds.

The vocal movement isn't only a movement of the vocal organs. It is also a movement that produces acoustic signals received by hearing as linguistic information through hydroacoustic phenomena along with the formation of the vocal way. The purpose of this research is to make clear human vocal mechanism from the view of engineering by reproducing the vocal movement using a robot, and to make the dynamic model. Therefore, the authors developed an anthropomorphic talking robot, WT-1 (Waseda Talker-No.1). It simulates human voice movement, and has articulators (the 4-DOF lips, 1-DOF teeth, 6-DOF tongue, nasal cavity and 1-DOF soft palate) and the vocal organs (the 1-DOF vocal cords, 1-DOF lungs); Total DOF of the robot is 14.