Vol.3 No.2 2010

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Research paper : Cyber Assist project as service science (H. Nakashima et al.)−113−Synthesiology - English edition Vol.3 No.2 (2010) source decays in much shorter period than their announced lifetime. We found that the cause was the periodical high voltage as the result of amplitude modulation of the source sound signal. Application of higher voltage than the design limit shortens the lifetime of LED significantly. We changed the design of the circuit to use the limiter. Laboratory tests cannot find this kind of problem.Similar systems were used in several exhibits in many institutes including MeSci and AIST. The Aichi Exposition was the summit of them.5.2 Event space support systemWe designed a conference support system[17] and used it at the annual conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. As individual terminals, we used a modified version of name tags usually used for conference participants. We added an integrated system of infrared receptor, ear phone, reflector and LED light (visible at the center of the reflector) (Fig. 7 left). As information stations placed in various places of the conference site, we used a unit consisting of an infrared emitter, a camera and a display (Fig. 7 right is an experimental station using a plain PC). Besides the main function of listening to voice information from the station by the ear phone, we provided a function to keep record of the visitor who emits his/her ID using the LED, and a function to use the name tag as a mouse to give instructions to the station by tracking the movement of the reflector with the camera.The content service of the system includes information retrieval based on the map of researcher relationships[18] automatically extracted from research papers lists on the Web [19]. This service makes use of the fact that the conferences are closed for research community only. The service also provides other contents based on conference programs. It is one of the rare applications of CARC that has intelligent contents.This event space support system was used at consecutive annual conferences of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and also at an international conference on ubiquitous computing held in Tokyo (UbiComp 2005).5.3 Intelligent home appliancesThe software team conducted a field experiment in Yokohama to run an integrated system flexibly connecting several intelligent home appliances using UBKit[20] developed by the team. Users do not have to manipulate each appliance separately. By vocally announcing their intention, the intelligent system controlling the room accomplishes the task to fulfill their wish. For example, if you say “I want to watch NHK news”, then the system takes series of actions including turning on the TV, setting the proper channel – note that the channel settings for NHK are different by regions, closing the curtain if the room is too bright, and so forth. It is also possible to preset the timer to automatically open the curtain and turn on the air conditioner at a certain time in the morning.The experiment was conducted at the community center. We asked volunteers from the region to come to our meeting several months prior to the experiment, to answer our questionnaires and exchange opinions on intelligent home appliances. Through the meetings we gathered precious information on how people including elderly and weak-sighted person feel about computerized appliances and fed it back to our research plansNote 9).5.4 Expo 2005 Aichi JapanThe biggest application opportunity for CARC was at Expo 2005 Aichi Japan. It was an unprecedented challenge for AIST to provide a half-a-year long service in this worldwide event. CARC took part in two projects.Global House: This was a pavilion directed by the Japanese government. It mainly featured collections supervised by Mr. ARAMATA Hiroshi, and CARC contributed technologies for audio commentaries about them. An advanced version of CoBIT equipped with ID tag was employed, named “Aimulet Fig. 7 The terminal (left) and the information station (right) for conference support systemFig. 8 Field test of our intelligent home appliance systemTerminalStation

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