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Research paper : Cyber Assist project as service science (H. Nakashima et al.)−111−Synthesiology - English edition Vol.3 No.2 (2010) image are constructed based on this conceptual model. Research of service science maybe composed around a new idealized service model.3.3 Intelligent contentContent services play a large part in recent service provision. Content such as movies, news, Web pages, music, etc. must go hand in hand with mechanisms to deliver them. CARC also focused on manipulation of content provided through devices such as CoBIT (section4.1). At CARC we developed technologies for compiling and delivering structured information content, called intelligent content, as well as proposing a standard format for those structured digital data [8]. Tags annotating digital documents, movies, and so on [9] allow computer programs to process semantic structures of such content. This makes possible semantic manipulation of content, in particular semantic matching and semantic restructuring. We further developed various application technologies of intelligent content based on natural language processing and multiagent technologies. We aimed at construction of a society for sharing and reusing semantic information of content. Since information content often concerns the real-world, we can semantically reconstruct the world by grounding intelligent content to the real physical world.Location-based communication and semantic structuring of the world are two wheels of one cart for grounding digital information. They allow computers and people to share meaning of information, which should promote a conspicuous improvement over the whole society by making it possible to realize brand-new systems, because the application domains of these technologies encompass a very large realm concerning the entire communication technologies and intelligent information processing technologies. In particular, such technologies and technologies of cellular phones, etc. are complementary to each other, so that their natural integration will enable various ubiquitous intelligent information services.CARC not only developed such fundamental technologies and promoted the standardization of related specifications, but also presented prototypes of representative application technologies involving major research issues, in order to provide common platforms for many applications and thereby to construct an infrastructure upon which private companies could develop various other application technologies. These research results are currently used for retrieval of movie scenes, collaborative authoring system for online comprehensive dictionary, and so forth.CARC had also planned to use these technologies in event-space assistance system (section 5.2) and Expo 2005 Aichi Japan, to instantly reconstruct information required in the users’ situations from huge annotated data and deliver it to the users’ information terminals. Due to the large cost of content production and the lack of sensing equipments for extracting appropriate content, however, this plan materialized only partially.4 Research and development projects In this chapter, we describe research and development activities for each sub-theme at the final phase of the project. Since we covered diverse areas in our activities, the followings depict only significant results.4.1 My-Button oriented terminals In the early phase of the project, we were trying to implement “location-based communication” (section 3.1) using i-lidar-based locating and communication [11]. The i-lidar is a device for measuring the distance to the target by observing the resonance of frequency modulated laser beam with its reflection from the target. Combining this distance information with the direction of the laser-beam, we can measure the 3D position of the target. However, the device costs the magnitude of ten million yen for each set and it cannot be expected to become lower than one million yen even with mass-production. It is too expensive to be used in mass in the real-world applications. We therefore limited this issue for basic research only.The concept of battery-less information terminal, CoBIT [12] was born as a deviation from i-lidarNote 7) (Fig. 5). This terminal exemplifies location-based communication since it utilizes physical location to deliver information encoded as an infrared beam which also provides the power. It is the first product of CARC to realize the simple and natural interface requirement of the “My-Button” concept. By reducing the device implanted in the environment into simple LED systems, it became feasible to use the device in various applications. Many applications described in chapter 5 came up together with plans for popularization through an AIST venture company “Cyber Assist One, Inc.” set up by some members of CARC.Fig. 4 Image of My-button (example)SpeakerMicrophonePhoto detectorReflectorsFingerprint recognizerCommand button

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