Going from the philosophy and concepts to the implementation and user study, this book presents an excellent overview of Japan's contemporary technical challenges in the field of human-computer interaction. The next information era will be one in which information is used to cultivate human and social potential. Driven by this vision, the outcomes provided in this work were accomplished as challenges to establish basic technologies for achieving harmony between human beings and the information environment by integrating element technologies including real-space communication, human interfaces, and media processing. Ranging from the neuro-cognitive level to the field trial, the research activities integrated novel perceptual technologies that even exceed human ability to sense, capture, and affect the real world. This book grew out of one of the CREST research areas funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The theme of the project is "the creation of human-harmonized information technology for convivial society", where 17 research teams aimed at a common goal. The project promotes a trans-disciplinary approach featuring (1) recognition and comprehension of human behaviors and real-space contexts by utilizing sensor networks and ubiquitous computing, (2) technologies for facilitating man-machine communication by utilizing robots and ubiquitous networks, and (3) content technologies for analyzing, mining, integrating, and structuring multimedia data including those in text, voice, music, and images. This is the second of two volumes, which is contributed by eight team leaders. Besides describing the technical challenges, each contribution lays much weight on discussing the philosophy, concepts, and the implications underlying the project. This work will provide researchers and practitioners in the related areas with an excellent opportunity to find interesting new developments and to think about the relationship between human and information technology.

This book covers an approach to conversational informatics which encompasses science and technology for understanding and augmenting conversation in the network age. A major challenge in engineering is to develop a technology for conveying not just messages but also underlying wisdom. Relevant theories and practices in cognitive linguistics and communication science, as well as techniques developed in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, are discussed.

This book explores an approach to social robotics based solely on autonomous unsupervised techniques and positions it within a structured exposition of related research in psychology, neuroscience, HRI, and data mining. The authors present an autonomous and developmental approach that allows the robot to learn interactive behavior by imitating humans using algorithms from time-series analysis and machine learning. The first part provides a comprehensive and structured introduction to time-series analysis, change point discovery, motif discovery and causality analysis focusing on possible applicability to HRI problems. Detailed explanations of all the algorithms involved are provided with open-source implementations in MATLAB enabling the reader to experiment with them. Imitation and simulation are the key technologies used to attain social behavior autonomously in the proposed approach. Part two gives the reader a wide overview of research in these areas in psychology, and ethology. Based on this background, the authors discuss approaches to endow robots with the ability to autonomously learn how to be social. Data Mining for Social Robots will be essential reading for graduate students and practitioners interested in social and developmental robotics.

Emotion connects the thought to the body, which is a magnificent biological - vice for sensing and affecting the world. The thought controls the body through emotions. The body affects the thought through emotions. Through this mec- nism, the thought allows the agent to behave intelligently in the complex world filled with a huge amount of dynamic information. The emotion maps a flux of information into a space which the agent is familiar with, enabling her/him to associate ongoing events with past experiences which help to reduce complexity by providing with a nominal solution. Recent findings in brain science suggest that mirror neurons map visual signals into motor signals for the body. This mechanism might permit one to experience the emotion of the other agent just by feeling the motor signals caused by mirror neurons as a result of visual stimuli caused by the other agent's emotional beh- iors. In particular, it might play a significant role in invoking empathy in a social situation. It may not be hard to think about what might happen to emotion-less machines. The emotion-less machines may not be able to accumulate experiences to avoid serious failures. They may not be able to communicate with the humans in an empathetic way.

Going from the philosophy and concepts to the implementation and user study, this book presents an excellent overview of Japan's contemporary technical challenges in the field of human-computer interaction. The next information era will be one in which information is used to cultivate human and social potential. Driven by this vision, the outcomes provided in this work were accomplished as challenges to establish basic technologies for achieving harmony between human beings and the information environment by integrating element technologies including real-space communication, human interfaces, and media processing. Ranging from the neuro-cognitive level to the field trial, the research activities integrated novel perceptual technologies that even exceed human ability to sense, capture, and affect the real world. This book grew out of one of the CREST research areas funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The theme of the project is "the creation of human-harmonized information technology for convivial society", where 17 research teams aimed at a common goal. The project promotes a trans-disciplinary approach featuring (1) recognition and comprehension of human behaviors and real-space contexts by utilizing sensor networks and ubiquitous computing, (2) technologies for facilitating man-machine communication by utilizing robots and ubiquitous networks, and (3) content technologies for analyzing, mining, integrating, and structuring multimedia data including those in text, voice, music, and images. This is the second of two volumes, which is contributed by eight team leaders. Besides describing the technical challenges, each contribution lays much weight on discussing the philosophy, concepts, and the implications underlying the project. This work will provide researchers and practitioners in the related areas with an excellent opportunity to find interesting new developments and to think about the relationship between human and information technology.

This book explores an approach to social robotics based solely on autonomous unsupervised techniques and positions it within a structured exposition of related research in psychology, neuroscience, HRI, and data mining. The authors present an autonomous and developmental approach that allows the robot to learn interactive behavior by imitating humans using algorithms from time-series analysis and machine learning. The first part provides a comprehensive and structured introduction to time-series analysis, change point discovery, motif discovery and causality analysis focusing on possible applicability to HRI problems. Detailed explanations of all the algorithms involved are provided with open-source implementations in MATLAB enabling the reader to experiment with them. Imitation and simulation are the key technologies used to attain social behavior autonomously in the proposed approach. Part two gives the reader a wide overview of research in these areas in psychology, and ethology. Based on this background, the authors discuss approaches to endow robots with the ability to autonomously learn how to be social. Data Mining for Social Robots will be essential reading for graduate students and practitioners interested in social and developmental robotics.

Emotion connects the thought to the body, which is a magnificent biological - vice for sensing and affecting the world. The thought controls the body through emotions. The body affects the thought through emotions. Through this mec- nism, the thought allows the agent to behave intelligently in the complex world filled with a huge amount of dynamic information. The emotion maps a flux of information into a space which the agent is familiar with, enabling her/him to associate ongoing events with past experiences which help to reduce complexity by providing with a nominal solution. Recent findings in brain science suggest that mirror neurons map visual signals into motor signals for the body. This mechanism might permit one to experience the emotion of the other agent just by feeling the motor signals caused by mirror neurons as a result of visual stimuli caused by the other agent's emotional beh- iors. In particular, it might play a significant role in invoking empathy in a social situation. It may not be hard to think about what might happen to emotion-less machines. The emotion-less machines may not be able to accumulate experiences to avoid serious failures. They may not be able to communicate with the humans in an empathetic way.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Active Media Technology, AMT 2009, held in Beijing, China, in October 2009.

The 47 revised full papers and the 6 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers reflect the shared forum for researchers and practitioniers from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, media engineering, economics, data mining, data and knowledge engineering, intelligent agent technology, human computer interaction, complex systems and systems science.

It offered new insights into the main research challenges and development of AMT by revealing the interplay between the studies of human informatics and research of informatics on the Web/Internet, mobile and wireless centric intelligent information processing systems.

The 2nd Workshop on Intelligent Media Technology for Communicative Intelligence commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology in Warsaw aimed to explore the current research topics in the ?eld of int- ligent media technologies for communicative intelligence. Communicative intelligence represents a new challenge towards building a sup- intelligence on the ubiquitous global network by accumulating a huge amount of - man andknowledgeresources.The term "communicativeintelligence"re?ects the view that communication is at the very core of intelligence and its creation. Communication permits novel ideas to emerge from intimate interactions by multiple agents, ranging from collaboration to competition. The recent advance of information and commu- cation technologies has established an information infrastructure that allows humans and artifacts to communicate with each other beyond space and time. It enables us to advance a step further to realize a communicative intelligence with many fruitful applications. Intelligentmediatechnologiesattempttocaptureandaugmentpeople'scommuni- tive activities by embedding computers into the environment to enhance interactions in an unobtrusive manner. The introduction of embodied conversational agents that might mediate conversations among people in a social context is the next step in the p- cess. The scope of intelligent media technologies includes design and development of intelligent supports for content production, distribution, and utilization, since rich c- tent is crucial for communication in many applications. The promising applications of intelligence media technologies include e-learning, knowledge management systems, e-democracy, and other communication-intensivesubject domains.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of five international workshops organized by the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence, JSAI in 2001.The 75 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. In accordance with the five workshops documented, the book offers topical sections on social intelligence design, agent-based approaches in economic and complex social systems, rough set theory and granular computing, chance discovery, and challenges in knowledge discovery and data mining.