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Purpose - Social relations play an important role in a real community. Interaction patterns reveal relations among actors (such as persons, groups, firms), which can be merged to produce valuable information such as a network structure. This paper aims to present a new approach to extract inter-firm networks from the web for further analysis. Design/methodology/approach - In this study extraction of relations between a pair of firms is obtained by using a search engine and text processing. Because names of firms co-appear coincidentally on the web, an advanced algorithm is proposed, which is characterised by the addition of keywords ("relation keywords") to a query. The relation keywords are obtained from the web using a Jaccard coefficient. Findings - As an application, a network of 60 firms in Japan is extracted including IT, communication, broadcasting, and electronics firms from the web and comprehensive evaluations of this approach are shown. The alliance and lawsuit relations are easily obtainable from the web using the algorithm. By adding relation keywords to named pairs of firms as a query, It is possible to collect target pages from the top of web pages more precisely than by only using the named pairs as a query. Practical implications - This study proposes a new approach for extracting inter-firm networks from the web. The obtained network is useful in several ways. It is possible to find a cluster of firms and characterise a firm by its cluster. Business experts often make such inferences based on firm relations and firm groups. For that reason the firm network might enhance inferential abilities on the business domain. Also we might use obtained networks to recommend business partners based on structural advantages. The authors'' intuition is that extracting a social network might provide information that is only recognisable from the network point of view. For example, the centrality of each firm is identified only after generating a social network. Originality/value - This study is a first attempt to extract inter-firm networks from the web using a search engine. The approach is also applicable to other actors, such as famous persons, organisations or other multiple relational entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the innovative use of AI computer algorithms in the creation of tanka, a form of Japanese poetry. From the recent forays into computer-generated poetry in Japan, I look at two computer programs in particular: the instant tanka generator "Inu-zaru," created by Sasaki Arara, and the "gūzen tanka" Twitter bot by programmer Inaniwa. These programs engender new paradoxical models of technology-mediated authorship and reading, whereby human agency is at once subtracted from the composition process while also being presupposed as a necessary component in the participant reader. Such forms of reading and writing shed new light on theoretical matters such as the death of the author even as they pose intractable questions concerning international copyright conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The first satellite of Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System transmits C/A code and the SAIF signal from different antennas. The baseline vector between these antennas can be computed from differential measurements if the satellite's attitude is known. Based on this vector, the yaw attitude of the spacecraft can be computed. This feature is interesting since the yaw attitude of QZSS satellites is switched between two modes and can be non-nominal during certain time periods. Precise knowledge of the satellite's attitude is essential when processing carrier-phase measurements or satellite laser ranging measurements. This paper introduces the algorithm for baseline vector and yaw attitude estimation and presents results based on real measurements of the CONGO network. The observability of the baseline vector and the accuracy of the yaw angle estimates are discussed. The analysis shows a switch from yaw-steering to orbit-normal orientation and changes of the attitude during an orbit maneuver. Copyright © 2012 Institute of Navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spiral Optimization Algorithm (SOA) is an optimization technique developed recently (2011) by K. Tamura and K. Yasuda at Tokyo Metropolitan University-Japan. SOA is a metaheuristic based on an analogy of spiral phenomena in nature and it is simple in concept, few in parameters and easy in implementation. In this paper, SOA is proposed for solving the Combined Economic and Emission Dispatch (CEED) problem. It is aimed, in the CEED problem, that scheduling of generators should operate with both minimum fuel costs and emission levels, simultaneously, while satisfying the load demand and operational constraints. The CEED problem is formulated as a multi-objective problem by considering the fuel cost and emission objectives of generating units. The bi-objective optimization problem is converted into a single objective function using a price penalty factor. The proposed algorithm has been implemented on three test systems with 3, 6, and 40 generating units, with different constraints and various cost curve nature. In order to see the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, its results are compared to those reported in the recent literature. Those results are quite encouraging showing the good applicability of SOA for CEED problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specification for a communication protocol is generally represented by a finite-state machine, and the operation of the machine is represented by transitions among states. The device implementing such specification is called the implementation under test (IUT). It is important for the IUT that its operation should be verified for all state transitions on the finite-state machine given in the specification. This test is called the conformance testing. In such testing it is important to generate efficiently a route containing all state transitions from the initial state. This problem is called the test sequence generation problem. This paper considers the test sequence generation problem for a communication protocol and proposes an application of an algorithm for satisfiability problem (SAT) that can flexibly handle various constraints, such as the order constraint and the time constraint among multiple constraints. The proposed method is applied to the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) and its effectiveness is demonstrated. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 34(11): 20–29, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10482 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, several inductive logic programming (ILP) systems have been developed. However, the normal ILP system does not have enough power to induce logic programs in some domains. Therefore, various new ILP systems, such as nonmonotonic ILP, that apply new learning tasks, have been proposed. In the present paper, a new learning task, called relational learning from nondichotomizable examples, is proposed for relational domains. The scheme of this task is similar to that of normal ILP, with the exception of the training examples. Normally, conventional ILP uses positive and negative examples in the training process. However, the examples of the proposed learning task are not strictly positive or negative: the training examples have a continuous scale. This new learning task is defined and a new method for learning this task is proposed. A new ILP system, SYNGIP (for SYNthesized system using Genetic programming and Inductive logic Programming), is developed based on this method and the performance of SYNGIP is compared experimentally to that of the conventional ILP method for the task of human feeling acquisition. © 2001 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 32(14): 34–40, 2001 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general, systems are comprised of a large number of elements and might be very symmetric. In verification of such systems, they are reduced while upkeeping their global structure and verified with the intuitive expectation that the verification of such reduced systems will yield almost the same results as those of the original ones. However, such verifications do not guarantee the success of original system verifications. In this paper, the target is verification of arbitrary scale systems with star-shape configuration which can be expressed by Petri nets. The proposed algorithm explores the reachable state space with no dependency on system scale. © 2001 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 32(14): 41–53, 2001 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors have previously proposed an efficient affine transformation algorithm for the two-dimensional binary image, where the image is represented by the run format called PXY table and the transformation is executed combining the skew and the transpose manipulations. This paper proposes a new affine transformation algorithm for the three-dimensional object (three-dimensional binary image) represented by the three-dimensional run format, called SPXY table. The SPXY table is composed by stacking the two-dimensional PXY tables. The affine transformation on the SPXY table is realized as a combination of the three-dimensional skew and the transpose manipulations, as an extension of the case of the two-dimensional PXY table. As the result of experiment, it is shown that the proposed method is faster, by a factor of 36 to 389, than the primitive method which applies the transformation to each voxel. It is also shown that the CPU time for the affine transformation by the proposed method is proportional to the number of runs in the representation of the three-dimensional object. The result of the affine transformation by the proposed method contains an error, which may be greater than the rounding error when the result is converted to an integer by rounding the subdecimal. The error analysis is applied to the three-dimensional rotation, which is used most frequently among the affine transformations. As a result, it is seen that the absolute error of each coordinate in the proposed method is 1.4 at the maximum. © 1998 Scripta Technica. Syst Comp Jpn, 29(3): 18–27, 1998 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is increasingly becoming a vital factor in enhancing the efficiency of ocean resources exploration. However, it is currently difficult to deploy such a package of AUVs for operation at sea because of their large size. The aim of our study is to create a demonstration system for formation control algorithms using actual hardware. To implement a prototype system, we developed a testbed AUV usable in a test basin and performed a simple formation control test in the Actual Sea Model Basin of the National Maritime Research Institute, Japan. Two AUVs, the simulated "virtual" leader and the developed "real" follower, communicate through an acoustic link and hence cruise to maintain a constant distance between them. Tests for more sophisticated formation control algorithms will be enabled using the system; consequently rapid implementation at sea will be realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational morphogenesis is the word generally used for expressing those techniques or ways of thought by which the configuration or the system of structures is generated mainly through the usage of computers, which is realized on the firm foundation of both FEM as a tool of numerical analysis and various methods based on relatively newly-developed algorithms for structural optimization. Recently, it has been gaining a considerable number of users such as structural engineers or architects for the structural design of actual buildings as well as proposals for architectural competitions. Here we present the state of the art in computational morphogenesis especially in Japan as well as the future prospects for computational morphogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]