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To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships is Takt which is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding human interactive behavior is a key technology required for future robots. To achieve this goal, the robot should be able to recognize key patterns in human–human interactions. Moreover, the robot should be able to generate similar behaviors during its interaction with human partners. In this paper, an unsupervised system is proposed that allows the robot to build a generative model of the interaction protocol using interaction records. A system is evaluated in a guided navigation task and is shown to successfully learn the underlying interaction protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ubiquitous Monitoring (UM) describes the continuous collection of data on a large scale, enabled by embedded, mobile, wireless, and sensory technologies [1]. This data will enable the envisioned applications of Ubiquitous Computing. Research has shown that monitoring can affect user behavior [2], which is problematic for ubiquitous computing because the data collected may not fully reflect the reality. Hence, any services provided may not fully align with user expectations or needs. One proposed solution is the use of deterministic models to predict the behaviors of users prior to deployment, reducing the undesirable effects of monitoring. The Perceptions of System Attributes?Behavioral Intention (PSA-BI) model was specifically designed for this purpose [1]. While the model has been validated, the moderating effect of culture has not yet been explored. As such, we present here results from a study carried out in the U.K. exploring the relationships in the PSA-BI model. This is then compared with a structural model from a previous study in Japan [3], [4], allowing us to explore any potential differences and similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aworld of ubiquitous computing, full of networked mobile and embedded technologies, is approaching. The benefits of this technology are numerous, and act as the major driving force behind its development. These benefits are brought about, in part, by ubiquitous monitoring (UM): the continuous and wide spread collection of ?significant amounts of data about users [1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology explosion induced by information explosion will eventually change artifacts into intelligent autonomous agents consisting of surrogates and mediators from which humans can receive services without special training. Four potential problems might arise as a result of the paradigm shift: technology abuse, responsibility flaw, moral in crisis, and overdependence on artifacts. Although the first and second might be resolved in principle by introduction of public mediators, the rest seems beyond technical solution. Under the circumstances, a reasonable goal might be to create a mutual dependency between empathy and technology: Using technology to help people cultivate empathy among people, so empathy in the society may allow people to help each other to recover from disasters beyond the scope of the assumption underlying the society of mediators. I highlight an immersive collaborative interaction environment for helping people share first-person view and its application to building empathic agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including social customer relationship management (SCRM), interactions for symbiotic and inclusive societies, and the socio-emotional aspects of laughter of humanoid robots.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one regarding the automated construction of a semantic network by making use of the wide information resource of the web site, one regarding a model-based approach to fault localization, and another regarding image annotation and retrieval.

This paper presents an approach to managing knowledge specific to a particular location for complex instruments. The goal is to improve the knowledge communication between experts and end-users of scientific instruments. We propose a computational framework that integrates augmented reality and augmented virtuality as interface for manipulating knowledge. The augmented virtuality-based interface can be produced and distributed without extra costs. It allows knowledge dissemination at a larger scale. The prominent feature of our model is that the knowledge representation is independent from those interfaces. A preliminary version of our framework has been implemented and deployed in customers' environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of motif discovery algorithms is to efficiently find unknown recurring patterns. In this paper, we focus on motif discovery in time series. Most available algorithms cannot utilize domain knowledge in any way which results in quadratic or at least super-linear time and space complexity. In this paper we define the Constrained Motif Discovery problem which enables utilization of domain knowledge into the motif discovery process. The paper then provides two algorithms called MCFull and MCInc for efficiently solving the constrained motif discovery problem. We also show that most unconstrained motif discovery problems be converted into constrained ones using a change-point detection algorithm. A novel change-point detection algorithm called the Robust Singular Spectrum Transform (RSST) is then introduced and compared to traditional Singular Spectrum Transform using synthetic and real-world data sets. The results show that RSST achieves higher specificity and is more adequate for finding constraints to convert unconstrained motif discovery problems to constrained ones that can be solved using MC-Full and MCInc. We then compare the combination of RSST and MCFull or MCInc with two state-of-the-art motif discovery algorithms on a large set of synthetic time series. The results show that the proposed algorithms provided four to ten folds increase in speed compared the unconstrained motif discovery algorithms studied without any loss of accuracy. RSST+MCFull is then used in a real world human-robot interaction experiment to enable the robot to learn free hand gestures, actions, and their associations by watching humans and other robots interacting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed an approach to implementing a system for managing situated knowledge for complex instruments. Our aim is to develop a system that guides a user through the steps for operating complex scientific instruments. A user manual is often inadequate support for a community of users, so direct communication with an expert is often required. One reason for this is that not all of the author’s expert knowledge was included in the manual, thus limiting the contents to explicit knowledge. This is a main concern of modern knowledge management practitioners who are attempting to design systems that consider both explicit and tacit knowledge. The key is to distribute explicit knowledge through interaction with the real world so that users can develop tacit knowledge as well as acquire explicit knowledge. We describe technical difficulties related to referencing the real world, which is required for interaction, and describe a novel approach to building a low-cost three-dimensional pointer for obtaining the required knowledge, which constitutes our preliminary result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of social robots in achieving natural coexistence with humans depends on both their level of autonomy and their interactive abilities. Although a lot of robotic architectures have been suggested and many researchers have focused on human–robot interaction, a robotic architecture that can effectively combine interactivity and autonomy is still unavailable. This paper contributes to the research efforts toward this architecture in the following ways. First a theoretical analysis is provided that leads to the notion of co-evolution between the agent and its environment and with other agents as the condition needed to combine both autonomy and interactivity. The analysis also shows that the basic competencies needed to achieve the required level of autonomy and the envisioned level of interactivity are similar but not the same. Secondly nine specific requirements are then formalized that should be achieved by the architecture. Thirdly a robotic architecture that tries to achieve those requirements by utilizing two main theoretical hypothesis and several insights from social science, developmental psychology and neuroscience is detailed. Lastly two experiments with a humanoid robot and a simulated agent are reported to show the potential of the proposed architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of a human’s intended behavior is one of the most important skills that a social robot should have in order to become acceptable as a part of human society, because humans are used to understand the actions of other humans in a goal-directed manner and they will expect the social robot to behave similarly. A breakthrough in this area can advance several research branches related to social intelligence such as learning by imitation and mutual adaptation. To achieve this goal the robot needs to integrate all possible evidence of intention and neglect the unintended behavior, and a complete solution should use low-level signal processing and high-level reasoning. This work explores the low-level signal processing part of the solution by proposing an interactive adaptive perception scheme that uses four important features of human behavior to amplify the signals originating from intended behavior with respect to signals originating from unintended behavior and other noise sources such as instrumental noise. This work follows the vision that intelligence is not only a function of a centralized sophisticated artificial brain, but can be presented in different forms in the entire robot including its perception and motion systems (the mind is not contained in the brain, but distributed in every cell in the body). A simple example of using the proposed scheme was implemented and the results of two experiments with it are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by O. Katai and colleagues on social intelligence design of social acts and communication and another by X. Pan and colleagues on the simulation of human and social behavior during emergency evacuation of buildings.

In the near future, our life will normally be surrounded with fairly complicated artifacts, enabled by the autonomous robot and brain–machine interface technologies. In this paper, we argue that what we call the responsibility flaw problem and the inappropriate use problem need to be overcome in order for us to benefit from complicated artifacts. In order to solve these problems, we propose an approach to endowing artifacts with an ability of socially communicating with other agents based on the artifact-as-a-half-mirror metaphor. The idea is to have future artifacts behave according to the hybrid intention composed of the owner’s intention and the social rules. We outline the approach and discuss its feasibility together with preliminary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue social intelligence for engineering applications in the Netherlands. Social intelligence involves engineering approaches concerning design and implementation of systems and environments. A workshop focuses on the development of theories to enhance the understanding and conceptualization of human cognition and interpersonal interaction.

In this paper, the authors propose a technique for generating creative conversations between users and multiple agents to support knowledge creation in a community. First, they describe self-expressing alter-ego agents as user proxies. An alter-ego agent accumulates statements that were originated by the user in past conversations as self-expressions and converses with other alter-ego agents by outputting these again in a manner adapted to the circumstances. Next, the authors describe the EgoChat system, which is an environment for conversations between alter-ego agents and users, and a framework for supporting knowledge creation by using EgoChat. Finally, they examine and discuss methods of evaluating this technique based on conversation examples using EgoChat. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 88(11): 56–65, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20201 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes social intelligence design for the web. Integration of human social intelligence into web applications; Evaluation of social intelligence; Collaboration design.

The principle behind anthropomorphic robots is that the appearance and behaviours enable the pre-defined social skills that people use with each other each day to be used as a means of interaction. One of the problems with this approach is that there are many attributes of such a robot which can influence a user's behaviour, potentially causing undesirable effects. This paper aims to identify and discuss a series of the most salient behaviour influencing factors in the literature, related to a number of robot attributes. A particularly novel aspect of this work is the study of robots as monitoring or data collection devices, one of several behaviour influencing factors which has received insufficient attention. As a first step towards this, the PSA matrix is produced, which visualises the relationships between system attributes and user perceptions, grounded in empirical evidence in the literature. This matrix highlights gaps in the literature, brings together a series of salient behaviour influencing factors for the first time and gives a clear view of the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A system for analyzing concerns of people from Weblog articles is proposed. The system called KANSHIN analyzes concerns of people by collecting Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Weblog articles. Users can find concerns of people in each language. Users can also compare differences of concerns between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean language communities. We describe several analysis results: (1) patterns of social concerns, (2) change of focuses on a problem along with the time, (3) differences of concerns on a problem between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Weblog sites, and (4) relation between words in Weblog articles and real world natural phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographs are snapshots of personal memories and image information is an indispensable medium for knowledge dissemination. In recent years, the widespread use of the Web and the rapidly dropping prices of digital cameras have led to the creation of large-scale personal image repositories. As a result, the importance of managing large image collections is constantly increasing. This paper describes Gallery – an experimental system under development. It is intended to support the management of personal image repositories that capture the user's valuable memories. This paper introduces the Gallery system and discusses the results of the two experiments that evaluated its feasibility. The results revealed that placing personal photo collections in a semantically meaningful layout on a zoomable surface considerably improved the efficiency of image information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed a broadcasting agent system, public opinion channel (POC) caster, which generates understandable conversational form from text-based documents. The POC caster circulates the opinions of community members by using conversational form in a broadcasting system on the Internet. We evaluated its transformation rules in two experiments. In experiment 1, we examined our transformation rules for conversational form in relation to sentence length. Twenty-four participants listened to two types of sentence (long sentences and short sentences) with conversational form or with single speech. In experiment 2, we investigated the relationship between conversational form and the user’s knowledge level. Forty-two participants (21 with a high knowledge level and 21 with a low knowledge level) were selected for a knowledge task and listened to two kinds of sentence (sentences about a well-known topic or sentences about an unfamiliar topic). Our results indicate that the conversational form aided comprehension, especially for long sentences and when users had little knowledge about the topic. We explore possible explanations and implications of these results with regard to human cognition and text comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss methods for creating avatars that use “knowledge cards,” which are used in the EgoChat system. These avatars are agents acting in place of their creators, capable of holding conversations with other users. In the method we propose, the avatar's conversational content is structured in the form of what we call knowledge cards, which are semantically tagged text fragments; by handling both avatar statements and user statements as knowledge cards that can be handled in the same way, the person behind an avatar can easily predict the content of a conversation conducted between another user and the agent, also simplifying the task of producing content for conversational production. This is because a conversation in the form of knowledge cards is essentially a matter of combining existing text fragments. In order for a conversational agent to be used in real life, it would need to be continuously updated in its conversational content, in response to the reactions of other users, changing circumstances, and so on. The system we propose maintains a log of conversations the avatar holds with users, assisting in the task of updating the conversational contents. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 88(1): 32–39, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.20144 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by T. Shiose and colleagues on inclusive communication design, one by Osamu Katai on coexistential communication and one by Pavan Dadlani on Aurama system for elderly care.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on papers showed at the sixth Social Intelligence Design Workshop and another on efficiency-oriented applications related with interface technology and computer science.

This paper shows a novel eye gaze tracking (EGT) technique using thecorneal imaging technique. Compared to the existing pupil center and pupil reflection techniques, our approach directly finds PoG in the reflected scene image at the human corneal surface. As a result, it does not suffer from the parallax issue and does not require per-setup system calibrations. To achieve this system, we develop following techniques: First, we use the idea of the gaze-reflection point (GRP), where light from the PoG in the scene reflects at the corneal surface into an eye image. Second, illuminating the whole scene or particular objects using coded structured light enables robust and accurate matching at the GRP to obtain the PoG in a scene image. For this purpose, we show two implementations: a special high-power IR LED-array projector and active LED markers. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves considerable accuracy and successfully supports depth-varying environments as well as practical applications including observation in a conversation scene. We believe the proposed EGT technique has considerably large potential to solve major issues of current EGT systems, expands the application fields of the EGT and increases the usability of interactive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the problem of human-computer interactions when the computer can interpret and express a kind of human-like behavior, offering natural communication. A conceptual framework for incorporating emotions with rationality is proposed. A model of affective social interactions is described. The model utilizes the SAIBA framework, which distinguishes among several stages of processing of information. The SAIBA framework is extended, and a model is realized in human behavior detection, human behavior interpretation, intention planning, attention tracking behavior planning, and behavior realization components. Two models of incorporating emotions with rationality into a virtual artifact are presented. The first one uses an implicit implementation of emotions. The second one has an explicit realization of a three-layered model of emotions, which is highly interconnected with other components of the system. Details of the model with implicit implementation of emotional behavior are shown as well as evaluation methodology and results. Discussions about the extended model of an agent are given in the final part of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports our research aiming at utilization of human interactive communication modeling principles in application to a novel interaction paradigm designed for brain-computer/machine-interfacing (BCI/BMI) technologies as well as for socially aware intelligent environments or communication support systems. Automatic procedures for human affective responses or emotional states estimation are still a hot topic of contemporary research. We propose to utilize human brain and bodily physiological responses for affective/emotional as well as communicative interactivity estimation, which potentially could be used in the future for human-machine/environment interaction design. As a test platform for such an intelligent human-machine communication application, an emotional stimuli paradigm was chosen to evaluate brain responses to various affective stimuli in an emotional empathy mode. Videos with moving faces expressing various emotional displays as well as speech stimuli with similarly emotionally articulated sentences are presented to the subjects in order to further analyze different affective responses. From information processing point of view, several challenges with multimodal signal conditioning and stimuli dynamic response extraction in time frequency domain are addressed. Emotions play an important role in human daily life and human-to-human communication. This is why involvement of affective stimuli principles to human-machine communication or machine-mediated communication with utilization of multichannel neurophysiological and periphery physiological signals monitoring techniques, allowing real-time subjective brain responses evaluation, is discussed. We present our preliminary results and discuss potential applications of brain/body affective responses estimation for future interactive/smart environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a robot to cohabit with people, it should be able to learn people's nonverbal social behavior from experience. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning method for recognizing gestures used in interaction and communication. Our method enables robots to learn gestures incrementally during human-robot interaction in an unsupervised manner. It allows the user to leave the number and types of gestures undefined prior to the learning. The proposed method (HB-SOINN) is based on a self-organizing incremental neural network and the hidden Markov model. We have added an interactive learning mechanism to HB-SOINN to prevent a single cluster from running into a failure as a result of polysemy of being assigned more than one meaning. For example, a sentence: ''Keep on going left slowly'' has three meanings such as, ''Keep on (1)'', ''going left (2)'', ''slowly (3)''. We experimentally tested the clustering performance of the proposed method against data obtained from measuring gestures using a motion capture device. The results show that the classification performance of HB-SOINN exceeds that of conventional clustering approaches. In addition, we have found that the interactive learning function improves the learning performance of HB-SOINN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present a parameterized model for generating multimodal behavior based on cultural heuristics. To this end, a multimodal corpus analysis of human interactions in two cultures serves as the empirical basis for the modeling endeavor. Integrating the results from this empirical study with a well-established theory of cultural dimensions, it becomes feasible to generate culture-specific multimodal behavior in embodied agents by giving evidence for the cultural background of the agent. Two sample applications are presented that make use of the model and are designed to be applied in the area of coaching intercultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are computer-generated, human-like characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. ECA is a powerful tool for representing cultural differences and is suitable for interactive training or edutainment systems. This article presents preliminary results from the development of a culture-adaptive virtual tour guide agent for serving Japanese, Croatian, and general Western users by displaying appropriate verbal and non-verbal behaviors. It is being implemented in Generic ECA Framework, a modular framework for developing ECAs. Dividing the ECA functions into reusable and loosely coupled modules minimizes the effort required to implement additional behavior and facilitates incremental scale up of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robot that is easy to teach not only has to be able to adapt to humans but also has to be easily adaptable to. In order to develop a robot with mutual adaptation ability, we believe that it will be beneficial to first observe the mutual adaptation behaviors that occur in human–human communication. In this paper, we propose a human–human WOZ (Wizard-of-Oz) experiment setting that can help us to observe and understand how the mutual adaptation procedure occurs between human beings in nonverbal communication. By analyzing the experimental results, we obtained three important findings: alignment-based action, symbol-emergent learning, and environmental learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key issue in social intelligence design is the realization of artifacts that can fluently communicate with people. Thus, we proposed a two-layered approach to enhance a robot’s capacity of involvement and engagement. The upper layer flexibly controls social interaction by dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) representing social interaction patterns. The lower layer improves the robustness of the system by detecting rhythmic and repetitive gestures. We designed a listener robot that can follow and record humans’ explanation on how to assemble and/or disassemble a bicycle. The implementation of this system is described by assembling the key algorithms presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘2chantier’ is the most popular online-community site in Japan, where millions of people are discussing or chitchatting about various topics. The communication in 2channel shows dynamic social phenomena such as positive/ negative communication, polarization of opinions, slander called flaming, etc. in this paper, we assume the existence of underlying prevailing structures that motivate people's participation. The structural equation model of 2channel. which is obtained on the basis of observed collective actions about people's thought, emotions and motivations, shows the uniformity and regularities in complex human communication in 2channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which proposed an architecture for a cognitive robot based on tactile and visual information. Overview of the cognitive robot architecture; Results; Discussion and conclusion.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including viable models of cultural aspects of interaction, cultural variability in learning, and multimodal culture-specific human interaction.