Panel: Towards Informatics Education and Research for Knowledge-Circulating Society
Katsumi Tanaka, Yoshimasa Nakamura, Toru Ishida, and Toyoaki Nishida
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University {ktanaka,ynaka,ishida,nishida}@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Abstract
Important aspects of information technology for promoting the circulation of knowledge include human interfaces to communicate knowledge, knowledge searches, collaboration based on knowledge sharing in fieldwork, and reliable high-speed computing infrastructures. In this panel, four panelists presented the aim and goal of the research conducted under our Kyoto University Global COE program, and overviews of the activities of the four (education and research) cores: "primordial knowledge models", "knowledge searches", "field informatics" and "knowledge grid computing" based on interdisciplinary research.
1. Overview of the Panel
The MEXT Global COE (Center of Excellence) program on Informatics Education and Research Center for Knowledge-Circulating Society, a five-year program from June 2007, started at the Graduate School of Informatics and Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies of Kyoto University. The objective of the Global COE (GCOE) program is to form an international education and research center that fosters Ph.D students and young researchers in the areas of computer science and information technology through advanced research. The GCOE program aims at establishing an international and interdisciplinary research center focusing on computer science and information technology that organize a knowledge-circulating society to push the frontiers of science.
Information systems as social infrastructures have
been improved along with the development of information technology. However, numerous technological and social problems have begun to surface, including unfamiliar human-computer interfaces (information equipment and robots), the threat of unpredictable behavior based on unreliable knowledge acquired from the Internet, and the fragility of social information systems. These problems can be ascribed to the congestion of knowledge circulated among people, communities, and societies. Knowledge
becomes useful if one person’s knowledge is linked to another’s and circulated throughout society. It is important to pursue not only engineering methodology but also new research methodology to facilitate the smooth circulation of knowledge among societies, communities, organizations, and individuals by organizing inter-disciplinary research teams.
Important aspects of information technology for
promoting the circulation of knowledge include human interfaces to communicate knowledge, knowledge searches, collaboration based on knowledge sharing in fieldwork, and reliable high-speed computing infrastructures. The present Global COE program has therefore established four (education and research) cores: "primordial knowledge models", "knowledge searches", "field informatics" and "knowledge grid computing" based on interdisciplinary research.
The primordial knowledge model core focuses on the
fundamental mechanism underlying knowledge in co-action. In order to develop better human interfaces for knowledge communication, it integrates multi-modal, brain and biological measurements to uncover how knowledge and communication induce each other. The knowledge search core focuses on new search-engine technologies to enable reliable knowledge to be searched from a variety of information sources, and on social systems and business models related to searching. The field informatics core focuses on the methodology to constructing social information systems based on collaboration with field experts. The knowledge grid computing core focuses on the construction of reliable high-speed knowledge-service infrastructures to support the previous three cores. The four cores enable cooperation between them to form the world's highest level of international education and a research center related to information technology to promote the circulation of knowledge.
2. Primordial Knowledge Model
(Toyoaki Nishida)
International Conference on Informatics Education and Research for Knowledge-Circulating Society
The primordial knowledge model core group addresses the interactive knowledge process, aiming to develop a theory and technology for understanding and augmenting the mechanism of knowledge creation, transfer and application in a situated and embodied fashion through computer-mediated human-human communication.
We shed light on the tacit dimension of knowledge
[1], for a significant portion of human-human communication is considered to be covered by tacitness and our knowledge circulation system should be able to cope with this aspect in order to be effectively embedded in the human society.
Tacitness comes into play depending on many
reasons, ranging from extrinsic ones merely resulting from the lack of the opportunities of externalization to intrinsic ones resulting from essential difficulty of externalizing the information. Although the former can be dealt with by existing technologies such as ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence, the latter is really challenging to the current technology, for it appears to result from a mechanism closely related to our sensation, embodiment, emotion, consciousness, and such, for which further scientific research is needed to provide computational accounts.
In the primordial knowledge model core group, we
look at nonverbal interactions such as synchrony or semantic gesture that are considered to manifest as a result of fundamental communicative functions played by people. In order to address tacitness from this perspective, we aim to develop techniques for measuring, analyzing, and modeling multimodal interactions. Building communicative robots will not only help us understand the problem based on analysis-by-synthesis, but also build artificial systems that can actively sense and mediate tacit knowledge.
We also look at biological mechanisms such as that
of sensation that are considered to be innate to people. Analysis of the sensory system at the physiological level is expected to bring about understanding of the tacitness based on materials.
Primordial knowledge refers to a basic form of
intelligence that we believe underlies our intellectual and communicative ability to cope with the tacit dimension of knowledge. We aim at building a computational model to understand primordial knowledge and incorporate the insights in artificial systems.
Towards this end, we attempt at integrating the following approaches. 1. Developing a technology for computational
auditory scene analysis that allows robots to hear like humans. The initial result in this direction is reported in [2].
2. Developing a technology for capturing human behavior using computer vision. The initial result in this direction is reported in [3].
3. Developing a technology for creating, transferring, and applying situated knowledge content by building communicative artifacts that can participate in multimodal interactions. The initial result in this direction is reported in [4].
4. Developing a theory that can account for the biological mechanism of sensation. The initial result in this direction is reported in [5].
An ultimate goal of this research is to create a
communicative robot that can build a perceptual image like humans to be able to reason about the situation encompassing itself, communication partners, and the environment to behave deliberately by actuating the motor system (see Fig.1).
Fig. 1: A communication robot that can
communicate with people based on a simulated image of the situation.
Such a robot will bring about several merits. First, it
will be able to get deeply involved in empathetic interaction with people not only by simulating the mental state of the partners but also by allowing her/him to look at it as an intentional communication partner. It makes a sharp contrast with a simpler communication robot that merely responds to incoming stimulus, for the latter will not be able to permit the user to sustain an illusion of the robot as a communication partner as soon as s/he becomes suspicious about the internal mental model of the robot. Second, it will permit us to understand the tacit dimension more clearly than before, for the internal mental process can now be described in computational terms so we can investigate every details of the model
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as well as simulate it to see what happens. This aspect may also be beneficial in the education, for it allows people to visualize what might be happening beneath the surface of communication. Third, it will serve as a basis for developing a far more intelligent communicative agent that can evolve by accumulating both explicit and tacit knowledge to thrust knowledge circulation in a society. 3. Field Informatics (Toru Ishida)
Field here is defined as “a spatio-temporal area that is hard to govern with any analytical and/or engineering approach due to unexpected happenings or accidental events generated by the coexistence of various individuals and entities; this necessitates our continuing commitment and caring (Osamu Katai).”
Field informatics is a new research area that has four stages: description of micro behavior in the field, prediction of macro behavior of the field, design of interaction in the field, and transfer of experiences among the fields. In the four stages, information technology is applied or created.
Field informatics core aims to establish methodologies of field informatics. To this end, we collaborate with and support various field oriented projects as pilot projects to gather actual research experience. In parallel, we select and apply existing field oriented methodologies to the pilot projects to understand their strength and weakness, and gradually shape the new methodologies of field informatics. The outcome of this core will be a textbook, and a series of open seminars, to help students, researchers and social workers obtain both an abstract and practical understanding of field informatics.
Field oriented projects currently being supported are as follows; members of the field informatics core are playing important roles. 1. Preservation of endangered aquatic species:
Obtain ecological information of endangered aquatic species, which inhabit extreme environments and that cannot be observed directly.
2. Business model creation for intermediate and mountainous regions: Such regions occupy 69% of the area of Japan, 42% of cultivated area, and provide 38% of the income from agricultural production. To prevent these areas from sliding into ruin, new business models must be created.
3. Large scale traffic simulation: The economic loss due to congestion is 12 trillion yen a year in
Japan. Traffic congestion and air pollution will be overcome by reexamining the urban structure. Compact cities must be designed.
4. Inclusive design workshop: Aged and disabled people with special needs participate in the entire design processes. Their various preferences are respected by all design partners.
5. Workshops of participatory production: Create community businesses through participatory production with collaboration among end users and industrial accumulation [6].
6. Intercultural collaboration: Support intercultural collaboration activities by developing the new multilingual infrastructure called the Language Grid [7].
7. Multilingual distance learning: Promote international distance learning among Asia-Pacific countries.
Field oriented methodologies we have started with
are as follows (see Fig.2). 1. Description stage: Biotelemetry and bio-logging
for natural fields [8], and ethnography as well as statistical analyses for social fields.
2. Prediction stage: Participatory modeling of agents and interactions for multi-agent simulation in natural and social environments.
3. Design stage: Participatory design methods, including inclusive design for users having special needs [9].
4. Transfer stage: Case writing and scenario study in contrast to academic papers in science and technology.
Fig. 2: Four stages in field informatics.
We plan to publish a textbook in two years and will
run open seminars in universities and also in various fields. The core is unique because there has never been a strong sense of fields in the computer science discipline. Research activity in the field informatics core is always undertaken through field workers.
Collaboration with the knowledge search core will create digital ethnography, which applies multimedia search technology to field data. The knowledge grid computing core will realize a large scale multi-agent
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simulation with a million agents. The primordial knowledge model core will provide new description technology for interaction among fields, and contribute to modeling the agents acting in the fields.
4. Knowledge Search (Katsumi Tanaka)
Increased usage of Web search engines in our daily lives means that the trustworthiness of searched results has become crucial. The aim of the knowledge search core group is to establish trust-oriented cross-media search technologies with particular emphasis on the credibility analysis of information and their business model. Toward the goal, we conduct the following 5 major research issues: (1) Knowledge extraction from Web search engine
indices and social annotation information for evaluating and re-ranking search results.
(2) NLP (Natural language Processing)-based search and credibility-analysis engines.
(3) Searching and evaluating XML-based contents. (4) Multimedia search technologies for archiving,
indexing and searching contents with video and speech recognition technology.
(5) Information literacy survey and exploration of business models of trust-oriented search technologies.
(1) is the research of mechanisms helping users
determine the trustworthiness of Web search results (see Fig.3) [10]. We have proposed extraction of Web knowledge from Web search engine. Extracted Web knowledge is useful not only for evaluation (quality, trustworthiness etc.) of search results, but also for improving conventional Web search, such as supporting user's recall of vocabulary (query keywords) and re-ranking of search results. Their knowledge extraction mechanism is based on the ideas of the usage of the structural term co-occurrence relationships and aggregating social annotation information, which are obtained by accessing to conventional Web search engines.
(2) aims at developing an open search engine
infrastructure called TSUBAKI and an information credibility analysis system called WISDOM. TSUBAKI crawls a huge number of Japanese Web pages and generates indices based on deep NLP techniques. It accepts a natural language query, and retrieves pages with higher relevance by using its indices. TSUBAKI also offers APIs without any restriction, transparent and reproducible search results, Web standard format for sharing pre-processed Web pages. WISDOM offers functions to analyze credibility
of searched Web pages by analyzing or clustering content itself, reputation contents, information senders, and appearance of searched Web pages [11] (see Fig.4 ).
Fig.3: Trustworthiness evaluation of search results [10]
Query: アガリクス(Agaricus) Analysis selection(Here, informationsender is selected)
List of pages classified as the selected item
Classified items based on
information sender
Fig.4: Information credibility analysis by WISDOM
(3) is to explore technologies for searching and re-
ranking XML data, especially, methods for searching XML sub-documents and their ranking scheme for both of keyword-based and XML structural queries [12]. Also, we started research on analyzing trustworthiness of structured data, especially Wikipedia data. (4) is the research of indexing multimedia e-learning contents [13]. We are developing technologies for extracting & indexing teacher’s pointing and students’ communication behaviors from lectures using video and speech recognition technologies. In (5), we proposed criteria of information literacy: accuracy, access time, and broadness of information space to search towards exploring business model of trust-oriented knowledge search [14].
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Collaboration with the primordial knowledge model
group, the field informatics group, and the knowledge grid computing group will bring technologies for ambient knowledge search such as query intention detection (eye-tracking based interaction, queries with user sentiments etc.), trust-oriented search for field analysis contents (search of multimedia ethnography contents etc.), and search technologies for e-science over knowledge gird.
4. Knowledge Grid Computing
(Yoshimasa Nakamura) One of the major research areas in Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, is computational science. Various components, ranging from algorithms, modeling, software, computer architecture and applications that represent computational science. Historically, computational science has largely been associated with the physical sciences and engineering. However, with the growth of information and data created by people, Web search business, for example, has emerged as a beneficiary of but also dependent on new computational science algorithms, tools, and techniques. Equally important, the social sciences such as computational finance are now major consumers of computing technology, with a set of data-rich problems. Computational science enables us to develop an infrastructure of knowledge-circulating society. Quality of data is most important there. All domains would benefit from improved reliable numerical and non-numerical algorithms, optimization, data mining and agent simulation technologies, and easier-to-use software suites.
Computational science is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses advanced computing capabilities to analyze and solve complex and large scaled problems. PITAC Report [15] in U.S. said: To confront these issues, universities must significantly change their organizational structures to promote and reward collaborative research that invigorates and advances multidisciplinary science. They must also implement new multidisciplinary structures and organizations that provide rigorous, multifaceted educational preparation for the growing ranks of computational scientists the Nation will need to remain at the forefront of scientific discovery.
Fortunately, all of such essential elements are already inherent in Graduate School of Informatics. Our global COE program forms a core named
Knowledge Grid Computing which fuses three distinct elements of computational science:
Algorithms and modeling and simulation
techniques originally developed to solve science and engineering problems
Computer architecture that develops and optimizes the advanced system hardware, software, middleware and networking components needed to solve computationally demanding problems
The high performance computing (HPC) that supports both the science and engineering problems solving and the developmental computer
Although dramatic increases in processor performance are well known, improved algorithms in numerical linear algebra, convex optimization and combinatorial problems have contributed as much to increases in computational simulation capability as have improvements in hardware.
Mathematical and physical modeling is also the skill
sets encompassed by computational science. A reliable simulation will be incarnated by substantial modeling through efficient numerical methods and visualization.
Infrastructure for computational science itself is the
computer architecture such as the middleware and networks over which users access the resources at high-end computer centers or data and software repositories, and collaborate on multidisciplinary projects.
Integrating these areas the high performance
computing such as parallel computing and grid computing with BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram) fills the vital role in Knowledge Grid Computing Core. A new supercomputer of 100-TFlops class of Kyoto University will be available in June 2008 via T2K Open Supercomputer Specifications. In Port Island of Kobe city the next generation supercomputer of 10-PFlops class of Japan will be operated in 2010 for industrial innovation and scientific research. Rich supercomputer resource should make education and research in this global COE program rather active.
The aim of Knowledge Grid Computing Core is twofold as is shown in Fig.5. One is to bridge both in education and research over algorithms, modeling, computer science via the HPC. The scientists are now asked to identify the important computational capabilities needed to achieve their research goals. It
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will take a combination of new theory, new design tools, and high-end computing for large-scale simulation to achieve fundamental understanding of the emergence of new behaviors and processes in e-science.
• Algorithms
modeling
MathematicsComputer Architecture
Simulation
High Performance Computing (HPC)
Data Mining
Search Engine
Agent Simulation
Knowledge-Circulating Society
Optimization
Fig. 5: Aim of Knowledge Grid Computing Core
The second aim is collaboration with the researchers in other three cores. Data search, data mining, agent simulation as well as various optimizations including computational finance will be on the front line of the collaboration. Knowledge Grid Computing Core will serve effective tools of reliable computing infrastructure such as HPC based on algorithms, modeling and computer architecture. Whereas other cores produce explicit problems. In other words this core develops methodologies and other core supply research objects. Therefore knowledge will be circulated sufficiently. References [1] M. Polyani: The Tacit Dimension, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1966. [2] H. G. Okuno, T. Ogata, K. Komatani: Robot
Audition from the Viewpoint of Computational Auditory Scene Analysis, in this volume.
[3] T. Matsuyama, S. Nobuhara, T. Mukasa, A. Miyamoto, K. Fujimoto: 3D Human Sensing, in this volume.
[4] T. Nishida: Conversational Informatics and Human-Centered Web Intelligence, IEEE Intelligent Informatics Bulletin, Vol.8 No.1, pp. 19-28, 2007.
[5] S. Kobayashi: Virtual Reality Produced in the Brain, in this volume.
[6] H. Kita, M. Mori and T. Tsuji: Toward Field Informatics for Participatory Production, in this volume.
[7] T. Ishida: Language Grid: An Infrastructure for Intercultural Collaboration,IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Internet, pp. 96-100, keynote address, 2006.
[8] Y. Naito: New steps in bio-logging science, Mem. Natl Inst. Polar Res., Spec. Issue 58, pp.50-57, 2004.
[9] T. Shiose, K. Toda, H. Kawakami, O. Katai: Inclusive Design Workshop by Regional Cooperation between an NPO and a University. International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, Springer-Verlag LNCS 4568, pp.355-367, 2007.
[10] S. Nakamura, S. Konishi, A. Jatowt, H. Ohshima, H. Kondo, T. Tezuka, S. Oyama, and K.Tanaka: Trustworthiness Analysis of Web Search Results, Proc. ECDL2007, LNCS 4675, pp.38-49, Sept.2007.
[11] H. Miyamori, S. Akamine, Y.Kato, K.Kaneiwa, K. Sumi, K. Inui, and S. Kurohashi: Evaluation Data and Prototype System WISDOM for Information Credibility Analysis, Proc. 1st International Symposium on Universal Communication, 2007.
[12] M. Yoshikawa and T. Shimizu: A New Ranking Scheme and Result Representation for XML Information Retrieval Based on Benefit and Reading Effort, in this volume.
[13] M. Minoh and K. Kakusho: Observing and Modeling Human Activities, in this volume.
[14] Y. Hara: Knowledge Exploratory in the Digitizing and Servicizing Economy, in this volume.
[15] President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC): Computational Science: Ensuring America's Competitiveness, pp.1-104, June 2005.
