Hiroshi Hosobe

Hosei University · Department of Digital Media Science

Although various aspects of soft-constraint based norms have been explored, it is still challenging to understand preemption. Preemption is a situation where higher-level norms override lower-level norms when new information emerges. To address this, we propose a derivation state argumentation framework (DSA-framework). DSA-framework incorporates d...

To exhaustively understand the impact of rule amendments and unforeseen cases on existing norms, it requires connecting their rule-based and case-based representations. However, those connections have not been explored in depth, especially for norms that are represented as soft constraints. This paper aims to explore the connection between constrai...

People are increasingly becoming interested in nail art, and many of them have treatments in nail salons. Nail technicians decide nail art designs according to their understandings of their clients’ requests. The results of nail art depend on the preceding consultations. However, there are problems with such consultations: some clients cannot appro...

Direct kanji input is a Japanese text input method that is totally different from kana-kanji conversion commonly used in Japan. Direct kanji input is said to enable the user to efficiently input kanji characters after mastering it. In this paper, we propose a bimanual flick-based Japanese software keyboard for a tablet that uses direct kanji input....

Physiological biometric authentication methods such as fingerprint, face, vein, and iris authentication have become or are becoming popular. Although these methods are highly accurate, they still have the problem of poor authentication due to noise and other disturbance in recognition. To alleviate this problem, behavioral biometric authentication...

Voice adaptation is an interactive speech processing technique that allows the speaker to transmit with a chosen target voice. We propose a novel method that is intended for dynamic scenarios, such as online video games, where the source speaker’s and target speaker’s data are nonaligned. This would yield massive improvements to immersion and exper...

In the education of introductory programming, people often adopt block-based visual programming languages such as Scratch and Blockly that allow programmers to construct programs by placing visual blocks. A previous study showed that a block-based language was more effective than a text-based language in introductory programming education. However,...

Hybrid systems are dynamical systems with continuous evolution of states and discrete evolution of states and governing equations. We have worked on the design and implementation of HydLa, a constraint-based modeling language for hybrid systems, with a view to the proper handling of uncertainties and the integration of simulation and verification....

In this work a default revision mechanism is introduced into speculative computation to manage incomplete information. The default revision is supported by a method for the generation of default constraints based on Bayesian networks. The method enables the generation of an initial set of defaults which is used to produce the most likely scenarios...

We propose a hand gesture-based spatial interaction method for biometric authentication. It supports 3D gestures that allow the user to move his/her hand without touching an input device. Using the motions of fingertips and joints as biometric data, the method improves the accuracy of authentication. We present the results of experiments, where sub...

One of the main challenges in distributed clinical decision support systems is to ensure that the flow of information is kept. The failure of one or more components should not bring down an entire system. Moreover, it should not impair any decision processes that are taking place in a functioning component. This work describes a decision module tha...

We propose an action-decision method for autonomous mobile robots, in which a robot constructs a logical representation of a map of its surrounding environment from its perception and uses that map to determine a plan to logically reach its destination. We conducted an experiment in which a robot had a sub-goal to reach halfway to its destination a...

To construct interactive graphics such as graphical user interfaces and interactive webpages is an important matter in computer programming. For this purpose, imperative programming usually has been used. On the other hand, researchers have been attempting to apply constraint programming to interactive graphics. Furthermore, the paradigm of constra...

Constraints that express relationships among objects are used to model and solve various problems arising from fields such as artificial intelligence, software, and computer graphics. Soft constraints are often important for applications that involve complex relationships among objects. This paper proposes a new method for solving soft constraints....

Visual block-based programming is useful for various users such as novice programmers because it provides easy operations and improves the readability of programs. Also, in programming education, it is known to be effective to initially present basic language features and then gradually make more advanced features available. However, the cost of im...

The use of motion sensing for input devices is becoming increasingly popular. In particular, hands-free gesture input is promising for such devices. We propose a mouse-like hands-free gesture technique for two-dimensional pointing. It is characterized as follows: (1) a user horizontally moves his/her hand to position a cursor shown on a vertical sc...

The paper tackles the problems of the 'giant hairballs', the dense and tangled structures often resulting from visualization of large social graphs. Proposed is a high-dimensional rotation technique called AGI3D, combined with an ability to filter elements based on social centrality values. AGI3D is targeted for a high-dimensional embedding of a so...

We propose a logic-based mechanism for robot action decisions that is robust over the environmental noise of the real world and has a formal way to reason the possibility of achieving the robot's goal. Our experimental demos show that a robot can eventually reach its destination even if its actions are not that accurate. Copyright © 2014, Internati...

In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated with sensing' and `dynamically change their plans when necessary'. We propose the use of a new concept, enabling...

We describe a tool to analyze unlinked documents by visualizing networks extracted using textual analysis. Our focus is on developing an interactive visual analytics tool that enables a user to interactively observe data to detect features of the documents that may be known or unknown in advance. We have tested our tool using two data sets, one con...

We present an interactive tool for the exploratory analysis of a long-term video from a stationary camera. The tool consists of three key methods: spatial change visualization, temporal change visualization, and similarity-based video retrieval. The first two methods provide the summarization of the long-term video that lets the user know where and...

Speculative Computation is an effective means for solving problems with incomplete information in an open and distributed environment, such as peer-to-peer environment. It allows such a system to compute tentative (and possibly final) solutions using default knowledge about the current environment, or the agent’s perception, even if the communicati...

The problem of staging data in workflows has received much attention over the last decade, with a variety of user-directed and automatic solutions. The latter are the focus of the first contribution in this paper, where we propose a simple peer-to-peer solution adapted to the needs of RESTful services. The second contribution, is the combination of...

We present a numerical optimization-based method for visualizing undirected graphs. Our method is a variant of force-directed graph drawing, and has sufficient generality to adopt different basic force models including those for the Kamada-Kawai and Fruchterman-Reingold methods. To achieve efficiency, we use the L-BFGS method for numerical optimiza...

We propose a scalable algorithm called HiRise2 for incrementally solving soft linear constraints over real domains. It is based on a framework for soft constraints, known as constraint hierarchies, to allow effective modeling of user interface applications by using hierarchical preferences for constraints. HiRise2 introduces LU decompositions to im...

This paper presents a bounded model checking tool called $${\texttt{Hydlogic}}$$ for hybrid systems. It translates a reachability problem of a nonlinear hybrid system into a predicate logic formula involving arithmetic constraints and checks the satisfiability of the formula based on a satisfiability modulo theories method. We tightly integrate (i)...

Hybrid systems are dynamical systems with continuous changes of states and discrete changes of states and governing equations. HydLa is a constraint-based modeling language for hybrid systems, and its implementation aims for system verification by means of simulation with guaranteed accuracy. However, how to simulate HydLa programs with initial val...

Hybrid systems are dynamical systems with continuous evolution of states and discrete evolution of states and governing equations. We have worked on the design and implementation of HydLa, a constraint-based modeling language for hybrid systems, with a view to the proper handling of uncertanties and the integration of simulation and verification. H...

Coupling constraints and ordinary differential equations has numerous applications. This paper shows how to introduce constraints involving ordinary differential equations into the numerical constraint satisfaction problem framework in a natural and efficient way. Slightly adapted standard filtering algorithms proposed in the numerical constraint s...

Answer sharing is a key element in multi-agent systems as it allows agents to collaborate towards achieving a global goal. However exogenous knowledge of the world can influence each agent’s local computation, and communication channels may introduce delays, creating multiple partial answers at different times. Agent’s answers may, therefore, be in...

Hybrid cc is a constraint-based programming language aimed for simple modeling and rigorous simulation of hybrid systems. The existing implementation of Hybrid cc uses intervals to handle partially specified models. Although the implementation solves nonlinear equations and ordinary differential equations (ODEs) based on interval arithmetic, discre...

Speculative computation is an effective means for solving problems with incomplete information in multi-agent systems. It allows such a system to compute tentative solutions by using default knowledge about agents even if communications between agents are delayed or fail. Previously we have proposed a logical framework for speculative constraint pr...

Coupling constraints and ordinary differential equations has numerous applications. This paper shows how to introduce constraints involving ordinary differential equations into the numerical constraint satisfaction problem framework in a natural and efficient way. Slightly adapted standard filtering algorithms proposed in the numerical constraint s...

Constraints provide an effective means for the high-level modeling and reasoning of various problems. In particular, soft constraints are useful since they treat over-constrained problems that naturally arise in real-life applications. Therefore, researchers have been exploring frameworks for soft constraints. The framework of semiring-based constr...

An approach to reliable modeling, simulation and verification of hybrid systems is interval arithmetic, which guarantees that a set of intervals narrower than specified size encloses the solution. Interval-based computation of hybrid systems is often difficult, especially when the systems are described by nonlinear ordinary differential equations (...

Speculative computation has been proposed for reasoning with incomplete information in multi-agent systems. This paper presents the first multi-threaded implementation for speculative constraint processing with iterative revision for disjunctive answers in master-slave multi-agent systems.

We present several innovative interaction techniques for 3D target acquisition and indication. These techniques make use of the shape of our cylindrical multi-touch interface, which we are developing as an interface for a volumetric display. Our interaction techniques are used to control a spherical cursor in 3D space. Notably, our techniques use a...

We propose a framework called HydLa for simple modeling and reliable simulation of hybrid systems which involve discrete and continuous changes over time. HydLa employs interval constraints as a central principle to express uncertainties in modeling, error bounds in the computation of nonlinear continuous changes, and reachable state sets that play...

Real-world information can often be expressed as a graph that consists of nodes and edges. Graphs are often effectively represented in a visual manner. To make visual representations of graphs easily available, researchers have proposed numerous techniques for automatic visualization of graphs [1]. An important class of graphs is the general undir...

We propose an approach that uses preferences on the constraints in order to deal with over-constrained geometric constraint problems. This approach employs constraint hierarchies, a paradigm that has close relations with the traditional graph-based approaches used in geometric constraint solving. We also remark that any geometric constraint problem...

Nous proposons une approche utilisant des préférences afin de gérer les problèmes géométriques sur-contraints. Cette approche s'appuie sur le paradigme des hiérarchies de contraintes dont les méthodes de résolution utilisent des algorithmes de graphes proches de ceux employés en résolution de contraintes géométriques. Elle nous semble très bien ada...

In this paper, we extend our framework of speculative computation in multi-agent systems by introducing default constraints. In research on multi-agent systems, handling incomplete information due to communication failure or due to other agents' delay in communication is a very important issue. For a solution to this problem, we previously proposed...

Graph drawing is an information visualization technology for illustrating relations between objects. Interactive graph drawing is often important since it is difficult to statically lay out complex graphs. For the interactive drawing of general undirected graphs, we have proposed the high-dimensional approach, which uses static graph layouts in hig...

This article presents an extension of the Through-the-Lens Camera Control approach proposed by Gleicher and Witkin. It first provides a higher means of control on the camera by using virtual composition primitives and second offers a means for through-the-lens interaction with both the location of the objects in the scene and the lighting. By setti...

In multi-agents systems, incompleteness, due to either communication failure or response delay, is a major problem to handle. To face incompleteness, frameworks for speculative computation were proposed (see references [5, 6, 7]). The idea developed in such frameworks is to allow the asking agent, while waiting for the slave agents to reply, to rea...

Constraint programming is an emergent technology that allows modeling and solving various problems in many areas such as artificial intelligence, computer programming, computer-aided design, computer graphics, and user interfaces. In this report, we provide recent activities of research collaboration on constraint programming conducted by the autho...

The development of information systems such as Web browsers based on open standards is becoming more and more important. To clearly formalize and appropriately implement document layout methods for Web browsers, researchers have proposed an approach that uses constraint programming and solving. However, it is still difficult for existing standard c...

Graph drawing is an information visualization tech- nology for illustrating relations between objects. In- teractive graph drawing is often important since it is dicult to statically lay out complex graphs. For the interactive drawing of general undirected graphs, we previously proposed the high-dimensional approach, which used static graph layouts...

Constraint programming is a method of problem solving that allows declarative specification of relations among objects. It is important to allow preferences of constraints since it is often difficult for programmers to specify all constraints without conflicts. In this paper, we propose a numerical method for solving nonlinear constraints with hier...

Graph layout is an information visualization technology for illustrating relations between objects. Interactive graph layout is often important since it is difficult to statically lay out complex graphs such as general undirected graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to interactive layout of general undirected graphs. The basic idea of...

In this paper, we extend our framework of speculative computation in multi-agent systems by using default constraints. In research on multi-agent systems, handling incomplete information due to communication failure or due to other agents’ delay in communication, is a very important issue. For a solution to this problem, we previously proposed spec...

Constraint hierarchies provide a framework for soft constraints, and have been applied to areas such as artificial intelligence, logic programming, and user interfaces. In this framework, constraints are associated with hierarchical preferences or priorities called strengths, and may be relaxed if they conflict with stronger constraints. To utilize...

Recent computer technologies have enabled fast high-quality 3D graphics on personal computers, and also have made the development of 3D graphical applications easier. However, most of such technologies do not sufficiently support layout and behavior aspects of 3D graphics. Geometric constraints are, in general, a powerful tool for specifying layout...

Constraints have been playing an important role in the user interface field since its infancy. A prime use of constraints in this field is to automatically maintain geometric layouts of graphical objects. To facilitate the construction of constraint-based user interface applications, researchers have proposed various constraint satisfaction methods...

This paper proposes an algorithm for satisfying systems of linear equality and inequality constraints with hierarchical strengths or preferences. Basically, it is a numerical method that incrementally ob- tains the LU decompositions of linear constraint systems. To realize this, it introduces a novel technique for analyzing hierarchical systems of...

TRIP systems are tools for visualization and animation. They are based on a constraint-based model of bi-directional translation between abstract data and pictorial data. Using these systems, programmers can visualize abstract data, and animate various algorithms and processes, simply by providing a declarative mapping rule. This paper presents thi...

Constraints are recognized as powerful tools for various problems such as management of knowledge, logic programming, and construction of graphical user interfaces. Especially, hierarchical constraint systems (HCSs) are promising since they are effective in modeling over-constrained real-world problems. However, there are a small number of practica...

Local propagation is often used in graphical user interfaces to solve constraint systems that describe structures and layouts of figures. However, algorithms based on local propagation cannot solve simultaneous constraint systems because local propagation must solve constraints individually. We propose an efficient algorithm that satisfies systems...

‘Constraint hierarchy’ is a nonmonotonic system that allows programmers to describe over-constrained real-world problems by specifying constraints with hierarchical preferences, and has been applied to various areas. An important aspect of constraint hierarchies is the existence of efficient satisfaction algorithms based on local propagation. Howev...

Constraints have been playing an important role in the user interface field since its infancy. A prime use of constraints in this field is to automatically maintain geometric lay- outs of graphical objects. To facilitate the construction of constraint-based user interface applications, researchers have proposed various constraint satisfaction metho...