Masato Yamanouchi’s research while affiliated with Keio University and other places

This paper introduces the concept of "Social Thing" where things have unique personalities and autonomously build network to cooperate with each other as if they are living entities. In this context, each thing has its goal and different level of smartness. They autonomously cooperate to achieve their goals through inter-thing communication. This paper proposes the concept of Social Things, with the emphasis on IoT application enabler for autonomous cooperation of networked things. In this paper, the system achieves autonomous cooperation of Social Things by providing them with preset conditional statements, combinations of triggers and action, which are triggered based on information transfer via inter-thing communication. On this system, Social Things shall autonomously exchange information about each other and take action by using this information to execute functions. The system has an advantage in which it enables the possibility to code cooperative functions of Social Things with comparative ease. The biggest contribution is achieving cooperation of mascots and a bench as case studies. They represent cooperation among private and public things. We will report implementation details and an experiment to discuss ways to design autonomous things.

This paper provides a design of scalable and simple remote security exercise system and its performances. Serious understaffing problem in security area. Basic security skills are necessary to all people these days. We have two fundamental problems to solve this problem.

A weather station with communication capability allows remote weather monitoring, which observations help us to estimate flooding and to make an alarm for evacuation from potential weather-related disasters. Rainfall often comes with a very local weather phenomenon, and to capture them, we have to deploy many weather stations geographically densely. This paper provides our study on a city-scale weather monitoring system for disaster management applications. We have identified a compact observation scheme for city-scale weather monitoring with campus networks, and developed our weather stations. In this work, we have deployed our weather stations at 18 locations over the city of Hyderabad India, and evaluated the performance of our city-scale weather monitoring system. With our preliminary analysis on the observations of 15th June 2014, we confirmed that our system had detected very heavy, local and short-term rainfall, sudden temperature changes, sudden wind changes, and rapid and very local air pressure changes. These results indicate that we can use this type of city-scale weather monitoring system for capturing the local weather phenomenon and for disaster management applications.

hough there are many examples of attempts to create interactive lighting installations in urban public space, its meaning for urbanites has not been fully explored and defined. What could interactive lighting contribute to urban public space? Using the concept of Third Place, this research focuses on the social potential of urban public space using the concepts of, especially the role of space in connecting people and fostering social capital. Our hypothesis is that interactive urban lighting can assist this role of urban public space. Openlight is a concept of networked interactive lighting that provides urbanites with open access to penetrate psychological barriers between individuals and groups in urban public space. Hence the interaction would provide more possibilities for urbanites becoming more aware of and getting to know each other. For this first attempt, we have created a scaled prototype for a Café/Restaurant setting.

In recent years home gardening is becoming popular in Japan. In contrast to the popularity, the percentage of the beginners who are unsatisfied with growing vegetables is high. There are two reasons for this problem. One is the conditions of individual environment for home gardening are not fulfilled. The other issue is that the beginners do not fully understand how to grow vegetables. As a result, the required environment that enables beginners to better understand the techniques in growing vegetables effectively while finding enjoyment in home gardening sustainably are not existent. While beginners have the option to use the Internet as a resource, they have a burden in trying to internet the information. The most of the information is described in pictures and writing and therefore, it is difficult to share the information about the timing of watering and a user's tending actions for effective fertilization and so on. To solve this problem, we propose a new system for automatic sharing information on movements in growing vegetables to enhance and promote the understanding of growing vegetable for beginners more intuitively. We implement two functions and one application: an automatic function for sharing movies of user's gardening techniques, an automatic function for sharing environmental data, and the web application to provide users accumulated data systematically. The evaluations results of our system indicated a 78% automatic storing of movies for sharing user's gardening movements. The function for automatic sharing environmental data stored complete environmental data stably. The web application provide users accumulated data systematically. By improving accuracy of the function for sharing movies by recording whole gardening action movements, the proposed system enhances automatic sharing information of movements in growing vegetables.

As sensor and wireless network technologies are developed, it is expected that we will be able to gather lots of sensor data from various sensors on globe. Combining/ aggregating these sensor data, many useful applications could be developed. However, it is difficult to aggregate sensor data and secure scalability, because in some case too much sensor data concentrate on some specific nodes. Then, we add data processing components onto content-based networks, considering division and reassign of processing components. Content-based networks provide publish/ subscribe system in distributed environment and appropriate for notifications and alerts. If content-based networks process published data and create meaningful information, this system enhance the application fields in ubiquitous sensing environment. In this paper, we model sensor data calculation process and describe how to add data processing components onto content-based networks. On the contrary, data processing components causes concentrations of sensor data. We also describe load distribution mechanism of these components. Performance evaluations of our implementation shows that load distribution mechanism works well, and proposed system secure the scalability by adding data components.

In recent years, everybody can get many kinds of real-time digital information easily, especially by using API as an infrastructure system which provides information data sets via the Internet. This system has changed a style of spreading information on the Internet. In a case of web developers, they utilize the real-time data sets which are created per time set by providers to create the web applications. These applications provide real-time information for the users then the users can get real-time information from them simply. However, there is a problem. This situation means many web applications using same source leads the situation which the users have to see same information often. Spreading same information leads too much information which the users cannot find out the information they need. To solve these problems, we propose a framework using the method of information visualization. This framework has two functions also has a purpose to make an environment to create information visualized web applications easily. One of them is to extract only important information from the large amount of information for understanding its essence of meaning well. The other is to generate values for visual effects like size and color which could be used for user interface to encourage the users to understand information's essence quickly. Both function are processed in a data base. The data base provides data sets including important information and visual values as XML data format to web developers. Therefore, they only focus on how express information on the user interface. As a result, the users can get only meaningful information with visual effects. To evaluate this framework's validity, we count how many processes are needed to make an information visualized web application with a ordinal way and the other way used our proposed framework's data sets. This result count shows that the proposed framework has more success over the ordinal method.

This research develops an Autonomous Distributed and Cooperative disaster information system based on the Internet technologies which distribute sensor information such as meteorological information. It is essential that disaster prevention systems collect and classify information or deliver to local residents rapidly. However, there are some problems with information sharing among some agencies because these systems have been constructed independently and lack uniformity and scalability. It is difficult to construct the systems which can share information in common for the initial cost and government's administrative structure. These problems cause delays in information distribution. We develop a common infrastructure which can ensure uniformity, scalability and low-cost construction within a jurisdiction. It enables every agency to use all kinds of disaster information in common and has scalability corresponding to the changing information or media with an aim of rapid distribution.