Plenary Talks

Abstract: Nowadays, microcomputers and their networking have been progressed and this is changing truly the present life. For example, human of this age can’t do anything without the smart phones, which are consist of the computers and the networks. Further, they, the machines, are embodied, that is, the computers have many sensors and actuators. Moreover, they have their own mobility as the drones, robot cleaners, automated driving cars, and so on. This embodiment leads machines to robots, which are comparable existence of human beings. Now, there are two intelligence, Human and Machine. In some areas, machine is superior than human and human is substituted by machine as the words of RPA (Robot Process Automation), DX (Digital Transformation). It is a big problem for human that the relation between two intelligence.

This talk is based on one of the possibilities, that is a collaboration of two. To do this, machine should know human and human should know machine. And it is inevitable to communicate each other. The university of Elector-Communications proposed in ten years ago an Integrated Communication Science, which includes communication between human and machine. Moreover, Japanese Government now progress the Society 5.0, which follows the Society 4.0 as the Information Society, Society 3.0 as the Industrial Society, and so on. This talk will present a concept of Society 5.0 and activities for the Society along the words of CPS (Cyber Physical System), IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artifice Intelligence), and so on.

Abstract: AI as a concept has been around since the 1950’s. With the recent advancements in machine learning algorithms, and the availability of big data and large computing resources, the scene is set for AI to be used in many more systems and applications which will profoundly impact society. The current deep learning based AI systems are mostly in black box form and are often non-explainable. Though it has high performance, it is also known to make occasional fatal mistakes. This has limited the applications of AI, especially in mission critical applications.

In this talk, I will present the current state-of-the arts in explainable AI, which holds promise to helping humans better understand and interpret the decisions made by the black-box AI models. This is followed by our preliminary research on explainable recommendation, relation inference in videos, as well as wellness applications. The talk will focus on leveraging prior domain knowledge, information theoretic principles, and adversarial algorithms to achieving explainable framework. Further, it will discuss future research towards quality, fairness and robustness of explainable AI, and suggest approaches to move forward for media research and applications. As the topic is broad and evolving, this talk will evoke more questions than answers.

Abstract: Our laboratory has been engaged in two broad and connected areas of research that relate to human surroundings: “bio-inspired robotics” and “rescue robotics.” Living creatures have survived and been optimized by natural selection. An understanding of the functions of living things is very useful in creating new artificial robots. In our lab, we are interested in analyzing the beautiful skills and behaviors of living things, and we are trying to find solutions to the following questions, among others: Why can living snakes move without legs? Why do quadrupeds change their gait patterns (for example, walk, trot, gallop) depending on their speed of movement? What is the mechanism of the flocking behaviors of birds and fish? How can small ants build a big anthill? Why can human beings walk with two legs? Based on our understanding of these phenomena, we can apply our knowledge to create robots to solve industrial problems.

We believe that rescue robot systems are another important application of robotic technology. During my time as an employee at Kobe University, one of my masters’ student, Mr. Motohiro Kisoi, was killed in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake on January 17, 1995. Since this tragic event, I have been putting my heart into the development of useful rescue robot systems and rescue engineering. When the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011, we dispatched and utilized the rescue robots KOHGA3 to inspect damaged buildings in Hachinohe and Aomori, and we dispatched underwater robots to search for bodies in Minamisanriku, Miyagi, and Rikuzentakata,Iwate. My dream is to establish an international rescue robot team, like the popular TV show Thunderbirds, using advanced robotic technologies. If we can dispatch rescue robots from Japan to disaster sites everywhere in the world for disaster response and recovery, it will be a strong contribution to the world. In this keynote speech I would like to introduce our research activities.

Abstract: The unit of thermodynamic temperature in the International System of Units (SI) is the kelvin (\(K\)), which is one of the seven basic units of the SI: The other six basic units are the meter (\(m\)), the kilogram (\(kg\)), the second (\(s\)), the ampere (\(A\)), the candela (\(cd\)), and the mole (\(mol\)). The re-definition of the kilogram, the ampere, the kelvin and the mole was agreed at the 26th CGPM held in November 2018 and implemented on May 20 in 2019. As a result of the re-definition, all SI units are defined in terms of physical constants.

The new definition of the kelvin is as follows:

“The kelvin, symbol \( K \), is the SI unit of thermodynamic temperature. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Boltzmann constant \( k \) to be \( 1.380 649 \times 10^{–23} \) when expressed in the unit \( J K^{–1} \), which is equal to \(kg\) \(m^{2}\) \(s^{–2}\) \(K^{–1}\), where the kilogram, meter and second are defined in terms of \(h\), \(c\) and \( \Delta \upsilon_{Cs}\).”

In this talk, we would like to introduce the revision of the definition of the kelvin, including chronological changes of the temperature standard. We would also like to describe recent progress of the temperature standard, some of which will be presented in SICE AC and World Congress of International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO).

Abstract: Several infrastructures in transportation, energy, and robotics require intricate interactions between cyber, physical, and human systems. Urban mobility in Transportation is witnessing a transformation due to the emergence of new concepts in Mobility on Demand, where new modes of transportation other than private individual cars and public mass transit are being investigated. With a projection of an annual global travel of 2 billion vehicles on roads, new modes of transportation that can optimize the number of passenger- miles with minimal carbon footprint are needed. This in turn necessitates a fundamental understanding of human decision making in transportation. Increasingly, more and more systems are becoming autonomous. Several key milestones need to be met before realizing the grand vision of fully autonomous systems, one of which is shared decision making with mixed autonomy. The presence of both humans and machines in these systems implies that shared decision making may prove to be advantageous by combining their complementary expertise. Here too, it is important to understand how the emerging Cyber-Physical and Human Systems (CPHS) should be modeled and designed.

In this talk, I will discuss two different examples of CPHS and discuss the opportunities for exploring several systems and control aspects, including adaptation and optimization. A socio-technical model that combines behavioral models of passengers based on Prospect Theory and traffic model together with principles of optimization and reinforcement learning is shown to result in a novel urban mobility solution. A shared control strategy between pilots and adaptation-based autopilots is shown to lead to swift and graceful recovery following a severe anomaly in a flight control problem with mixed autonomy. The underlying theoretical tools and numerical examples of their validation will be presented. A number of new control-centric opportunities and challenges in this fascinating topic of CPHS will be discussed.