[My New Affiliation] [Research in 2003] [Educational Activity] [Academic Service] [21st Century COE Program] [Private]
Dear my friends in the world,
I made this 2003 annual report as my seasonal greeting to my friends. Please
enjoy it.
I hope that we keep in touch
Thinking of you from Japan on New Year Day, 2004
--- My topics in 2003 ---
Hideyuki TAKAGI (Kyushu University)
My New Affiliation
Kyushu Institute of Design (KID) and Kyushu University merged into one on October 1, 2003, and my affiliation name, e-mail address, and URL have been changed, while my office and phone & FAX numbers are same. My old e-mail address will be expired one year later. New Faculty URL has changed, too. New contact information is:
Kyushu University
Faculty of Design
4-9-1, Shiobaru, Minami-ku, Fukuoka, 815-8540 Japan
TEL & FAX <+81>92-553-4555
e-mail 
URL http://www.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~takagi/
Research in 2003
I have been working on the combination of human factor and computational intelligence that I call as Humanized Computational Intelligence. Interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) is still a main keyword of my research for this direction.
Three joint IEC researches were conducted in 2003.
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One is an IEC application to underground water management that Prof. Minsker of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has worked with her students. She stayed at my lab for two weeks with the support of JSPS Invitation Fellowship programs for Research in Japan, and her two graduate students stayed at my lab for a month with the support of NFS in US. They are expanding their work using IEC technique.
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The second is an IEC application to MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system) design that Prof. Agogino of University of California at Berkeley has worked with her student. When I gave a talk at UCB in October, 2002, we discussed the possibility of IEC to support the MEMS design and decide to start this joint research. Her graduate student stayed at my lab for 50 days with the help of JSPS Summer Program and implemented IEC to their MEMS design system. He evaluated their pervious approach vs. IEC plus the pervious approach and showed that the latter is significantly better than the former though statistical tests. We are going to submit our paper with this result to GECCO2004.
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The third one is a unique IEC application to mental therapy or psychiatry as a joint research with a clinical therapist. We set up a hypothesis that schizophrenics have narrower expression range of felling than mental normal persons and the range is in proportion to the condition of the disease. We asked 3 schizophrenics and 5 our students to make lighting design impressions of happy and sad using IEC, conducted a subjective test, Scheffe's multiple comparison test, with more than 30 subjects, and found the tendency to support our hypothesis. If it is true, this IEC approach may provide a new diagnostic approach to psychiatry. Since the number of 3+5 subjects is not enough to conclude it statistically, we are taking additional patient data now.
How am I going to expand my IEC research? I am thinking to expand a human factor in IEC from psychological feedback to physiological feedback in 2004 as my contribution to 21st Century COE project. See the detail in the below [21st Century COE Program]. I also want to develop new paradigms in humanized computational intelligence beyond the IEC echnique.
Our outputs in 2003 were a book chapter Ch.15 in Computational Intelligence: The Experts Speak, one paper appeared in a journal, three papers accepted by three journals, and five papers presented at international conferences. Most of their topics are evolutionary computation (EC) and IEC.
Educational Activity
My ex-student, Dr. Kei Ohnishi, received a doctoral degree in March, 2003 on EC. He is working at the Prof. Goldberg's DISCUS project at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a one-year postdoctoral fellow till this March.
I taught courses on computational intelligence, software engineering, acoustic and speech signal compression, and other lab works in 2003.
Academic Service
Prof. Iba and I are guest editors for the Special Issues on "Interactive Evolutionary Computation" at an international journal, New Generation Computing, and are collecting papers. If you are interested in, please visit its CFP in the left column.
My three-year service as a Board of Governors member of IEEE SMC Society was terminated at the end of 2003. I am still contributing as the Chair of Soft Computing Committee under SMC Technical Committee and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part B. My two-year service as an Audit for SOFT (Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics) was terminated in June, 2003 and started to serve for SOFT as a Councilor till June, 2005.
I gave a plenary talk at ICCC2003 on IEC. Prof. Murata and I collected 51 papers and organized a Soft Computing Track consisting 8 sessions at IEEE SMC2003. I received 2003 SMC Outstanding Service Award for these volanteer services.
This year is the 40th anniversary year since Prof. Zadeh proposed the academic concept of `fuzzy' and is the 20th year of SOFT Fuzzy System Symposium. We will have international conference, FIC2004, and a domestic conference, the 20th Fuzzy System Symposium, together at same place in this June, and I am serving for these events as the Planning Committee Chair. Prof. Zadeh will give his talk on the first day of these anniversary events.
21st Century COE Program
Our project of "Design of Artificial Environments on the Basis of Human Sensibility" has been accepted to the 21st Century COE Program in 2003 for 5 years research and education. See detail in Japanese; English site is under construction but will be opened soon. It consists of 19 professors and some post-doctoral fellows; it is a little big project as well as its grant amount.
I am going to contribute to the COE project from computational intelligence side; I am thinking to expand IEC technique for designing the best artificial environment by monitoring human psychological preference and physiological sensing signals that react to heat, lighting, vibration, audio & visual stimuli, and other physical factors for office, living, and other artificial environment.
Note: COE is a new program sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and aims to form the Education and Research base with the world's highest standards in each
discipline (i.e. Center Of Excellent). It
also aims to develop Japan's human resources by producing individuals who will become future global
leaders, and create unique universities with global competitiveness
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Private
My elder daughter reached to the age to take university enrollment examinations. She is working hard now for preparing the exam held in this January to March. My younger daughter will be the third grade of a junior high school (nineth grade). She has trained Karate for these years. My wife teaches Japanese language to foreign students. She has taught foreign adults whose lives in Japan are not long and sometime is hired by our local government to teach foreign students Japanese language as their second language at their elementary schools.
We spent our holidays in Beijing in Dec. 12 - 29, 2003 except our elder daughter. She wants to accompany with me after she enrolls a university when I attend an international conference. Beijing was cold in the evening, but it was warmer than our expectation. I guided them to several famous historical places and shopping areas where I have been in 1989 and 1990, i.e. this trip was not for my holidays but for family service.