[What we are doing] [Academic Activities] [Educational Activity] [Academic Service] [Private][ver.2007] [ver.2006] [ver.2005] [ver.2004]

 
Dear my friends in the world,

I made this 2008 annual report as my seasonal greeting to my friends.
Two photos of traditional Japanese New Year images at my home are at the bottom of this page. Please enjoy them.
I hope to keep in touch with you.

Thinking of you from Japan in early 2009

--- My topics in 2008 ---

 

Hideyuki TAKAGI (Faculty of Design, Kyushu University)
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/

What we are doing:

I have worked on the combination of human factors and computational intelligence that I call as Humanized Computational Intelligence. I have used interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) for this direction and manage my lab along with this direction. If you are interested in IEC, my survey and tutorial paper and 100 slides are downloadable from my top web page, FYI.The survey paper was cited 204 times that is the 55th citations among 53,647 EC and GA papers in SCOPUS database as of last October.

There are two IEC research directions: extending IEC application areas and reducing IEC user fatigue for practical use.

During the 2008 fiscal year (April, 2008 - March, 2009), I have 1 Bachelor students, 3 Master students, and 2 Doctoral students. I will have 2 Bachelor students and 1 Master students in the 2009 fiscal year, and I may have 1 research student.


A doctoral student, Makoto Inoue (井上誠）, submits his doctoral dissertation on A Study of Architectural Planning Using Evolutionary Computing Methods in Japanese and will receive the Doctoral Degree in this March, hopefully. He proposed a method for generation spatial planning that was inspired by cellar-automaton, applied it to generate room layout plans, and combined it with evolutionary multi-objective optimization and interactive evolutionary computation.

Another doctoral student, Jan Dolinsky, submitted his doctoral dissertation on Naturalness Learning and Its Application to the Synthesis of Handwritten Letters in English and will receive the Doctoral Degree in this March, hopefully. He first defined naturalness as the difference between strokes of font characters and their corresponding handwritten characters in his dissertation, and then analyzed the relationship between and font characters and corresponding naturalness. Through the analysis, he showed that the nonlinearlity can been expressed by recurrent neural networks (RNN). He also proposed improved RNN by adding self-feedback at neurons of the output layer.

Other keywords of our lab in 2008 were interactive PSO and analysis of its sensitivity of noise in fitness, characteristics of real code GA operations for small population size and small generations, parallel interactive evolutionary computation (IEC), and interactive differential evolution.

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Academic activities

January:
IEEE SMC Society (SMCS) President, Daniel Yeung, collected all Vice-Presidents at San Diego and had a meeting. My flight from smaller airport in San Diego to Los Angeles delayed and could not connect my next flight to Japan. If I take the same flight on the next day, I had to make two makeup classes on Monday. I changed air carrier from UA to Asiana and could give lecture for one of two Monday classes.

I planned Korea-Japan Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Graduate Students with Prof. Sun-bae Cho of Yonsei Yuniversity, Korea, and held at our university. We used the WebEx web conferening system and delivered the workshop to four universities in Korea, USA, and Japan.

Bio-Housing Research Institute of Chonam National University has a seminar in Gwangju, Korea, and I gave a talk on general IEC and extended IEC with physiological feedback. Their research and our COE Project ended in March, 2008, have similarity, and three COE project members gave talks.

February:
Private Trip to Shanghai: Prof. Xizhi Shi of Shanghai Jiaotong University and I took one-day holiday in Zhujiajie (朱家角）. I could enjoy the view and walk in this historical area.

March:
It was busy month. I attended DHMS2008 held in Athens and JET18, a French domestic conference on Evolutionary Computation, held in Paris. I gave an keynote speech at the domestic conference and gave a short presentation to French Industry next day. This talk was realized thanks to Prof.s Evelyne Lutton and Pierre Collet. When I arrived to the hotel that I booked near the Orsay Airport on the final day, I found that it was closed due to fire!

I came back from Europe on 3/17, gave an invited talk at a Japanese domestic conference on 3/18, and flue to Nepal in the night on the day. I attended SKIMA2008 held in Kathmandu and gave a keynote speech. Thanks to Dr. Alamgir Hossain's invitation, my first visit to Nepal was realized. I caught cold during this conference, but it was Influenza type B. Thanks to Tamiful, it was not severe but I got a strained back due to the Influenza.

April-May:
SMCS Executive Committee meeting was held in Vancouver. My small pouch with my passport was stolen in a plane from Vancouver to Japan. I scheduled to go to ACDM2008 held in Bristol, UK in the same week, I had to cancel the trip. As I do not want to cancel my keynote talk, I consulted with General Chair, Prof. Ian Parmee, and gave my one-hour talk from my office in Japan using WebEx web conference system for slide presentation and Skype for voice and video.

June:
I attended WCCI2008 held in Hong Kong and be one of panelists at a panel discussion. The deadlines of SMC2008 programming and submitting a journal paper with my student, I was busy for them during WCCI2008 though it was not good.

My student, Makoto Inoue, and I attended SMCia2008 fully sponsored by SMCS and held in Hokkaido, Japan, and he presented his doctoral research mentioned in the above.

July:
IEEE SMC Society held a Publication Committee meeting in Konstanz and discussed about Technical Map Project. The scopes of SMCS is so wide that it is difficult to catch new emergent technologies and support them as a society. We tried to pick up such emergent technologies through brainstorming.

Konstanz was a city to the boarder with Switzerland. I enjoyed two-day hiking in Swiss Alps.

August:
Thanks to the financial support of Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, I visited University of Ulster, Derry, UK and started a joint research with Dr. Nazmul H. Siddique. We tried to create robot team-formation using IEC.

September:
I connected my travel from UK to Croatia and attended KES2008 held in Zagreb. Thanks to Prof. Ignac Lovrek, I gave one-hour keynote speech .

After then, I flue to Barcelona and attended HIS2008. My main purpose was to discuss with HIS board members to change the sponsorship of the conference. IEEE SMCS technically sponsored HIS conference series in past, but we would like to change it a conference fully sponsored by SMCS. After the discussion, we decided to have SMCS co-sponsorship for HIS2009 and continue to discuss its full sponsorship from HIS2010.

I visited Taiwan 9/23-27. Prof. Chang-Shing Lee invited me to give a keynote talk at 2008 World Computer GO Congress held in Tainan. During my visit, I gave four talks; Distinguish Lecturer Program talk at National Taipei University of Technology (台北科技大学) for SMCS Taipei Chapter,
two talks for students and faculty at National Cheng Kung University (国立成功大学) and Chang Jung Christian University (長榮大学), and a keynote speech at National Tainan University (国立台南大学）. One of events of the GO Congress was a play of computer GO program and professional GO player, which was good news for local newspapers.

October:
I attended SMC2008 held in Singapore where I served as a Special Session Chair. There were SMCS Executive Committee meeting and Board of Governors meeting on whole Saturday and Sunday, respectively, SMCS Associate Editor meeting at lunch time and SMCS Technical Committee Chair meeting in 18:30-21:30 on Monday, and GOLD member meeting on Tuesday. Always, there are many administrative meetings during SMC annual meeting.

I attended Iranian domestic conference on Fuzzy and Intelligent Systems held in Teheran. I was surprised the line of students who had questions just after my keynote talk. I have never seen such motivated students at my past talks. Prof. M. R. Akbarzadeh-T. invited me as a keynote speaker and Dr. Akbar Zare and other university faculty members supported me during my stay.

I needed a visa to enter Iran. If I use a tourist visa, it is easy to get it at Teheran airport if my stay is within a week. However, my trip was financially supported by Iran Government, and I was asked to get a Visa from Iran Embassy in Tokyo. The embassy did not use a return envelop with my home address that I prepared but sent my passport to the head office of our university in other campus (we have five campuses); my passport became missing on Friday and Saturday. By chance, I found that the passport was at a big post office which covers the area of the campus and got it on Sunday and could departed on Monday. It was stressful weekends.

December:
I visited to Jiangnan University (江南大学） Wuxi, China and discussed on the possibility of joint research with Prof. Shitong Wang and his colleagues. We applied a proposal of joint research on clustering plus IEC twice to JSPS but failed. My visit followed the second fail to go ahead.

China Railway Highspeed (CRH) started their business from April, 2007, and I took this train this time. I also used same rapid train in Taiwan in September. Good news of CRH was that it took only less than one hour between Shanghai and Wuxi, its bad news was that it is not easy to make reservation. When I arrived to Shanghai Station, I could book a seat to Wuxi but could not book on the way back. Prof. S. Wang could book the return ticket that I could not. It implied that departure stations have priority to sell seats of trains that depart from the stations. If anyone including people outside of China can book train tickets before our travel, it is quite helpful for us to make travel plans.

I attended a domestic Evolutionary Computation Symposium held in Nobaribetsu Spa in Hokkaido and gave a keynote talk. All participants stayed at one Spa hotel and had single track and poster sessions. The objective of the symposium is to discuss deeply. To do so, all participants stay at a symposium Spa hotel, we had single track, all other papers were assigned to poster session regardless their qualities. We will have the third symposium in Okinawa in December, 2009.


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Educational Activity

Kyushu University has a unique system, and we faculty members belong to Faculty of Design, in our case, and teach Undergraduate School of Design and Graduate School of Design. Unique point is that they are not on the same one line, i.e. faculty members of same Faculty may teach at different Undergraduate School and Graduate School.

Our Graduate School divided inside into five courses. I was assigned to Human Science Course and started new course lecture. Also, new curriculum of Undergraduate School started from 2008, and I also started new course.

I am teaching courses on computational intelligence, software engineering, media information processing, academic English A, and other lab works in 2008.


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Academic Service
I am serving as the Vice-President of IEEE SMC Society (SMCS) in 2008-2009, the Chair of SMCS Technical Committee on Soft Computing, and an Associate Editor of Transaction on SMC-B, and working for SMC2008 as the Special Session Chair as well as the Special Session Chair at SMC2006 and SMC2007.

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Private


Family: New Year Photos:

The below is photos of my home on New Year Day thwhich is the biggest event in Japanese calendar. The left is traditional OSECHI cooking, Zohni soup that my wife made; and Toso that I prepared the right is my Japanese style room with New Year decorations such as Kagami-mochi, hanging scroll of calligraphy, Japanese art of flower arrangement that my elder daughter made, and a iron kettle for Japanese tea ceremony.
(Osechi cooking) (New Year decoration)

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