We propose a novel probabilistic image selection method for the Web image gathering system we proposed before. It employed two-step processing: (1) Gather HTML files of Web pages related to given keywords, analyze them and fetch only Web images expected to be highly related to the keywords. (2) Select only relevant images from the gathered images based on the image-feature-based clustering. In this paper, we propose building a generative model based on the Gaussian mixture model to represent the distribution of (...) image features of images related to the given keywords, and applying it to select images instead of the processing (2). We call the new system ``Probabilistic Image Collector''. We show the effectiveness of our proposed system by the experimental results. (shrink)

These volumes present the text of Abū Ma’͑šar’s _Great Introduction to Astrology_ in Arabic and Greek and the divergences in the Latin translations. It provides a fully-comprehensive account of traditional astrological doctrine and its philosophical bases.

This paper reports the results of questionnaire-based research conducted at an exhibition of interactive humanoid robots that was held at the Osaka Science Museum, Japan. The aim of this exhibition was to investigate the feasibility of communication robots connected to a ubiquitous sensor network, under the assumption that these robots will be practically used in daily life in the not-so-distant future. More than 90,000 people visited the exhibition. A questionnaire was given to the visitors to explore their opinions of the (...) robots. Statistical analysis was done on the data of 2,301 respondents. It was found that the visitors’ opinions varied according to age; younger visitors did not necessarily like the robots more than elderly visitors; positive evaluation of the robots did not necessarily conflict with negative evaluations such as anxiety; there was no gender difference; and there was almost no correlation between opinions and the length of time spent near the robots. (shrink)

In _Religion and Nothingness_ the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy lays the foundation of thought for a world in the making, for a world united beyond the differences of East and West. Keiji Nishitani notes the irreversible trend of Western civilization to nihilism, and singles out the conquest of nihilism as _the_ task for contemporary philosophy. Nihility, or relative nothingness, can only be overcome by being radicalized to Emptiness, or absolute nothingness. Taking absolute nothingness as the (...) fundamental notion in rational explanations of the Eastern experience of human life, Professor Nishitani examines the relevance of this notion for contemporary life, and in particular for Western philosophical theories and religious believes. Everywhere his basic intention remains the same: to direct our modern predicament to a resolution through this insight. The challenge that the thought of Keiji Nishitani presents to the West, as a modern version of an Eastern speculative tradition that is every bit as old and as variegated as our own, is one that brings into unity the principle of reality and the principle of salvation. In the process, one traditional Western idea after another comes under scrutiny: the dichotomy of faith and reason, of being and substance, the personal and transcendent notions of God, the exaggerated role given to the knowing ego, and even the Judeo-Christian view of history itself. _Religion and Nothingness_ represents the major work of one of Japan's most powerful and committed philosophical minds. (shrink)

Negative attitudes toward robots are considered as one of the psychological factors preventing humans from interacting with robots in the daily life. To verify their influence on humans‘ behaviors toward robots, we designed and executed experiments where subjects interacted with Robovie, which is being developed as a platform for research on the possibility of communication robots. This paper reports and discusses the results of these experiments on correlation between subjects’ negative attitudes and their behaviors toward robots. Moreover, it discusses influences (...) of gender and experience of real robots on their negative attitudes and behaviors toward robots. (shrink)

Involuntary eye movement during gaze fixation, referred to as fixational eye movement, consists of two types of components: a Brownian motion like component called drifts-tremor and a ballistic component called microsaccade with a mean saccadic amplitude of about 0.3° and a mean inter-MS interval of about 0.5 s. During GZ fixation in healthy people in an eccentric position, typically with an eccentricity more than 30°, eyes exhibit oscillatory movements alternating between centripetal drift and centrifugal saccade with a mean saccadic amplitude (...) of about 1° and a period in the range of 0.5–1.0 s, which has been known as the physiological gaze-evoked nystagmus. Here, we designed a simple experimental paradigm of GZ fixation on a target shifted horizontally from the front-facing position with fewer eccentricities. We found a clear tendency of centripetal DRT and centrifugal MS as in GEN, but with more stochasticity and with slower drift velocity compared to GEN, even during FEM at GZ positions with small eccentricities. Our results showed that the target shift-dependent balance between DRT and MS achieves the GZ bounded around each of the given targets. In other words, GZ relaxes slowly with the centripetal DRT toward the front-facing position during inter-MS intervals, as if there always exists a quasi-stable equilibrium posture in the front-facing position, and MS actions pull GZ intermittently back to the target position in the opposite direction to DRT. (shrink)

To investigate whether people with social anxiety have less actual and “anticipatory” anxiety when interacting with a robot compared to interacting with a person, we conducted a 2 × 2 psychological experiment with two factors: social anxiety and interaction partner. The experiment was conducted in a counseling setting where a participant played the role of a client and the robot or the confederate played the role of a counselor. First, we measured the participants’ social anxiety using the Social Avoidance and (...) Distress Scale, after which, we measured their anxiety at two specific moments: “anticipatory anxiety” was measured after they knew that they would be interacting with a robot or a human confederate, and actual anxiety was measured after they actually interacted with the robot or confederate. Measurements were performed using the Profile of Mood States and the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results indicated that participants with higher social anxiety tended to feel less “anticipatory anxiety” and tension when they knew that they would be interacting with robots compared with humans. Moreover, we found that interaction with a robot elicited less tension compared with interaction with a person regardless of the level of social anxiety. (shrink)

A great deal of research has been performed recently on robots that feature functions for communicating with humans in daily life, i.e., communication robots. We consider it important to develop methods to measure humans’ attitudes and emotions that may prevent them from interaction with communication robots, as indices to study short-term and long-term interaction between humans and communication robots. This study is aimed at exploring the influence of negative attitudes toward robots, focusing on applications of communication robots to daily-life services. (...) First, a scale of negative attitudes toward robots consisting of three subordinate scales, “negative attitudes toward situations of interaction with robots,” “negative attitudes toward the social influence of robots,” and “negative attitudes toward emotions in interaction with robots,” was developed based on a data sample comprising of 263 Japanese university students. This scale was administered to 240 Japanese university students to confirm its validity and reliability. In this paper, we report on the results of analyses of these data samples. Moreover, we discuss some future problems including a comparison of attitudes toward robots between nations. (shrink)

Prenant acte de la fondation aristotélicienne de la métaphysique comme science de l’être en tant qu’être, Nishitani interroge la posture philosophique qui, sous-jacente à ce geste initial, le détermine de l’intérieur. En fait, c’est la conception même de la philosophie, comprise comme pensée objectivante et analytique, que remet en question Nishitani en retraçant la genèse de la question de l’être chez les prédécesseurs d’Aristote. Et c’est à l’aune de cette question de l’être qu’il réévalue l’héritage aristotélicien de l’ousia, et plus (...) spécialement le rapport de l’essence et de l’existence à l’être-vrai à l’intérieur de cette question de l’être. (shrink)

Dans cet article publié deux ans après la parution de son maître ouvrage, Qu’est-ce que la religion? , auquel il est fait allusion dans les dernières lignes, Nishitani jette un regard rétrospectif sur son parcours philosophique. Plutôt que de rédiger un essai autobiographique, l’auteur y adopte une perspective analytique sur sa propre démarche et s’efforce d’expliciter la position philosophique qui est la sienne, qu’il a forgée très tôt dans sa carrière et à partir de laquelle il faut comprendre sa pratique (...) de la philosophie. Tout l’intérêt de ce texte réside dans la jonction qu’il établit entre les préoccupations du jeune Nishitani pour la question du nihilisme et ses réflexions de maturité, imprégnées de l’héritage spirituel du bouddhisme. (shrink)

We develop a semiotic scheme of time, in which time precipitates from the repeated succession of punctuating the progressive tense by the perfect tense. The underlying principle is communication among local participants. Time can thus be seen as a meaning-making, semiotic system in which different time codes are delineated, each having its own grammar and timekeeping. The four time codes discussed are the following: the subjective time having tense, the objective time without tense, the static time without timekeeping, and the (...) inter-subjective time of the E-series. Living organisms adopt a time code called the E-series, which emerges through the local synchronization among organisms or parts of organisms. The inter-subjective time is a new theoretical dimension resulting from the time-aligning activities of interacting agents. Such synchronization in natural settings consists of incessant mutual corrections and adjustments to one’s own punctuation, which is then constantly updated. Unlike the third-person observer keeping the objective time while sitting outside a clock, the second-person negotiators participate in forming the E-series time by punctuating and updating the interface through which different tenses meet at the moment of “now.” Although physics allows physicists to be the only interpreters, the semiotic perspective upends the physical perspective by letting local participants be involved in the interpretation of their mutual negotiations to precipitate that which is called time. (shrink)

Anticipatory acts or predictive behavior are prerequisites for living organisms to sustain their survival when escaping from a predator, catching prey, or schooling. For example, catching prey requires that the predator perform some procedures that are equivalent to estimating the directional movement of the prey, its speed and its distance relative to the predator. Underlying these procedures is time experience, which does not adhere to man-made mechanical clocks. Living organisms keep time based on the local activities of each participant and (...) form ecological clocks together. The timekeeping of ecological clocks has been called E-series time, which is interactive in character and consists of mutual alignment of timing that is co-adjusted to each other’s movements and rhythms. A main objective of our current work is to illustrate how E-series time is used for flows of anticipatory acts. To explain such predictive moves and their efforts based on how the perspective of the immediate future affects the present, we resort to the organismic activity of revising the preceding acts in retrospect and semiotic scaffolding that extends beyond simple linear causality. Special attention is paid to the construction of the notion of retrocausal scaffolding, which is a series of dialogical punctuations or mutual coordination of rhythms for the joint production of the present moment of now. Retrocausal scaffolding is synonymous with negotiated anticipation, which is a semiotic/communicative account of revising the preceding acts in the present moment. (shrink)

We found that children sometimes abused a social robot placed in a shopping mall hallway. They verbally abused the robot, repeatedly obstructed its path, and sometimes even kicked and punched the robot. To investigate the reasons for the abuse, we conducted a field study in which we interviewed visiting children who exhibited serious abusive behaviors, including physical contact. We analyzed interview contents to determine whether the children perceived the robot as human-like, why they abused it, and whether they thought that (...) the robot would suffer from their abusive behavior. We obtained valid interviews from 23 children over 13 days of observations. We found that 1) the majority of the children engaged in abuse because they were curious about the robot’s reactions or enjoyed abusing it and considered it human-like, and 2) about half of them believed the robot was capable of perceiving their abusive behaviors. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe a generic image classification system with an automatic knowledge acquisition mechanism from the World Wide Web. Due to the recent spread of digital imaging devices, the demand for generic image classification/recognition of various kinds of real world scenes becomes greater. To realize it, visual knowledge on various kinds of scenes is required, and we have to prepare a large number of learning images. Therefore, commercial image collections such as Corel Image Gallery are widely used in (...) conventional studies on generic image classification. However, they are not suitable as learning images for generic image classification, since they do not include various kinds of images. Then, in stead of commercial image collections we propose utilizing of a large number of images gathered from the World-Wide Web by a Web image-gathering system as learning images. Images on the Web have huge diversity in general. So that we take advantage of the diversity of Web images for a generic image classification task, which is the first attempt among this kinds of work. By the experiments, we show that utilizing of Web images as learning images is effective and promising for generic image classification. (shrink)