Search results

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to emergent understandings in research into urban climate change-related disasters (such as extreme heat), which recognise that present-day actions or failures of cities to address climate risk are rooted in a historical context.

The paper analyses content of scientific journals produced by the not-for-profit Kyushu Environmental Evaluation Association in Fukuoka since the 1970s. The aim is to evaluate the shifting understanding and conception of a liveable urban environment within Fukuoka over time and assess how this narrative has informed capability to understand and manage extreme heat as an emergent disaster risk.

The strong technical competences enabling Fukuoka to undertake evidence-based management of risks from climate-related disasters today exist at least partially because of earlier environmental concerns within the city and an early emergence of techno-scientific competence within the city's research institutions working at the science–policy interface.

The findings suggest a need to avoid uncritically exporting “lessons” from apparent urban climate “success stories”, without full recognition of the historical context enabling production and utilisation of weather and climate knowledge in specific locations.

This chapter examines the issues of the low-cost carriers (LCCs) in Japan and their impact on the domestic and international aviation markets. “Genuine” LCCs, such as Peach Aviation and Jetstar Japan, began their operations in 2012 to follow the new movement of low-cost and low-fare airlines, which are different from the “new emerging” airlines, such as Skymark and AIRDO that appeared in the late 1990s. We discuss the recent history of LCCs in Japan, the characteristics of each LCC, the competitiveness of the high-speed railway in the domestic market, the impact of open sky policies, and the contribution of inbound foreign visitors to the international passenger volume increase. As LCCs in Japan have recently begun operations, they can continue to play a significant role in the Japanese aviation market.

Discovering and recommending points of interest are drawing more attention to meet the increasing demand from personalized tours. This paper aims to propose and evaluate two fuzzy-based systems for decision of sightseeing spots considering different conditions.

In the system, the authors considered four input parameters as follows: ambient temperature (AT), air quality (AQ), noise level (NL) and the current number of people (CNP) to decide the sightseeing spots visit or not visit (VNV). The authors call the proposed system: fuzzy-based decision visiting systems (FBDVSs). The authors implemented two systems as follows: FBDVS1 (three input parameters) and FBDVS2 (four input parameters). The authors make a comparison study between FBDVS1 and FBDVS2. The authors evaluate the proposed systems by computer simulations.

From the simulations results, the authors conclude that when CNP is increased, the VNV is increased. However, when AQ and NL are increased, the VNV is decreased. Also, when the AT is around 18°C-26°C, the VNV is the best. Comparing the complexity, the FBDVS2 is more complex than FBDVS1. However, FBDVS2 considers also the AT, which makes the system more reliable.

In the future, the authors would like to make extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed systems and compare the performance of the proposed systems with other systems.

By simulation results, the authors have shown that the proposed system has a good performance and can choose good sightseeing spots.

This study aims to describe the behavior of blocks in the system under consideration using systems modeling language (SysML) state machine diagrams. In this paper, formalization and model checking for SysML state machine diagrams have been investigated.

The work by Zhang and Liu (2010) proposed a formalization of SysML state machine diagrams in which the diagrams were translated into CSP# processes that could be verified by the state-of-the-art model checker PAT. In this paper, several modifications have been made and new rules have been added to the translation described in that work.

First, three translation rules were modified, which apparently are inappropriately defined according to the SysML definition of state machine diagrams. Next, we add new translation rules for two components of the diagrams – junction and choice pseudostates – which have not been dealt with previously. Further, we are implementing the automatic translation system on a web-based model-driven development tool, which reflects on our translation rules.

As the contribution of this work, more reasonable verification results for more general SysML state machine diagrams can be achieved.

This work is motivated by the need to develop decentralized peer‐to‐peer (P2P) approaches to support e‐learning and teaching activity in virtual universities. This paper aims to present the implementation of the JXTA‐based e‐learning P2P system.

The design and implementation of a smart box environment that will be used for stimulating the learners to increase the learning efficiency is shown. The smart box is integrated with the JXTA‐overlay by using efficient message sending between peers in the system.

The proposed e‐learning P2P system is a useful tool for monitoring and controlling learners' activity.

In the future, other effective stimulation for each learner using IC tag card will be added. Also, the Servo Motor has 12 control ports, so these will be used for implementing other stimulating functions. It is planned to extend the system with functionalities for presence mechanism of students in classrooms and activities.

The proposed system is evaluated by experimental results and it has a good performance.

This paper proposes and implements a novel e‐learning system, which is based on P2P, web and sensor technologies.

Peer‐to‐Peer computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self‐organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many serious challenges. In our previous work, we implemented a synchronous P2P collaboration platform called TOMSCOP. However, the TOMSCOP was implemented only in Windows XPOS. In this work, we extend our previous work and present a multi‐platform Peer‐to‐Peer system. The proposed system operates very smoothly in UNIX Solaris 9 OS, Linux Suse 9.1 OS, Mac OSX, and Windows XP. In this paper, we present the design of proposed system and four web application tools: info, joint draw pad, shared web browser and subaru avatar.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to improve the accuracy of estimating feature points of human body on a vision‐based motion capture system (MCS) by using the variable‐density self‐organizing map (VDSOM).

The VDSOM is a kind of self‐organizing map (SOM) and has an ability to learn training samples incrementally. The authors let VDSOM learn 3D feature points of human body when the MCS succeeded in estimating them correctly. On the other hand, one or more 3D feature point could not be estimated correctly, the VDSOM is used for the other purpose. The SOM including VDSOM has an ability to recall a part of weight vector which have learned in the learning process. This ability is used to recall correct patterns and complement such incorrect feature points by replacing such incorrect feature points with them.

Experimental results show that the approach is effective for estimation of human posture robustly compared with the other methods.

The proposed approach is interesting for the collaboration between an MCS and an incremental learning.

Nepal is located in mountainous terrain in the Himalayan arc, where landslides are common and are the main cause of natural hazards. On 23 July 2002, daily rainfall of 300mm triggered a landslide of 9,000m³ at head valley of 39^o, which has quaternary unconsolidated gravel rock base coated with thin soil, tree species and shrubs. The landslide changed into debris flow and to flash flood. The average velocity was 30m/sec. and the equivalent friction angle of the materials was 28^o. A total of 16 people lost their lives in Matatirtha village, near to Kathmandu city and millions of properties were damaged. To minimize the disaster, warning system development of standards such as promotion of education level to people and preparation of hazard mapping are suggested.

A cyber world (CW) is a digitized world created on cyberspaces inside computers interconnected by networks including the Internet. Following ubiquitous computers, sensors, e‐tags, networks, information, services, etc., is a road towards a smart world (SW) created on both cyberspaces and real spaces. It is mainly characterized by ubiquitous intelligence or computational intelligence pervasion in the physical world filled with smart things. In recent years, many novel and imaginative researches have been conducted to try and experiment a variety of smart things including characteristic smart objects and specific smart spaces or environments as well as smart systems. The next research phase to emerge, we believe, is to coordinate these diverse smart objects and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level of spaces known as smart hyperspace or hyper‐environments, and eventually create the smart world. In this paper, we discuss the potential trends and related challenges toward the smart world and ubiquitous intelligence from smart things to smart spaces and then to smart hyperspaces. Likewise, we show our efforts in developing a smart hyperspace of ubiquitous care for kids, called UbicKids.