POPULAR LECTURES FOR STUDENTS AND GENERAL AUDIENCE

D-104, Friday, May 25, 2017, 18:30-20:00

Two participants of the 12th International Workshop on Natural Computing at AIU next weekend will have popular lectures easy to understand for everyone on topics related to the workshop. Discussion – Question/Answer session at the end will give you opportunity to learn what is natural computing and why it is important for the future of information technology.

18:30-19:00

Title:	“A “cane” for thinking: an optimistic information engineering viewpoint on dementia”
Author:	Katsunobu Imai
Affiliation:	Hiroshima University
E-mail:	imai@hiroshima-u.ac.jp
Abstract:	Issues related to dementia are usually discussed in rather pessimistic ways from other people’s points of view such as that of families, medical or health care workers. In this talk, we give a first-person perspective to the issues and try to understand them as a continuous change of one’s physical condition particularly the shrinking of the scope of perception or accumulative errors of sensing. Then we can introduce a rather optimistic and information engineering viewpoint to cope with the change and to support one’s thinking activity. We illustrate some quite practical methodology as well as a comprehensive vision to the issues which include many socially difficult problems. We also discuss about that the viewpoint is essentially related to the field of “natural computing.”

19:00-19:30

Title:	“Tactileology; a paradigm for tactile communications “
Author:	Yasuhiro Suzuki
Affiliation:	Nagoya University, Graduate School of Informatics
E-mail:	ysuzuki@nagoya-u.jp
Abstract:	Tactile sense is irreducible for human begin, however it is not easy to examine or design tactile sense. Because we have not yet developed a suitable method for describing the tactile sense, so we propose a method based on musical scoring, which we refer to as the ‘tactile score’. On designing tactile sense, one of the important issues is how to design “comfortable” tactile sense, however it is still our challenge. In order to consider it, we have been interested in massaging; it gives us comfortable stimulus and has been used in various areas such as medicine, cosmetics, education and so on. We have been collaborating with cosmeticians who give massages and based on their experience in beauty salons, we have developed the method for describing massaging, “tactile score” and we have analyzed massages that show high beauty effects by using the tactile score and found that there are basic techniques of massages and also the rules of composing techniques exist. Tactile score has been developed for massaging, we also show that this method can be applied various areas, in order to create comfortable tactile sense.

19:30-20:00

Title:	“Discussion – Question & Answer Session: What is Natural Computing?”
Moderator:	Marcin J. Schroeder
Affiliation:	Akita International University
E-mail:	mjs@aiu.ac.jp