Connected services have been under development in the automotive industry. Meanwhile, the volume of predictive notifications that utilize travel-related data is increasing, and there are concerns that drivers cannot process such an amount of information or do not accept and follow such predictive instructions straightforwardly because the information provided is predicted. In this work, an interactive voice system using two agents is proposed to realize notifications that can easily be accepted by drivers and enhance the reliability of the system by adding contextual information. An experiment was performed using a driving simulator to compare the following three forms of notifications: (1) notification with no contextual information, (2) notification with contextual information using one agent, and (3) notification with contextual information using two agents. The notification content was limited to probable near-miss incidents. The results of the experiment indicate that the driver may decelerate more with the one- and two-agent notification methods than with the conventional notification method. The degree of deceleration depended the number of times the notification was provided and whether there were cars parked on the streets.

Argumentation is a process of reaching a consensus through premises and rebuttals. If an artificial dialogue system can perform argumentation, it can improve users' decisions and ability to negotiate with the others. Previously, researchers have studied argumentative dialogue systems through a structured database regarding argumentation structure and evaluated the logical consistency of the dialogue. However, these systems could not change its response based on the user's agreement or disagreement to its last utterance. Furthermore, the persuasiveness of the generated dialogue has not been evaluated. In this study, a method is proposed to generate persuasive arguments through a hierarchical argumentation structure that considers human agreement and disagreement. Persuasiveness is evaluated through a crowd sourcing platform wherein participants' written impressions of shown dialogue texts are scored via a third person Likert scale evaluation. The proposed method was compared to the baseline method wherein argument response texts were generated without consideration of the user's agreement or disagreement. Experiment results suggest that the proposed method can generate a more persuasive dialogue than the baseline method. Further analysis implied that perceived persuasiveness was induced by evaluations of the behavior of the dialogue system, which was inherent in the hierarchical argumentation structure.

Background subtraction is widely used in detecting moving objects; however, changing illumination conditions, color similarity, and real-time performance remain important problems. In this paper, we introduce a sequential method for adaptively estimating background components using Kalman filters, and a novel method for detecting objects using margined sign correlation (MSC). By applying MSC to our adaptive background model, the proposed system can perform object detection robustly and accurately. The proposed method is suitable for implementation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) and as such, the system realizes real-time performance efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.