The behavior of visitors browsing in a web site offers a lot of information about their requirements and the way they use the respective site. Analyzing such behavior can provide the necessary information in order to improve the web site's structure. The literature contains already several suggestions on how to characterize web site usage and to identify the respective visitor requirements based on clustering of visitor sessions. Here we propose to combine visitor behavior with the content of the respective web pages and the similarity between different page sequences in order to define a similarity measure between different visits. This similarity serves as input for clustering of visitor sessions. The application of our approach to a bank's web site and its visitor sessions shows its potential for internet-based businesses.

This paper addresses issues regarding to the development of teleconferencing support collaboration focusing on the realistic sensation domain. It argues that the gaze communications are the important mechanisms to enable visual channel and social presence in human-human communications. We propose a new aspect to establish multiple eye contacts and community awareness in multiparty videoconference (VC). The participants can aware of being recognized from any remote sites while they are talking with each other. Community awareness means the ability to aware of group communication in the videoconference. The participant can recognize of who is talking with whom and any communicative groups in a conference. An intelligent image arrangement through a unique position of camera is built and simulated. The systematic placement of images serves the gaze communications by utilizing the characteristic of gaze direction and image's position. The experimental results show that the proposed approach has the significant improvement in the interpersonal communication compared with the conventional VC system.

Under the broadband-ubiquitous environment, digital content creation/distribution will be the key factor to activating new industries. This paper first describes the impact of a broadband-ubiquitous environment on digital content creation/distribution; then it proposes new models for digital content creation/distribution businesses. In a broadband-ubiquitous environment, the key is creation of moving picture content; thus the paper describes a system that allows non-CG experts to make CG movies easily.

This study has developed a system that performs data communications using high frequency bands of sound signals. Unlike radio communication systems using advanced wireless devices, it only requires the legacy devices such as microphones and speakers employed in ordinary telephony communication systems. In this study, we have investigated the possibility of a machine learning approach to improve the recognition accuracy identifying binary symbols exchanged through sound media. This paper describes some experimental results evaluating the performance of our proposed technique employing a neural network as its classifier of binary symbols. The experimental results indicate that the proposed technique may have a certain appropriateness for designing an optimal classifier for the symbol identification task.

The information communication service vision for the 21st century -"Visual", "Intelligent" and "Personal" or VI&P- was proposed by NTT, and efforts to develop the techniques necessary to realize this service vision on time are now being accelarated. Among VI&P, visual communication services are expected to play major roles in this future vision. Particularly, visual telephone and related services will become very attractive services. This paper gives an evolutional perspective of visual communication services and the technologies to support them and presents the clear prospect of our 21st century service vision.

Because motion capture system enabled us to capture a number of human motions, the demand for a method to easily browse the captured motion database has been increasing. In this paper, we propose a method to generate simple visual outlines of motion clips, for the purpose of efficient motion data browsing. Our method unfolds a motion clip into a 2D stripe of keyframes along a timeline that is based on semantic keyframe extraction and the best view point selection for each keyframes. With our visualization, timing and order of actions in the motions are clearly visible and the contents of multiple motions are easily comparable. In addition, because our method is applicable for a wide variety of motions, it can generate outlines for a large amount of motions fully automatically.

The Internet has become an important medium for effective marketing and efficient operations for many institutions. Visitors of a particular web site leave behind valuable information on their preferences, requirements, and demands regarding the offered products and/or services. Understanding these requirements online, i.e., during a particular visit, is both a difficult technical challenge and a tremendous business opportunity. Web sites that can provide effective online navigation suggestions to their visitors can exploit the potential inherent in the data such visits generate every day. However, identifying, collecting, and maintaining the necessary knowledge that navigation suggestions are based on is far from trivial. We propose a methodology for acquiring and maintaining this knowledge efficiently using data mart and web mining technology. Its effectiveness has been shown in an application for a bank's web site.