The development of computers capable of handling complex objects requires nonverbal interfaces that can bidirectionally mediate nonverbal communication including the gestures of both people and computers. Nonverbal expressions are poweful media for enriching and facilitating humancomputer interaction when used as interface languages. Four gestural modes are appropriate for human-computer interaction: the sign, indication, illustration and manipulation modes. All these modes can be conveyed by a generalized gesture interface that has specific processors for each mode. The basic component of the generalized gesture interface, a gesture dictionary, is proposed. The dictionary can accept sign and indicating gestures in which postures or body shapes are significant, pass their meaning to a computer and display gestures from the computer. For this purpose it converts body shapes into gestural codes by means of two code systems and, moreover, it performs bidirectional conversions of several gesture representations. This dictionary is applied to the translation of Japanese into sign language; it displays an actor who speaks the given Japanese sentences by gesture of sign words and finger alphabets. The performance of this application confirms the adequacy and usefulness of the gesture dictionary.

The new notion of "multiuser interface", an interface for groups working together in a shared workspace, originated from the expansion of CSCW research and the spread of the groupware concept. This paper introduces a new multiuser interface design approach based on the translucent video overlay technique. This approach was realized in the multimedia desktop conference system Team WorkStation. Team WorkStation demonstrates that this translucent video overlay technique can achieve two different goals: (1) fused overlay for realizing the open shared workspace, and (2) selective overlay for effectively using limited screen space. This paper first describes the concept of open shared workspace and its implementation based on the fused overlay technique. The shared work window of Team-WorkStation is created by overlaying translucent individual workspace images. Each video layer is originally physically separated. However, because of the spatial relationships among marks on each layer, the set of overlaid layers provides users with sufficient semantics to fuse them into one image. The usefulness of this cognitive fusion was demonstrated through actual usage in design sessions. Second, the problem of screen space limitation is described. To solve this problem, the idea of ClearFace based on selective overlay is introduced. The ClearFace idea is to lay translucent live face video windows over a shared work window. Through the informal observations of experimental use in design sessions, little difficulty was experienced in switching the focus of attention between the face images and the drawing objects. The theory of selective looking accounts for this flexible perception mechanism. Although users can see drawn objects behind a face without difficulty, we found that users hesitate to draw figures or write text over face images. Because of this behavior, we devised the "movable" face window strategy.

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the recent developments in the area of speech processing and in particular in the fields of speech coding and speech recognition. The speech coding review covers DPCM coders, model-based vocoders, waveform coders, and hybrid coders. The hybrid coders are described in some detail since they are the subject of current research. Our treatment of speech recognition techniques concentrates on the methodologies for voice recognition and the progress made in speaker independent recognition. In addition, we describe the efforts towards commercial deployment of this technology.

Binaural effects in two measures are studied. One measure is the detectable limen of click sounds under lateralization of diotic or dichotic noise signals, and the other is phoneme articulation score under localization or lateralization of speech and noise signals. The experiments use a headphones system with listener's own head related transfer function (HRTF) filters. The HRTF filter coefficients are calculated individually from the impulse responses due to the listener's HRTF measured in a slightly sound reflective booth. The frequency response of the headphone is compensated for using an inverse filter calculated from the response at the subject's own ear canal entrance point. Considering the speech frequency band in tele-communication systems is not sufficiently wide, the bandwidth of the HRTF filter is limited below 6.2 kHz. However, the experiments of the localization simulation in the horizontal plane show that the sound image is mostly perceived outside the head in the simulated direction. Under simulation of localization or lateralization of speech and noise signals, the phoneme articulation score increases when the simulation spatially separates the phonemes from the noise signals while the total signal to noise ratio for both ears is maintained constant. This result shows the binaural effect in speech intelligibility under the noise disturbance condition, which is regarded as a part of the cocktail party effect.

In speech output expected as an ideal man-machine interface, there exists an important issue on emotion production in order to not only improve its naturalness but also achieve more sophisticated speech interaction between man and machine. Speech has two aspects, which are prosodic information and phonetic feature. For the purpose of application to natural and high quality speech synthesis, the role of prosody in speech perception has been studied. In this paper, prosodic components, which contribute to the expression of emotions and their intensity, are clarified by analyzing emotional speech and by conducting listening tests of synthetic speech. The analysis is performed by substituting the components of neutral speech (i.e., one with no particular emotion) with those of emotional speech preserving the temporal correspondence by means of DTW. It has been confirmed that prosodic components, which are composed of pitch structure, temporal structure and amplitude structure, contribute to the expression of emotions more than the spectral structure of speech. The results of listening tests using prosodic substituted speech show that temporal structure is the most important for the expression of anger, while all of three components are much more important for the intensity of anger. Pitch structure also plays a significant role in the expression of joy and sadness and their intensity. These results make it possible to convert neutral utterances into utterances expressing various emotions. The results can also be applied to controlling the emotional characteristics of speech in synthesis by rule.

Sound field telecommunication describes a voice communication system, intended to implement a virtual meeting, in which participants at distant sites experience the sensation of sharing a single room for conversation. Binaural synthesis reconstructs the sound propagation pattern of a particular room or environment in the vicinity of each ear, which seems appropriate for a personal multimedia environment. Localization cues in spatial hearing comprise both the sink's transfer function and source attenuation. Sink directional cues are captured by binaural head related transfer functions (HRTFs). Source attenuation is modeled as a frequency-independent function of the direction, dispersion, and distance of the source, capturing sensitivity, amplification, and mutual position. Audio windows, aural analogues of video windows, can be thought of as a user interface to binaural sound presentation for a teleconferencing system. Exocentric representation of audio window entities allows manipulation of all teleconferees in a projected egalitarian medium. We are implementing a system that combines dynamically selected HRTFs with dynamically determined source and sink position, azimuth, focus, and size parameters, controlled via iconic manipulation in a graphical window. With such an interface, users may arrange a virtual conference environment, steering the virtual positions of teleconferees.

The groupware for new idea generation system, GUNGEN, has been developed. GUNGEN consists of a distributed and cooperative KJ method support system and an intelligent productive work card support system. The system was implemented on a network consisting of a number of personal computers. The distributed and cooperative KJ method is carried out on computers. The ideas proposed by participants are classified into several groups on the basis of similarity and then a conclusion is derived. The intelligent productive work card support system can be used as a multimedia database to refer to the previous data of the distributed and cooperative KJ method.

In order to realize flexible interaction control between user and information processing system, a special purpose user model is proposed on the basis of the knowledge-based design method of user interface system. The user-specific control knowledge of user-oriented interface environment is represented explicitly in the user model and utilized in the user-oriented interface system. Furthermore, the framework of user-oriented interface environment based on this user model called user-model-driven interface system, is proposed as one of user-adaptive human interface systems, in this paper. According to the proposed framework, a prototype system of the user-model-driven interface system is implemented and the facility of user-specific interaction control based on the user model has been verified with respect to an electronic mail handling task.

Proposed here is an internal representation and mapping method for multimedia information in which retrieval is based on the impression documents desired to make. A user interface design for a system using this method is also proposed. The proposed internal representation and mapping method represents each desired document impression as an axis in a semantic space. Documents are represented as points in the space. Queries are represented as subspaces. The proposed user interface design employs a method of visual presentation of the semantic space. Pictorial examples are given to illustrate the range of impressions represented by the axes. The relations between the axes are represented by dispersion diagrams for the documents stored in the document base. With this method, the user can intuitively decide the appropriate subspace for his needs and can specify it directly. For evaluation purposes, a prototype system has been developed. An image retrieval experiment shows that the proposed internal representation and mapping method and the user interface design provide effective tools for information retrieval.

This paper deals with communication model in a software development project when there happens some trouble on it. First, we analyze a communication process in the real projects, and investigate what type of communication exists and which aspect is thought to be important by the members of the projects. Then we propose a communication model based on the analysis. We focus on the communication in case of troubles, and the process is modeled using charge, competence and knowledge of each member in the project. The features of the model lies in the ability to simulate communication route dynamically. The results of the simulation is compared with the real data, and also the use of the model for communication support system is discussed.

In the coming information society, people will have to be engaged in the information environment for their everyday activities. We propose a new design concept of Contextual Metaphors for constructing a human interface. It introduces multiple metaphors and makes it easy for people to directly participate into the environment. The major part of the concept is to provide good contextual support for their everyday activities with a layered design of three cognitively distinct concepts. They are the use of everyday based object metaphors, the task oriented assignment of each of metaphors to system functions and the scenario based sequencings of scenes of those metaphors. A prototyping of the concept showed effectiveness of the concept together with some remarks on the actual design.

An optimum placement of capacitors in the layout of Switched Capacitor networks is presented in this paper. The performance of integrated circuits is generally degraded by perturbations of physical parameters of each device and parasitic strays. The optimality imposed in this paper is the minimum degradation of a transfer function with respect to the distribution of capacitance values. A capacitance value per unit area fabricated on a LSI chip is assumed to be perturbed linearly with its x and y coordinates. The capacitor placement is determined so that the effects of such perturbation of capacitances to the overall transfer-characteristics are canceled. As the result, input-output transfer function will stay nominal under the linear perturbation model with arbitrary gradients.

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the problem of floorplanning of the mixed design of macro and standard cells. The proposed algorithm which is based on partitioning and slicing approach, uses a modified min-cut bipartitioning heuristic. The heuristic bipartitions a block of a mixture of macro and standard cells to minimize the netcut, which are the number of nets connecting both sub-blocks, with size constraints. A sub-block is a resulting descendant block. Before starting the bipartitioning of the block, the macro cell with the longest side in the block is selected first. Using edges of the selected macro cell, bipartitionings are performed twice fixing the location of the macro cell on one of 4 corners of the block with its rotation and reflection. Bipartitioning of blocks is repeated until each block has either a macro cell or standard cells without macro cells. As a result of bipartitioning, a slicing tree is constructed. Using the proposed floorplan algorithm, we developed an automatic placement and routing tool, Cell Designer, for the mixed design of macro and standard cells. According to the floorplanner, macro cells are placed and standard cells are grouped into standard cell blocks. Standard cells are placed and routed within estimated area of block using conventional tools. They form a fixed-shaped block like a macro cell. Interconnections between the two adjacent blocks are performed with a conventional channel router. The channels and the order of channel routing are determined following the hierarchy of the slicing tree. Cell Designer has a dedicated graphics editor to provide interactive services to users. Experimental results on well-known benchmark data are shown.

Suppose that there are terminals on two concentric circles, C_in and C_out, with C_in inside of C_out. We are given a set of nets each of which consists of a terminal on C_in and a terminal on C_out. The routing area is the annular region between the two circles. In this paper, we present an O(n^k-1) time algorithm for testing whether the given net set is k-layer routable without vias, where k2 and n is the number of nets.

This paper proposes a technique for designing two-dimensional (2-D) digital filters approximating an arbitrary magnitude function. The technique is based on 2-D spectral factorization and rational approximation of the complex exponential function. A 2-D spectral factorization technique is used to obtain a recursively computable and stable system with nonsymmetric half-plane support from the desired 2-D magnitude function. Since the obtained system has an exponential function type transfer function and cannot be realized directly in a rational form, a class of realizable 2-D digital filters is introduced to approximate the exponential type transfer function. This class of filters referred to as two-dimensional log magnitude approximation (2-D LMA) filters can be viewed as an extension of the class of 1-D LMA filters to the 2-D case. Filter coefficients are given by the 2-D complex cepstrum coefficients, i.e., the inverse Fourier transform of the logarithm of the given magnitude function, which can be efficiently computed using 2-D FFT algorithm. Consequently, computation of the filter coefficients is straightforward and efficient. A simple stability condition for the 2-D LMA filters is given. Under this condition, the stability of the designed filter is guaranteed. Parallel implementation of the 2-D LMA filters is also discussed. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the design capability.

This paper presents a new method for estimating lattice parameters of a system with additive white noise. A new lattice structure filter is used to reduce the effect of additive white noise, and then, an overfitting lattice filter is proposed to obtain the ARMA parameters by using the estimated lattice parameters with additive white noise.

We present schemes for disseminating information in the n-dimensional hypercube with some faulty nodes/edges. If each processor can send a message to t neighbors at each round, and if the number of faulty nodes/edges is k(kn), then this scheme will broadcast information from any source to all destinations within any consecutive n+[(k+l)/t] rounds. We also discuss the case where the number of faulty nodes is not less than n.

Unlike a noise removal recursive or averaging filter, this letter presents a temporal filter which attenuates temporal high frequency components and improves visual effects. Although temporal aliasing occurs, the proposed filter proceeds temporal bandlimitation not affected by them. To reduce effects caused by aliasing components, a spatial filtering which is applied along the trajectory of motion is investigated. The proposed filter presents a de-aliasing and effective bandlimiting characteristics as well as reducing of noises.

In the delayed regulation medel, X(t+1)=AX(t){1-X(t-1)}, new bifurcation regions which have been overlooked in the past studies were found out for -1.01A0 and 2.27563A2.2838. In the former fixed point lying at 0 is destabilized at A=-1, and new type bifurcation is induced for A-1, where oscillation with saw-tooth waveform is observed. In the latter the stability once lost for A2.271 is restored for A2.27563, and the stable region continues up to A=2.2838.