Evaluation of a Video Generation Method Linking Dance and Scenes

Owing to the impact of COVID-19, the venues for dancers to perform have shifted from the stage to the media. In this study, we focus on the creation of dance videos that allow audiences to feel a sense of excitement without disturbing their awareness of the dance subject and propose a video generation method that links the dance and the scene by utilizing a sound detection method and an object detection algorithm. The generated video was evaluated using the Semantic Differential method, and it was confirmed that the proposed method could transform the original video into an uplifting video without any sense of discomfort. © 2023 SPIE.

-Editorial-SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE JULY 2020 HEAVY RAINFALL EVENT IN JAPAN

In July 2020, the Kyushu region experienced record-breaking heavy rains from July 4 to7, causing extreme floods in the Kuma and Chikugo Rivers. This was followed by atmospheric instability over a wide area from western Japan to the Tohoku region, resulting in heavy rainfall on July 13-14 in the Chugoku region, and on July 27-28 in the Tohoku region. There was also flooding of large rivers including the Go River and the Mogami River. In recent years, record-breaking torrential rainfall disasters have been occurring every year. The heavy precipitation scale has been increasing in space and time as well as in rainfall intensity, resulting in spatio-temporal expansion of the damage. Furthermore, in 2020, the disaster occurred amidst the restriction of social activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The compilation and dissemination of disaster survey data and lessons are essential for the sustainable development of society. Therefore, JSCE has planned a special issue on the July 2020 torrential rain disaster to share and disseminate disaster information and to contribute to the advancement of technology and science related to disaster prevention and mitigation. © 2022 Japan Society of Civil Engineers. All rights reserved.

Effects of Digital Avatar on Perceived Social Presence and Co-presence in Business Meetings Between the Managers and Their Co-workers

Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, more people in the workforce, especially in the IT industry, started working from home. This brought a set of issues and challenges for both workers and companies across the globe such as losing touch with other co-workers. This could potentially result in decrease of the performance and innovation. This paper investigates effects of using digital avatar robots in virtual meeting environment, specifically, focusing on the perception of social presence and co-presence between workers and their managers. Our experiment results showed that majority of participants felt an improvement in social presence, co-presence and overall virtual meeting experience while using digital avatar for their meetings, especially to those who has a meeting with less familiar persons or persons from the higher corporate hierarchy. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Using an Android Robot to Improve Social Connectedness by Sharing Recent Experiences of Group Members in Human-Robot Conversations

Social connectedness is vital for developing group cohesion and strengthening belongingness. However, with the accelerating pace of modern life, people have fewer opportunities to participate in group-building activities. Furthermore, owing to the teleworking and quarantine requirements necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the social connectedness of group members may become weak. To address this issue, in this study, we used an android robot to conduct daily conversations, and as an intermediary to increase intra-group connectedness. Specifically, we constructed an android robot system for collecting and sharing recent member-related experiences. The system has a chatbot function based on BERT and a memory function with a neural-network-based dialog action analysismodel. We conducted a 3-day human-robot conversation experiment to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system. The results of a questionnaire-based evaluation and empirical analysis demonstrate that the proposed system can increase the familiarity and closeness of group members. This suggests that the proposed method is useful for enhancing social connectedness. Moreover, it can improve the closeness of the user-robot relation, as well as the performance of robots in conducting conversations with people.