Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Japan: Reading, Writing, and New Technology

My dissertation is an ethnographically inspired theoretical exploration of the crises of reading and writing in contemporary Japan. Each of the five chapters examines concrete instances of reading and writing practices that have been problematized in recent decades. By calling attention to underlying moral assumptions, established sociocultural protocols, and socio-technological conditions of the everyday, I theorize the concept of embodied reading and writing thresholds. The scope of analysis is partly informed by popular discourse decrying a perceived decline in reading and writing proficiency among Japanese youth. This alleged failing literacy figures as a national crisis under the assumption that the futurity of children's national language proficiency metonymically correlates with the future well being of its national cultural body. In light of heightened interests in the past, present, and future of books, and a series of recent state interventions on the prospect of "national" text culture, it is my argument that ongoing tensions surrounding the changing media landscape and symbolic relations to the world do not merely reflect changes in styles of language, structures of spatiotemporal awareness, or forms of knowledge production. Rather, they indicate profound transformations and apprehensions among the lives mediated and embodied by the very system of signification that has come under scrutiny in the post-Lost Decade Japan (03/1991-01/2002). My dissertation offers an unique point of critical intervention into 1) various forms of tension arising from the overlapping media technologies and polarized population, 2) formations of reading and writing body (embodiment) at an intersection of heterogeneous elements and everyday disciplining, 3) culturally specific conditions and articulations of the effects of "universal" technologies, 4) prospects of "proper" national reading and writing culture, and 5) questions of cultural transformation and transmission. I hope that the diverse set of events explored in respective chapters provide, as a whole, a broader perspective of the institutional and technological background as well as an intimate understanding of culturally specific circumstances in Japan. Insofar as this is an attempt to conduct a nuanced inquiry into the culturally specific configurations and articulations of a global phenomenon, each ethnographic moment is carefully contextualized to reflect Japan specific conditions while avoiding the pitfall of culturalist assumptions. Understanding how an existing system of representation, technological imperatives and sociohistorical predicaments have coalesced to form a unique constellation is the first step in identifying how the practice of reading and writing becomes a site of heated national debate in Japan. Against theories that problematize the de-corporealizing effects of digital technology within reading and writing, I emphasize the material specificity of contemporary reading and writing practices

Recognition of Japanese handwritten characters with Machine learning techniques

The recognition of Japanese handwritten characters has always been a challenge for researchers. A large number of classes, their graphic complexity, and the existence of three different writing systems make this problem particularly difficult compared to Western writing. For decades, attempts have been made to address the problem using traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techniques, with mixed results. With the recent popularization of machine learning techniques through neural networks, this research has been revitalized, bringing new approaches to the problem. These new results achieve performance levels comparable to human recognition. Furthermore, these new techniques have allowed collaboration with very different disciplines, such as the Humanities or East Asian studies, achieving advances in them that would not have been possible without this interdisciplinary work. In this thesis, these techniques are explored until reaching a sufficient level of understanding that allows us to carry out our own experiments, training neural network models with public datasets of Japanese characters. However, the scarcity of public datasets makes the task of researchers remarkably difficult. Our proposal to minimize this problem is the development of a web application that allows researchers to easily collect samples of Japanese characters through the collaboration of any user. Once the application is fully operational, the examples collected until that point will be used to create a new dataset in a specific format. Finally, we can use the new data to carry out comparative experiments with the previous neural network models

アメリカ人および日本人によるオンラインコミュニケーションの対照分析 ―人気日記ブログにおけるUMCの機能と用法を中心に―

Tohoku University上原聡課

Onsetsu hyoki no kyotsusei ni motozuita Ajia moji nyuryoku intafesu ni kansuru kenkyu

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3450号 ; 学位の種類:博士(国際情報通信学) ; 授与年月日:2011/10/26 ; 早大学位記番号:新577

Graphonomics and your Brain on Art, Creativity and Innovation : Proceedings of the 19th International Graphonomics Conference (IGS 2019 – Your Brain on Art)

[Italiano]: “Grafonomia e cervello su arte, creatività e innovazione”. Un forum internazionale per discutere sui recenti progressi nell'interazione tra arti creative, neuroscienze, ingegneria, comunicazione, tecnologia, industria, istruzione, design, applicazioni forensi e mediche. I contributi hanno esaminato lo stato dell'arte, identificando sfide e opportunità, e hanno delineato le possibili linee di sviluppo di questo settore di ricerca. I temi affrontati includono: strategie integrate per la comprensione dei sistemi neurali, affettivi e cognitivi in ambienti realistici e complessi; individualità e differenziazione dal punto di vista neurale e comportamentale; neuroaesthetics (uso delle neuroscienze per spiegare e comprendere le esperienze estetiche a livello neurologico); creatività e innovazione; neuro-ingegneria e arte ispirata dal cervello, creatività e uso di dispositivi di mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) indossabili; terapia basata su arte creativa; apprendimento informale; formazione; applicazioni forensi. / [English]: “Graphonomics and your brain on art, creativity and innovation”. A single track, international forum for discussion on recent advances at the intersection of the creative arts, neuroscience, engineering, media, technology, industry, education, design, forensics, and medicine. The contributions reviewed the state of the art, identified challenges and opportunities and created a roadmap for the field of graphonomics and your brain on art. The topics addressed include: integrative strategies for understanding neural, affective and cognitive systems in realistic, complex environments; neural and behavioral individuality and variation; neuroaesthetics (the use of neuroscience to explain and understand the aesthetic experiences at the neurological level); creativity and innovation; neuroengineering and brain-inspired art, creative concepts and wearable mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) designs; creative art therapy; informal learning; education; forensics

Brushed in Light

Drawing on a millennia of calligraphy theory and history, Brushed in Light examines how the brushed word appears in films and in film cultures of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and PRC cinemas. This includes silent era intertitles, subtitles, title frames, letters, graffiti, end titles, and props. Markus Nornes also looks at the role of calligraphy in film culture at large, from gifts to correspondence to advertising. The book begins with a historical dimension, tracking how calligraphy is initially used in early cinema and how it is continually rearticulated by transforming conventions and the integration of new technologies. These chapters ask how calligraphy creates new meaning in cinema and demonstrate how calligraphy, cinematography, and acting work together in a single film. The last part of the book moves to other regions of theory. Nornes explores the cinematization of the handwritten word and explores how calligraphers understand their own work