Conditional Answer Computation in SOL as Speculative Computation in Multi-Agent Environments1 1This research was supported partly by Grant-in-Aid from The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan.

AbstractIn this paper, we study speculative computation in a master-slave multi-agent system where reply messages sent from slave agents to a master are always tentative and may change from time to time. In this system, default values used in speculative computation are only partially determined in advance. Inoue et al. [8] formalized speculative computation in such an environment with tentative replies, using the framework of a first-order consequence-finding procedure SOL with the well-known answer literal method. We shall further refine the SOL calculus, using conditional answer computation and skip-preference in SOL. The conditional answer format has an great advantage of explicitly representing how a conclusion depends on tentative replies and defaults, both of which are used to derive the conclusion. The dependency representation is significantly important to avoid unnecessary recomputation of tentative conclusions. The skip-preference has the great ability of preventing irrational/redundant derivations

Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue

人と一緒に笑う会話ロボットを開発 --人に共感し、人と共生する会話AIの実現に向けて--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-09-29.Spoken dialogue systems must be able to express empathy to achieve natural interaction with human users. However, laughter generation requires a high level of dialogue understanding. Thus, implementing laughter in existing systems, such as in conversational robots, has been challenging. As a first step toward solving this problem, rather than generating laughter from user dialogue, we focus on “shared laughter, ” where a user laughs using either solo or speech laughs (initial laugh), and the system laughs in turn (response laugh). The proposed system consists of three models: 1) initial laugh detection, 2) shared laughter prediction, and 3) laugh type selection. We trained each model using a human-robot speed dating dialogue corpus. For the first model, a recurrent neural network was applied, and the detection performance achieved an F1 score of 82.6%. The second model used the acoustic and prosodic features of the initial laugh and achieved a prediction accuracy above that of the random prediction. The third model selects the type of system’s response laugh as social or mirthful laugh based on the same features of the initial laugh. We then implemented the full shared laughter generation system in an attentive listening dialogue system and conducted a dialogue listening experiment. The proposed system improved the impression of the dialogue system such as empathy perception compared to a naive baseline without laughter and a reactive system that always responded with only social laughs. We propose that our system can be used for situated robot interaction and also emphasize the need for integrating proper empathetic laughs into conversational robots and agents

Direct observation of local chemical ordering in a few nanometer range in CoCrNi medium-entropy alloy by atom probe tomography and its impact on mechanical properties

ミディアムエントロピー合金の局所規則構造の原子レベル観察に成功 --新しい高強度合金の設計・開発に期待--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2021-08-30.Local chemical ordering in CoCrNi medium-entropy alloy (MEA) was directly observed by the use of atom probe tomography. It was found that the densities of Cr, Co, and Ni were almost the same along the [111] direction, while those along the [001] direction were modulated to take a slightly enhanced and depleted value alternately within approximately 10 atomic layers corresponding to about 2 nm. The degree of modulation of Co and Ni was stronger than that of Cr. It was suggested that Cr-rich {001} atomic layers and (Ni + Co)-rich {001} layers tended to align mutually in the face-centered-cubic CoCrNi solid solution alloy. The mechanical properties of the MEA was found not to be affected by the presence of the local chemical ordering

Character expression for spoken dialogue systems with semi-supervised learning using Variational Auto-Encoder

Character of spoken dialogue systems is important not only for giving a positive impression of the system but also for gaining rapport from users. We have proposed a character expression model for spoken dialogue systems. The model expresses three character traits (extroversion, emotional instability, and politeness) of spoken dialogue systems by controlling spoken dialogue behaviors: utterance amount, backchannel, filler, and switching pause length. One major problem in training this model is that it is costly and time-consuming to collect many pair data of character traits and behaviors. To address this problem, semi-supervised learning is proposed based on a variational auto-encoder that exploits both the limited amount of labeled pair data and unlabeled corpus data. It was confirmed that the proposed model can express given characters more accurately than a baseline model with only supervised learning. We also implemented the character expression model in a spoken dialogue system for an autonomous android robot, and then conducted a subjective experiment with 75 university students to confirm the effectiveness of the character expression for specific dialogue scenarios. The results showed that expressing a character in accordance with the dialogue task by the proposed model improves the user’s impression of the appropriateness in formal dialogue such as job interview

持続的腎代替療法におけるメシル酸ナファモスタットの血中動態

Continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) is the preferred dialysis modality in critical care settings for patients with hemodynamic instability. Nafamostat mesylate (NM) is an anticoagulant commonly used (mainly in Japan) during CRRT in patients with high bleeding risk. In this study, we evaluated the pharmacokinetics of NM during CRRT. Patients undergoing CRRT therapy and using NM as the anticoagulant in the intensive care unit were enrolled in the study. Blood was collected from the CRRT circuit just after blood removal, just before and after the membrane for CRRT, and from the filtrates after the membrane. NM concentrations were measured using high-performance liquid chromatography. NM was detected in the intracorporeal circulation during CRRT in some cases, and liver enzymes were severely elevated in almost all of the cases. Coagulation time was prolonged even before the initiation of NM administration in these cases and may be associated with liver damage. This study suggests that NM dosage should take into account liver damage assessed by elevated liver enzymes.博士（医学）・乙第1531号・令和5年3月15