Design and Implementation of Kawaii Robots by Japanese and American University Students using Remote Collaboration

This paper describes our approach to the design and implementation of virtual Kawaii robots and spaces by Japanese and American university students using remote collaboration. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to change our planned 7-week collaboration from in-person to virtual with a resultant change in the target product of our collaboration from real robots to virtual robots. Based on our new plan, students designed virtual spaces with robot pairs, proposed evaluation items for the robot pairs, evaluated their designs, and analyzed the results. The students designed each robot pair with the goal that one robot would be more kawaii and the other would be less kawaii due to a variation in a single attribute such as shape or color. The evaluation instrument used adjective pairs that were suitable to evaluate the affective values of the robot pairs and the virtual spaces the robots occupied. Through the design experience, students learned a lot about Kawaii Engineering and affective evaluation, which gave them a deeper understanding of Japanese culture from the viewpoint of Kansei/Affective Engineering

An Operating System Architecture for Future Information Appliances

Abstract. A software platform for developing future information appliances requires to satisfy various diverse requirements. The operating system architecture presented in this paper enhances the flexibility and dependability through virtualization techniques. The architecture allows a system to use multiple operating systems simultaneously, and to use multi-core processors in a flexible way. Also, dependability mechanisms in our architecture will avoid crashing or hanging a system as much as possible in order to improve the user experience when defects in the software are exposed. We present a brief overview of each component in the operating system architecture and some sample scenarios that illustrate the effectiveness of the architecture

D3h -Symmetric Porphyrin-Based Rigid Macrocyclic Ligands for Multicofacial Multinuclear Complexes in a One-Nanometer-Sized Cavity.

The one-step synthesis of D3h -symmetric cyclic porphyrin trimers 1 composed of three 2,2\u27-[4,4\u27-bis(methoxycarbonyl)]bipyridyl moieties and three porphyrinatozinc moieties was achieved from a nickel-mediated reductive coupling of meso-5,15-bis(6-chloro-4-methoxycarbonylpyrid-2-yl)porphyrinatozinc. Although cyclic trimers 1 were obtained as a mixture that included other cyclic and acyclic porphyrin oligomers, an extremely specific separation was observed only for cyclic trimers 1 when using columns of silica gel modified with pyrenylethyl, cyanopropyl, and other groups. Structural analysis of cyclic trimers 1 was carried out by means of NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography. Treatment of an η(3) -allylpalladium complex with a cyclic trimer gave a tris(palladium) complex containing three η(3) -allylpalladium groups inside the space, which indicated that the bipyridyl moieties inside the ring could work as bidentate metalloligands.The one-step synthesis of D3h -symmetric cyclic porphyrin trimers 1 composed of three 2,2\u27-[4,4\u27-bis(methoxycarbonyl)]bipyridyl moieties and three porphyrinatozinc moieties was achieved from a nickel-mediated reductive coupling of meso-5,15-bis(6-chloro-4-methoxycarbonylpyrid-2-yl)porphyrinatozinc. Although cyclic trimers 1 were obtained as a mixture that included other cyclic and acyclic porphyrin oligomers, an extremely specific separation was observed only for cyclic trimers 1 when using columns of silica gel modified with pyrenylethyl, cyanopropyl, and other groups. Structural analysis of cyclic trimers 1 was carried out by means of NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography. Treatment of an η(3) -allylpalladium complex with a cyclic trimer gave a tris(palladium) complex containing three η(3) -allylpalladium groups inside the space, which indicated that the bipyridyl moieties inside the ring could work as bidentate metalloligands