Japan Animation: from Commercialism to Art

AbstractGuarding children from the too much influence of foreign culture, especially the influence of Western world, Chinese government has been encouraging the production of domestic animation.In China, after 2000, it was decided that more than 60 percent of animations broadcasted on TV must be products of China. Although foreign animation is obliged to be under 40 percent, most of the TV stations except CCTV would not keep the rule. This is the reason why the government decided to take this measure. There is a fact in the background that Disney animations from US and Japan animations are quite popular among Chinese children. Especially, most of the elementary school pupils in the urban area seem to watch such Japan animations as “Detective Konan”, “Ultraman”, “Chibimarukochan”, “Captain Tsubasa” and so on. In China, Japanese animation and Manga are estimated very high. “Doraemon” used to be selected as the “most humorous reading piece” in the research executed by China Social Science Institute.In Japan, the number of the animation pieces broadcasted on TV is about 2500. Including the sales of character goods, the gross sales are more than 1 trillion yens. It will be large enough to be called a “gigantic industry”. Export sales are 100 billion yens a year(half equal to the sales grade of all US movies a year, four times equal to the Japanese export steel sales to US). the share of Japanese animation in the world market is more than 60 percents, 80 percents of animation piece broadcasted on TV in Europe are Japanese product. Not only TV animation but also comics are popular. One can easily find bookshelves filled with “manga” in the bookstores in Asian or European countries. Japanese animation is highlighted as the world wide gigantic industry. Not only from the cultural point of view but also from economical phase connected with the movement of vast amount of money, the problems of globalization, regionalization and localization of animation are going to be focused on.These kinds of animations in Japan, which compose the main stream of commercial animation, produce the particular sub-cultural field that is called “Otaku” culture. Akihabara, where a lot of foreign sightseers went to buy electrical appliance made in Japan, has recently been getting to be the center of “Otaku” culture. With animations, this “Otaku” culture also has spilled on the world. In Europe, as same as Japan, animation events (and even “costume play show” also) are held in various cities. Young people gathering there are called “Otaku” with the respect to the persons who are well up in the sub-culture.In this paper, the presenter will not treat the actual conditions of Japanese animation as the gigantic industry with the worldwide market and vast investment, which even arouse the interference of politics in the various countries and areas. Relatively independent of the main stream commercial animation, there are some artistic and creative animations which have gradually been popular to the audiences. Their method and potentiality will be mainly introduced in the paper. In this boundary also we can find the conflict between the restriction of nationalism and the possibility of globalization, that never means “Amaricanization”.The main objects of this examination are the animation pieces based on the works of MIYAZAWA Kenji, a famous Japanese poet and children story writer of the former 20th century. In these years, he has been regarded as one of the national writer of Japan, and also he has been getting gradually well-known in world wide scale. This paper will show how different are the concepts and methods of these pieces of “animazation” of literature, from the ones of commercial animations, and also will show the endeavor of animators to lessen the restriction of nationalism, localism and so on

Semi-supervised Relation Extraction via Data Augmentation and Consistency-training

Due to the semantic complexity of the Relation extraction (RE) task, obtaining high-quality human labelled data is an expensive and noisy process. To improve the sample efficiency of the models, semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods aim to leverage unlabelled data in addition to learning from limited labelled data points. Recently, strong data augmentation combined with consistency-based semi-supervised learning methods have advanced the state of the art in several SSL tasks. However, adapting these methods to the RE task has been challenging due to the difficulty of data augmentation for RE. In this work, we leverage the recent advances in controlled text generation to perform high quality data augmentation for the RE task. We further introduce small but significant changes to model architecture that allows for generation of more training data by interpolating different data points in their latent space. These data augmentations along with consistency training result in very competitive results for semi-supervised relation extraction on four benchmark datasets.Comment: Previously published at INTERPOLATE @ NeurIPS 2022 worksho

Underdetermination and Decomposition in Kepler’s Astronomia Nova

This paper examines the underdetermination between the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and the Tychonic theories of planetary motions and its attempted resolution by Kepler. I argue that past philosophical analyses of the problem of the planetary motions have not adequately grasped a method through which the underdetermination might have been resolved. This method involves a procedure of what I characterize as decomposition and identification. I show that this procedure is used by Kepler in the first half of the Astronomia Nova, where he ultimately claims to have refuted the Ptolemaic theory, thus partially overcoming the underdetermination. Finally, I compare this method with other views of scientific inference such as bootstrapping

Combined Use of Federated Learning and Image Encryption for Privacy-Preserving Image Classification with Vision Transformer

In recent years, privacy-preserving methods for deep learning have become an urgent problem. Accordingly, we propose the combined use of federated learning (FL) and encrypted images for privacy-preserving image classification under the use of the vision transformer (ViT). The proposed method allows us not only to train models over multiple participants without directly sharing their raw data but to also protect the privacy of test (query) images for the first time. In addition, it can also maintain the same accuracy as normally trained models. In an experiment, the proposed method was demonstrated to well work without any performance degradation on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets

AI 研究とのコラボレーションによる次世代型図書館の構築 ―電気通信大学附属図書館“UEC Ambient Intelligence Agora”―

電気通信大学附属図書館がAI（人工知能）研究との協働によって整備したAmbient IntelligenceAgora は，利用者のためのアクティブラーニングスペースであると同時にAI 研究のための実験空間でもある。学修環境からビッグデータを取得し，AI での解析結果を環境にフィードバックすることを通して，学修者の主体的な学びをAI が支援するアンビエント学修環境の実現を目指している。本稿では，Agora の現況を紹介するとともに，人間と共存・共生する汎用AI の研究開発と図書館のインタラクションによって構築される次世代型図書館の可能性を示す。Ambient Intelligence Agora, which was developed by the University of Electronic Communication University Library in collaboration with AI（Artificial Intelligence）research, is an experiment space for AI research as well as active learning space for library users. By acquisition of big data from a learning environment and feedback of analysis results by AI to the environment, we aim to realize an ambient educational environment where AI supports active learning of students. In this paper, we introduce the current situation of Agora and show the possibility of a next-generation library built by interaction between research and development of general-purpose AI and the library

The Impact of Employee Participation in Accounting Services Outsourcing Decision: Case Study of Nigerian SMEs

This paper titled the Impact of Employee Participation in Accounting Services Outsourcing (ASO) by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Nigeria. The study seeks to identify what factors affect outsourcing decision and the relationship between employee participation and outsourcing decision by SMEs. Therefore the study is mainly guided by the theory of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). The key arguments of this paper were developed in line with TCE Theory. Thematic analysis of 1,300 SMEs using 10 case study based on in-depth interviews with Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) representing 10 industrial sectors. The study area is North Central Geo-Political Zone of Nigeria comprising mainly profit based manufacturing SMEs excluding public not for profit and service oriented enterprises. The study found that ASO decision is affected by cost-driven, strategy-driven, environment-driven and function-driven factors which all are linked with employee attitude and behavior to work. Therefore the study concludes that employee participation has positive influence over sourcing decision by Nigeria’s SMEs. It also confirmed that communication, vendor expertise and trustworthiness are drivers of sourcing decision by these enterprises