Pro-social motive promotes early understanding of false belief

Ever since Premack & Woodruff's classic article^1^, which introduced the term "theory of mind", researchers have claimed that strategic deception is the most natural behavioural consequence of understanding false belief. Here we challenge that claim, and provide evidence for the first time that the earliest manifestation of false belief understanding in human development is found in young children's emerging pro-social behaviours. In a modified false belief task, children were asked either to choose one protagonist they should help to find the object (the pro-social context), or to choose one they need to deceive so that none of the protagonists can find the object (the competitive context). The results show that the pro-social motive, but not the competitive motive, boosts early false belief understanding. This is most clearly contrasted with findings that apes, our closest living relatives, are capable of intentionally manipulating others by concealing information only under competitive motives, not under cooperative alternatives. Thus, the current findings are the strongest to date that sophisticated understanding of others' belief in humans has its unique origin, separate from the primate origin at some point in recent evolution, when cooperative and communicative motives played an essential role for their survival

A Graduate Student Perspective on How Student Engagements Enrich and Enhance Multicultural Awareness on the Campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato

The challenges of enhancing and enriching student engagement, in order to promote multicultural awareness, on the campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato are the impetuses of this study. Multicultural awareness involves a greater understanding, sensitivity, and appreciation of the history, experiences, and lifestyles of different racial and ethnic groups. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to promote multicultural awareness through domestic and international students\u27 engagements on the campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato. Four different theoretical perspectives explained the study, for example, Tinto\u27s (1975) social integration theory, which emphasizes that one main function of higher education is to socialize students into university life. The study employed quantitative research methods to collect primary data. The information was gathered from students through a questionnaire consisting of 33 items. Data was analyzed using a version 12,018 of Qualtrics computer software. The subject of study is multicultural awareness (dependent variable). The number of responses from the participants in the online survey was 275 students of total student population of 14,000. The chi-square tests of research hypotheses are supported. The study revealed that most American students and international students think that their educational experiences and multicultural awareness are enriched through engagement in both curricular and extra-curricular activities

A kernel for time series based on global alignments

We propose in this paper a new family of kernels to handle times series, notably speech data, within the framework of kernel methods which includes popular algorithms such as the Support Vector Machine. These kernels elaborate on the well known Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) family of distances by considering the same set of elementary operations, namely substitutions and repetitions of tokens, to map a sequence onto another. Associating to each of these operations a given score, DTW algorithms use dynamic programming techniques to compute an optimal sequence of operations with high overall score. In this paper we consider instead the score spanned by all possible alignments, take a smoothed version of their maximum and derive a kernel out of this formulation. We prove that this kernel is positive definite under favorable conditions and show how it can be tuned effectively for practical applications as we report encouraging results on a speech recognition task

Tweet Analysis for Enhancement of COVID-19 Epidemic Simulation: A Case Study in Japan

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in December 2019, progressed in a complicated manner and thus caused problems worldwide. Seeking clues to the reasons for the complicated progression is necessary but challenging in the fight against the pandemic. We sought clues by investigating the relationship between reactions on social media and the COVID-19 epidemic in Japan. Twitter was selected as the social media platform for study because it has a large user base in Japan and because it quickly propagates short topic-focused messages ("tweets"). Analysis using Japanese Twitter data suggests that reactions on social media and the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic may have a close relationship. Experiments to evaluate the potential of using tweets to support the prediction of how an epidemic will progress demonstrated the value of using epidemic-related social media data. Our findings provide insights into the relationship between user reactions on social media, particularly Twitter, and epidemic progression, which can be used to fight pandemics.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

統計的機械学習による都市インテリジェンス研究

Open House, ISM in Tachikawa, 2018.6.15統計数理研究所オープンハウス（立川）、H30.6.15ポスター発

統計的機械学習による音声/画像/SNS情報解析に関する研究

Open House, ISM in Tachikawa, 2013.6.14統計数理研究所オープンハウス（立川）、H25.6.14ポスター発

統計的機械学習による音声認識研究

Open House, ISM in Tachikawa, 2017.6.16統計数理研究所オープンハウス（立川）、H29.6.16ポスター発

Analysis of COVID-19 evolution based on testing closeness of sequential data

A practical algorithm has been developed for closeness analysis of sequential data that combines closeness testing with algorithms based on the Markov chain tester. It was applied to reported sequential data for COVID-19 to analyze the evolution of COVID-19 during a certain time period (week, month, etc.)

An attempt to reproduce petrographic features of mesosiderites

The Tenth Symposium on Polar Science/Poster presentations: [OA] Antarctic meteorites, Wed. 4 Dec. / Entrance Hall (1st floor), National Institute of Polar Researc