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Professor |
Assistant Professor |
Research
Development of ubiquitous platform
We have proposed a situation-aware model to specify the situations of users, define
actions on the situations, so that when the situations really happen, defined actions
will be triggered to provide services to the users.Ubiquitous learning applications
In this research, we studied on the following problemsInvestigation of functional safety methods in embedded systems
Functional safety is a concept regarding safety, which means even though the device
has some problems or failures, the system should have some ways to guarantee
people/equipment get less damages than a designed level. Concepts and methods
of functional safety have been used in many traditional industries, such as nuclear
energy industry, railway, etc. for years, but have not been well used in embedded
systems. In 2008, a member of this lab, continued to investigate the trend of
world on functional safety for embedded systems, and designed a course on the
functional safety corporately with faculty of other laboratory and IPA/SEC. In
addition, researched on new architecture for functional safety of software and its
applications were carried.RIDEE(Realtime Interactive Distance Education Environment)
This research focuses on the support of real-tiem and interactive distance education
activities. One result of this research is a computer system, named RIDEE system.
In 2008, the comunication control subsystem of RIDEE system has been redesigned
to get the scalability in IPv4 environment especially private networks connected
the Internet by NAT (Network Address Transfer) devices. The basic design has
been finished and a prototype has been developed.Skill Evaluation Support for Nuclear Power Plant Operator Training
In Japan, more than 20 nuclear power plants are in operation. To keep the safety
of nuclear power plants, the ability for the operators to deal with dangerous case is
very important. To get good skill in nuclear power plant operation, every operator
is trained in a training center where is equipped with a full-mock simulator of
nuclear power plant control room. In the training center, the operators learn how
to control a nuclear reactor and how to deal with various warning or dangerous
cases. Operator’s skill evaluation will be given by examinations based on scenarios
of warning or dangerous cases. Currently, this kind of evaluation is done based
on the subjective judgment of the instructors and the following training data:
(1)Warning scenario and operation log in the examinations. (2)Video and audio
recorded in the examinations.Computer Programming Contest Support
PC Kosien, a nationwide high school student personal computer programming
contest, is an important educational activity organized by the University of Aizu.Computer Programming Language Education Support
C language is a major computer programming language, being widely used in software
system development and education of computer science. However, comparing
with other computer languages, C language is difficult and little uninteresting to
its beginners and therefore, it takes more time to learn or teach. To give those
beginners a interesting and comprehensible way to learn C language, we proposed
a technique to make C language program visible. By this technique, the change of
program status such as variable value in each step can be displayed in a graphical
way. The effectiveness of this proposal was confirmed by experiments.Education
Courses
Members of our laboratory taught the following courses in AY2008.
Undergraduate courses
– Communication and Networks IGraduate courses
Computer Communications and Networking (801) Supervising students
3 Ph.D students, 7 master students, 10 seniors did their research work in AY2008
in the laboratory, under the supervision of the professors in the lab.-
Theses
4 Masters, and 11 seniors finished their theses in AY2008, and graduated, under
the supervision of the professors in the laboratory. Aizu IT Nisshikan factory
A factory for experiencing venture starting up is
continued, as a part of Good Practice program supported by MEXT. Every week,
there is an activity time, when the students discussed with professors and/of engineers
in companies on how to develop new systems and product for business.Contribution to local region
- Professors of this laboratory helped for preparation and operation of U. Aizu Computer
Science Summer Camp.
- Professor Aiguo He made big contribution to the PC KOSHIEN (PC contest sponsored
by the Fukushima prefecture).
- Professors of this laboratory gave several off-campus lectures to students and teachers
of high-schools, and citizens in the Fukushima prefecture).
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In order to realized the proposed model, we implement a ubiquitous platform called ubiquitous tiles system, by which users identifications and location can be acquired with corresponding relation between a user and his/her location, to detect the situations. In 2008, we were trying to build a variety of applications based on the platform, including dangerous detection systems. Specially, we designed context-aware systems considering the relations among users, surrounding objects, and environment of the users. (1) A Courseware Platform for Safety Education through Dual Experience based Learning Using an Integrated Environment of a Miniaturized World and a Computerized World. Ubiquitous computing has been widespread. Ubiquitous learning is one of fields utilizing such technologies and gives learners more effective and personalized education than the traditional one. Safety education is necessary for children since accidents and crimes against them happen increasingly in recent years. The children might need to protect them from dangers by themselves. It is important for the children to learn safety knowledge through real experiences on dangers. However, it is not always realizable because of lack of opportunities and possibilities of hurting the children. In contrast, a virtual experience is possible and popular to educate the children in some way such as using computers. However, only virtual experiences might be insufficient for children to practice what they learnt in the real world. Therefore we propose a novel approach by fusing a real world and virtual space to let a learner have dual experiences in both real and virtual worlds. We design a support system which employs the following techniques: (1) a platform of dual experiencing learning, (2) dual experiencing learning scenario design policies, and (3) personalized dual experiencing learning course. (2) A SupportMethod with Changeable Training Strategies based onMutual Adaptation between a Ubiquitous Pet and a Learner With the progress of ubiquitous technology, ubiquitous learning presents new opportunities to learners. Training for acquiring skills and enhancing physical abilities through exercise and experience in the real world is an important domain in u-learning. A training process may last for several days and has one or more training units (exercises) for a day. A learners performance in a unit is considered as short term state. The performance in a series of units may change with patterns: progress, plateau, and decline. Long term state in a series of units is accumulatively computed based on short term states. In a learning/training process, it is necessary to apply different support strategies to adapt different states of the learner. Adaptation in learning support is significant, because a learner loses his/her interests easily without adaptation. Systems with the adaptive support usually provide stimulators to a learner, and a learner can have a great motivation in learning at beginning. However, when the stimulators reach some levels, the learner may quite lose his/her motivation, because the long term learning state of the learner changes dynamically, which means a progress state may change to a plateau state or a decline state. In different long term learning states, different types of stimulators are needed. However, the stimulators or advices provided by the existing systems are monotonic without changeable support strategies. We propose a mutual adaptive support. The mutual adaptation means each of the system and the learner has their own states. On one hand, the system tries to change its state to adapt the learners state for providing adaptive support. On the other hand, the learner can change its performance following the advices given based on the state of the system. We create a ubiquitous pet (u-pet) as a metaphor of our system. The u-pet can perform actions with a learner in training, and change its own attributes based on the learners attributes, and adjust its own learning rate by a learning function. The u-pet grasps the state of the learner, and adopt different training support strategies to the learners training based on the learners short and long term state. In order to get high level training, the next step of skill evaluation is quantitative evaluation including checking operator’s mental condition etc. This kind of evaluation needs more detail information about trainee’s operation and even behavior. For example, when a trainee faces a dangerous case, he should act such as follows: (1)Pointing his finger to the indicators or meters on the control panel which will give the reasons of the dangerous case. (2)Firmly checking all necessary points with eyes before performing a control operation (3)Firmly asking the permission from the group leader before performing a control operation (4)Therefore, moving passing an optimal path in the control room. This research is to support the training center to realize quantitative evaluation of nuclear reactor operator. The goal of this research is to support the programming contest, not only for the contest players, but also for the spectators, especially providing services to the spectators; making them more exciting, giving them more enjoyment, so that they will have more interests for computer, programming, and our university. As the result, a programming contest management support system, PCSS, has been used in PC Kosien every year. A lot of functions were added to PCSS by 2008 fiscal year. – Communication and Networks II – Computer Languages – Programming Java (Only exercise class) – Distributed Algorithms (808) – Functional Safety of Critical Systems (950) – Ubiquitous network systems and its applications (956) – Fundamentals and Practices of High Quality and Safety-Critical Embedded Systems (963) |
Refereed Journal Papers
| [aiguo-01:2008] |
Aiguo He. An Understanding Information Management System for a
Real-time Interactive Distance Education Environment. International Journal
of Distance Education Technologies, 7:44–57, 2008 |
| A real-time interactive distance lecture is a joint work between the lecturer and
the students mutually away. It is important for the lecturer to get understanding
information from the students which cannot be efficiently collected by only using
video/audio channels between the lecturer and the students. This paper proposes
RIDEE-UIM(Understanding Information Management system for Real-time Interactive
Distance Education Environment) for collecting understanding information from
each participant to the lecturer during real time distance education activities. The
usefulness of RIDEE-UIM has been confirmed by experiments. This paper describes
the basic idea, implementation and experiments of RIDEE-UIM. |
|
| [z-cheng-01:2008] |
H. Ozaki, A. Kara, and Z. Cheng. User-perceived Reliability of Mfor-
N (M:N) Shared Protection Systems. IEICE Trans. INF.& SYST., E92-
D(3):443–450, 2009. |
| User-perceived Reliability of M-for-N (M:N) Shared Protection Systems are proposed. |
Refereed Proceeding Papers
| [z-cheng-02:2008] |
Lei Jing, Xianzhi Ye, and Zixue Cheng. A Ubiquitous Learning System
Based on the Digital Artifacts. In the 1st IEEE International Conference on
Ubi-Media Computing (U-Media2008), pages 314 - 319, 2008. |
| A Ubiquitous Learning System is proposed. |
|
| [z-cheng-03:2008] |
Xianzhi Ye, Lei Jing, and Zixue Cheng. A Ubiquitous Learning System
Using Co-learning Ubiquitous Pet for Enhancing Educational Effect,. In 2008
IEEE 8th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology
Workshops, pages 494–500, Jul. 2008. |
| In recent years, with the improving of ubiquitous technology, ubiquitous learning combined
with tiny ubiquitous computing devices has provided great educational effect for
users. In the aspect of learning process in traditional ubiquitous learning systems, in
some systems users need to follow the instruction of the systems, and in other systems,
they adapt to users. However, these may result to that users are hard to catch the
learning process at first or may be tired of the learning process easily. To solve these
problems, we believe that a co-learning process is needed. In this paper, we propose
a ubiquitous learning system using co-learning for enhancing the education effect. We
create a virtual pet referred as ubiquitous pet. A Ubiquitous pet can progress with a
user through its own progress attributes, and according to the gap of learning progress
between the user and the ubiquitous pet, the ubiquitous pet will actively learn from
the user or teach the user. To specify those traits, we consider both internal events
and external events for the rule reasoning in our system, and to explicitly describe the
condition of learning environment, we give a further definition in the external event
and the internal event. |
|
| [z-cheng-04:2008] |
Junbo Wang and Zixue Cheng. Designing an Indoor Situation-aware
Ubiquitous Platform Using Rule-based Reasoning Method. In 2008 International
Computer Symposium, pages pp.82–87(Vol.1). Tamkang University, Department
of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University,
Nov. 2008. |
| In recent years, with the development of computing technology, it becomes realizable
to use embedded micro-processors in order to provide a variety of services. For example,
some systems have been proposed to provide context-aware services such as
protecting children from dangers, taking care of patients and so on, by getting the
user ’s surrounding information using mobile computing technology and sensor networks.
However, these systems can not describe the information gotten from sensor
network as situations explicitly and uniformly, and also can not recognize the specified
situations defined by the users. Therefore, we design this ubiquitous platform which
can accomplish the above functions. We get the indoor objects position information
from U-tile sensor network. And we design a language named SDML which is based
on the situation theory to describe situations explicitly and uniformly. We also design
an easy-to-understand interface to let users sketch the specified situations and support
actions on those situations, which can be transformed into situations by SDML and
then into rules. Finally we use the rules to recognize the specified situations by comparison
the information grasped by the U-tile sensors with the user-defined situations,
and provide the corresponding support services. |
Grants
| [z-cheng-05:2008] |
Zixue Cheng. Ministry of Education Scientific Research Fund, 2006-
2008. |
Ph.D, Master and Bachelor Theses
| [z-cheng-06:2008] |
Lei Jing d8071202. Doctor Thesis: Ubiquitous Learning Systems for
Interactive and Personalized Education in Everyday Life, University of Aizu,
2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-07:2008] |
Hikaru Nihei (m5111223). Master Thesis: An Experience-based Safety
Education Platform for Children using Web Camera and Infrared Camera,
University of Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-08:2008] |
Kentaro Sato (m5111220). Master Thesis: Relation-oriented Contextaware
Services for Preventing Users from Leaking Information to Others, University
of Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-09:2008] |
Xianzhi Ye (m5111225). Master Thesis: A Co-Learning Support System
Using Changeable Educational Strategies for Enhancing Learning Effect,
University of Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-10:2008] |
Hiroshi Oki (s1130052). Graduation Thesis: Support System for Arranging
Child ’s Life Rhythm by Using a Virtual Character and RF-ID Technology,
University of Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-11:2008] |
Tomoaki Tamura (s1130144). Graduation Thesis: A Dynamic Information
Board Based on Relation-Oriented Context-Aware Service for Improving
Satisfaction of Users, University of Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-12:2008] |
Hiroaki Kimura (s1130067). Graduation Thesis: A Safety Education
Courseware Aimed at Improvement of the Learning Efficiency by Introduction
Competition on Multi Player Game Based Learning, University of Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-13:2008] |
Kazuhiro Ishizuka (s1130019). Graduation Thesis: A Functional
Safety Module for Elevator Systems Using Linked Software Monitors Architecture,
University of Aizu, 2008 Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
| [z-cheng-14:2008] |
Kohichi Egawa (s1130035). Graduation Thesis: Linked Software Monitores
: A new Architecture for Functional Safety of Software, University of
Aizu, 2008. Thesis Advisor: Zixue Cheng |
