- Principal Investigator: Ian Wilson
Title: Dialects of the Aizu Area: Digital Audio Documentation and Phonetic
Analysis
Amount: Y=1,109,000
With Japan fs decreasing birth rate and increasing migration of young people
from rural to urban areas, the endangerment of a number of Japanese dialects
is inevitable. In this light, it is regrettable that with such a rich diversity of
dialects in the Aizu area, no audio databases exist of actual speech samples of
the dialects. Language and dialects change over time and it is useful for linguists
and anthropologists to have a systematic and high-quality record of how language
is spoken in a given era. With this in mind, our research focused on creating a
publicly-available audio database of the dialects of Aizu, before it is too late.
A total of 7 fieldwork trips were made, 4 to areas in Minami-Aizu and 3 to areas
in Nishi-Aizu. Two of the recording sessions were filmed by television film crews:
NHK, TUF, and Nishi-Aizu Cable TV. A total of 26 language informants were
recorded, but more were present during group-recording sessions. Their ages ranged
from 26 years old to 100 years old (not including elementary school students who
participated in a video session), and the average age of the 26 informants was
approximately 69 years old. Data that was collected included (a) picture card
identification, (b) conversations between Aizu speakers, and (c) culturally-relevant
monologues. A website was created (in Japanese) and many samples of our data
can be downloaded there. The research project funding was renewed in AY 2009.
- Principal Investigator: Kazuyoshi Mori
Title: On Public Lectures for Building Personal Computers and for Installation of
Softwares
Amount: Y=655,000
On this project, we have implemented five public lectures (July 7 , July 26, August
9 and November 29, and February 14). The implementation was based on the
past public lectures held in 2007 and newly included the introductions of software
installation and personal computers with AMD CPU. The software installed in the
public lectures are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Acroread. The AMD CPU we
used is Phenom X4.
Five implementation of the public lecture were for elementary school students,
junior high school students, and other persons. This made participation of this
public lecture easy for many people. The related URL of the public lecture is
http://pcjisaku.u-aizu.ac.jp/
- Principal Investigator: Haruo Terasaka
Title: Research for local weather forecasting system in Fukushima Prefecture (with
a central focus on Aizu area)
Amount: Y=2,000,000
This research aims to develop a new very high-resolution weather forecasting system
for Aizu area. The system can provide micro-scale weather information for
agricultural and forestry industries, for local governments to prevent and to mitigate
natural disasters.
- Principal Investigator: Keitaro Naruse
Title: Development of educational robot kits using RFID tags
Amount: Y=900,000
The objective of this project is to develop education robot kits. The conventional
robot kits show good mechanical design and controller modules. However, they
do not have a good sensor system for measuring its current position. It means it
is almost impossible to develop a mobile robot because it cannot know where it
is and where to go. To solve the problem, it this project, we have developed a
position detection system using RFID system. RFID tags can be placed anywhere
in a workspace of robots, and the robots detect and read the tags, then it knows
where it is. It is implemented to simple robot kits and verified.
- Principal Investigator: Takafumi Hayashi
Title: A Knowledge Information Infrastructure usingMessage Networking -Sapience
Networking-
Amount: Y=1,531,000
This project will study a novel intelligent infrastructure for theg intelligent hexchange
of knowledge. The proposed infrastructure is constructed by SOA-based
approach and a messaging network architectures. The proposed solution uses a
messaging networking, which is a type of content-aware network realized as an
overlay network. The project will study of network-centric Mash-up of web services
and various contents by using messaging network technologies. As an sample
system, we are constructing an integration of sight-seeing information in Aizu area
and a integrated contents service for the culture related with forest in Fukushima
prefecture.
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