Hiroaki Ogata

Current projects

Research on Ubiquitous Learning
Keywords: Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile and wireless technologies, Knowledge Awareness, Right time and right place learning, Language Learning, Just-in-time Learning

TANGO: Vocaburary Learning with RFID tags

suports to link phisical objects and vocaburaries with RFID tags.

JAPELAS

helps to learn Japanese polite expressions by detecting users' social relationships etc.

JAMIOLAS

helps to learn Japanese omomatopoeia with Phigedts sensors.

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Past Projects

Sharlok: Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environment

Knowledge awareness (KA) has been proposed to increase collaboration opportunities in an open ended and collaborative learning environment. To encourage collaboration, an individual user’s agent called KA-Agent autonomously informs the learner about up-to-the-minute activities from other learners. For instance, a message might be “someone is looking at the same knowledge that you are looking at.” Although this message, called active KA, is very useful to create real-time collaboration, a large number of messages often confuse learners and disturb their learning. Therefore, the agent has to have an information filtering facility to inform a learner of the important messages of KA. This paper describes a KA filtering technique based on some educational strategies toward efficient collaborative learning.

CoCoA: Computer Supported Collaborative Correction Environment

CoCoA (Commutative Collection Assisting System) is a computer-mediated language-learning environment that supports students and teachers to exchange marked-up documents via Internet.  Its environment is very similar to a real one in which people use paper and pen.  CoCoA allows teachers not only to correct the compositions sent from foreigners by E-mail, but also learners to see where and why the teacher corrected them.  CoCoA improves the opportunities that foreigners have for writing Japanese compositions and for receiving instructions from teachers.  In order to record and exchange corrected compositions with some marks and some comments, this paper also proposes CCML (Communicative Correction Mark-up Language), which is based on XML. 

PeCo: Computer Supported Social Networking Environment

Beyond the information stored in pages of the World Wide Web, a type of ``meta-information'' is created when they connect to each other. This new information is a collective effect of independent users writing and linking pages, hidden from the casual individual user. Accessing it and understanding the inter-relation of community and content in the WWW is a challenging problem to form a new community or join an exiting community in social creativity & lifelong learning. We have developed a prototype system called “community-finder”, which visualize topic-specified relationships can be precisely located by looking only at the graph of hyperlinks, gleaning content and context from the Web without having to read what is in the pages. Noting that reciprocal links (co-links) between pages signal a mutual recognition of authors. In addition, the system detects the central person based on social network analysis.  The central person means the mainly active contributor in the community. The user might obtain much information from the center person about the keywords that the user gave as well as from the web page of the center person. Moreover, social network represented with direct graph shows the access to the center person.

Neckle: Network based Communicative Kanji Learning Environment

This project focuses on the problem of language transfer in foreign language learning. The transfer caused by the difference between learner’s mother language and target language, often leads a communicative gap. This paper first analyzes the semantic relations between learner’s mother language and target language. Then proposes a CGM (Communicative Gap Model) due to language difference. We have developed a communicative language-learning environment called Neckle (Network-based Communicative Kanji Learning Environment) to support foreign language learning through communication with native speakers. Neckle has a software agent called Ankle (Agent for Kanji Learning). Ankle observes the conversation between the learner and the native speaker, checks up the communicative gap according to CGM, and notices the gap for the support of language learning congenial to each learner. Learners can not only be aware of the language difference but also acquire its cultural background from the native speakers.

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