Dr. Yasuhiro Ota, IEEE Senior Member, received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Wyoming in 1991, 1993, and 1996, respectively. Currently, he takes a leading role as Project Manager for the Partner Robot Group at Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America. He is also active as one of few Japanese delegates for the ISO robot standardization committee.
In addition to Dr. Ota’s professional experience in industry, he has served as an organizing chair and several session chairs for various IEEE conferences. Furthermore, he has demonstrated his professional carrier as a reviewer for several IEEE conference proceedings and journals.

According to EU reports for every 1000 Europeans 4 are blind or visually impaired. Lack of truly independent mobility is one of the main factors depriving the blind of active professional and social lives. In spite of worldwide research efforts on assistive mobility technologies, none of the proposed solutions have gained widespread acceptance among the visually impaired community.
The lecture will focus first on the current state of the art of the electronic travel aids (ETAs) and their limitations. Then, an appraisal of advances in personal and environment embedded information and communication technologies (ICTs) that offer new prospects for aiding the visually impaired will be indicated and discussed. The lecture will conclude with a demonstration of ETA project results and prototypes carried out at the Technical University of Lodz, Poland (www.naviton.pl).

Pawel Strumillo holds the position of professor at the Technical University of Lodz, Poland and is the head of the Medical Electronics Division. His research interests include: processing of biomedical signals and images, artificial intelligence and human-computer interfaces. He has authored more than 100 publications in these fields. He has been principal and co-principal investigator of research grants on electronic systems aiding the blind. He has also received a number of industry grants from the Orange Telecommunications Group. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Polish Neural Network Society.

For modern man-machine communication traditional methods based on keyboard and mouse only are definitely not enough. Especially thinking about poor and bad-qualified citizens of Information Society we must find easiest and most comfortable method for man-machine communication. Optimal method for Man-Machine communication processes is speech communication. In paper some problems connected with this area are discussed and the survey of speech recognition systems is shown. Forecast of future systems is also given.

Professor Ryszard Tadeusiewicz is full professor and former Rector of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow. He has written and published over 700 scientific papers, which were published in prestigious Polish and foreign scientific journals. Prof. Tadeusiewicz also wrote also over 70 scientific monographs and books, among them are highly popular textbooks (which had many reprints). He was supervisor of 56 doctoral thesis.

Humans are able to communicate with each other by using not only verbal media but also the five senses such as vision, audition, and tactile and haptic sensations, effectively using their bodies. Information transmitted through non-verbal media directly affects our emotions and feelings, and especially touch feeling and haptics play an important role for the emotional human communication. In the face-to-face communication, gestures and touch actions are effectively employed together with the information transmitted through speech and vision, and in the conversation about an actual object, the tactile sensation and haptics help to understand the object intuitively. Human communication is regarded as the information transmission through our body and sensations, and computers have recently been used as an extensive tool for supporting the communications as human-machine interfaces.

In the first part of the talk, the mechanism of tactile sensations how tactile stimuli are physically and mechanically applied to human skin, and how they are perceived as different tactile sensations, will be discussed. A higher psychological perception of tactile sensations such as the phantom sensation and the apparent movement will be also introduced. Then, several examples of tactile devices and tactile communication systems will be introduced, together with the perspectives for realizing novel human interfaces and multimodal communication systems.

Hideyuki Sawada is an Professor in Faculty of Engineering, Kagawa University. He received the B.E., M.E. and Dr. Eng. degrees in Applied Physics from Waseda University in 1990, 1992 and 1999, respectively. From 1992 to 1995, he engaged in the development of optical sensors for measuring the sweetness and color of fruits at Mitsui Mining & Smelting Co., Ltd. He was a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 1995 to 1998, and conducted a research on the music information processing and neural networks. In 1999, he engaged in researches on gesture recognition and speech signal processing as a Research Associate of Waseda University.

His current research interests include sound and image processing, neural networks, robotics, human interfaces and assistive technologies. He is a member of IEEE, IPSJ, IEICE, RSJ, SICE and JSME.