Article Engineering in General

Evaluation of Revitalization Measures for Central City Areas Considering Changes in Human Flows

by Daisuke Kamiya - September 9, 2024

In recent years, a declining population and an aging and decline have led to a reduction in the vibrancy and economic activity of the city. Various regional cities have taken measures to revitalize their central city areas. However, they have yet to develop a method to quantify the effects of these measures. In this study, using a device equipped with Internet of Things (IoT), we obtained basic data on the number of visitors before the COVID-19 to quantify pedestrian traffic along Kokusai Street. Our findings revealed that the implementation of revitalization strategies led to a notable increase in the number of individuals visiting the area, as well as in the average duration of their stay. This suggests that the implemented measures have the potential to contribute to the revitalization of the area, thereby fostering the creation of a vibrant town center.

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Article Education Information Sciences Psychology and Education

An Inquiry-Based Learning Support System for Children in Sports Acquisition Processes

by Masayuki Yamada - February 28, 2024

This study examined an inquiry-based learning support system for children in sports acquisition processes and describes the characteristics of a case study on the long-term collaborative process of children’s forward and backward cycle practices on horizontal bars. We analyzed 18 horizontal-bar practices for two elementary schoolchildren who had not succeeded in their backward cycle for approximately half a year. They were required to make practice plans collaboratively to succeed in their forward and backward cycles. To support their practices, we provided them with “HDMi (HDMi is the name of a system we developed in the past.),” which was developed to support reflecting on one’s physical movements using movies. The movies were also used for discourse analysis to determine where the children focused, and OpenPose software was used for motion analysis to examine how the children’s actions improved on a horizontal bar. Both the HDMi and the discourse analysis suggested that two children selected their focusing points for their practice and they gradually became referring to “move toes toward opposite side of the bar” in the periods of practices. However, the motion analysis revealed that the focused points and actual movement of the body did not match completely.

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Article Information Sciences Others Psychology and Education Sociology

Clarifying the Sharpened network diversity in French flair rugby

by Koh Sasaki - February 17, 2024

This study aimed that open rugby, known as flair rugby, drives the modern game by analyzing the 2022-2023 international test matches of France representative team. We examined the superiority of a spatial tactic called French flair rugby. First, the advantage of creating a relatively large number of networks was demonstrated. From the transitivity analysis of the network (CUG test; Conditional Uniform Graph test), the cooperation occurs at a higher level than in other networks. The network graph structure showed which players functioned centrally at which time of match as unusual positions, i.e., multi-position and multi-skill. In this study, we operationally defined this diversity as the sum of the standardized eigenvector centralities. We found that the increase in the time-series score balance tended to reduce and sharpened the diversity. As a result of examining a scale-free model in network theory, Sharpening the diversity (central and transitive role players) tended of the network power law scaling.

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Article Education Interdisciplinary Sciences Psychology

Review matching task to diagnose basic review ability

by Koki Saito - March 29, 2024

Software development begins with writing a requirement definition document (RDD) specifying what software is to be built, and the RDD should define the necessary and sufficient conditions the software must satisfy. Preferably, the RDD is reviewed to guarantee its quality. However, the quality of reviews of such documents is not easy to evaluate, due to various review styles and the logical complexity of RDDs. Therefore, we regarded the review ability as the ability to match an RDD with a software and developed a game to make a matching task that can assess review quality. The task has four types of relationships, two-by-two classes of necessity (i.e., the RDD has no irrelevant sentences to define the given software) and sufficiency (i.e., the RDD covers all the parts of the software), between requirements and software, which are expressed in verbal and nonverbal forms. Results suggest that the game likely sufficiently simulated the process of making/reviewing RDD in the requirement definition process. Therefore, it is suggested that the matching task created through the game can be adequate to assess the review ability.

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