Toru Ishida
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University

To realize crisis management systems with digital cities, this talk proposes a new system design methodology called society-centered design. We have already developed the scenario description language Q, which describes interaction protocols that link agents to society. Using the virtual space called FreeWalk, wherein agents behave under given Q scenarios, I explain each step of society-centered design. The process consists of participatory simulation, where agents and human-controlled avatars coexist in virtual space to jointly perform simulations, and augmented experiment, where an experiment is performed in real space by human subjects, scenario-controlled agents, and human extras.

We have applied the society-centered design approach to evacuation systems. A participatory simulation was performed to learn accurate models of human behaviors, we replaced six out of twenty scenario-controlled agents by human-controlled avatars. To perform augmented experiments, we placed more than twenty cameras in Kyoto subway stations, and successfully captured the movements of passengers in real time. We then reproduced their behavior in virtual space. The bird's-eye view of real space is reproduced on the screen of the control center so as to monitor the experiment and to communicate with people in the subway station by mobile phones.

Toru Ishida is a professor of Kyoto University, IEEE fellow, a research professor of NTT Communication Science Laboratories, and a visiting　professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has been working on　autonomous agents and multiagent systems for more than twenty years. He is currently working on a 3D interaction space called FreeWalk/ Q, and applying it to virtual cities. He also initiated an intercultural collaboration experiments (ICE) with Chinese, Korean, Malaysian colleagues. He is an associate editor of Kluwer Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and an editor-in-chief of Elsevier Journal on Web Semantics.

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