○International Award

Mr. Masatoshi TAKANO (Member)
Masatoshi TAKANO is currently a project general manager in Plant & Environmental Engineering Div., Toyota Motor Corporation, Aichi, Japan. He is primarily responsible for utility facilities control systems and networks of manufacturing plants, with the concept that the pursuit of goals leads to connections and not with the concept that connectivity occurs to discover new things. His current interests include ensuring cybersecurity of Industrial Control Systems (ICSs), and flexibility in engineering design of ICSs. He is a member of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE). He has been a chair of the Technical Committee on Instrument and Control Networks (2004-2007), co-chair of the committee (2008-present), and SICE director of the committee of Transaction (2014-2015).

受賞論文「Review of a Connected System of Utility Facility Control and Energy Management Systems」
This study presents the experiences and feedback to human-centered industrial control systems (ICSs), which the author described as next-generation ICSs at SICE-AC2008. The following three visions of utility monitor and control system for critical infrastructure have been indicated: human-centered interface with remote operation in any location, promoting information sharing especially to analyze energy consumption data from vertical and horizontal directions, and flexible reconfiguration with zero marginal cost. These are target-oriented activities that have evolved gradually for more than 10 years. Expertise obtained through these activities involves the improvement in plant floor operation, which must begin from awareness of problems and identification of hidden and potential needs. In most cases of manufacturing processes improvement, the achievements are built on steadily, and after a decade, the result of innovative progress owing to the activity appears.

Ms. Negin AMIRSHIRZAD
Negin Amirshirzad completed her bachelor of science in Computer Engineering at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran in 2014. She is now a M.Sc. student, research and teaching assistant in Computer Science department of Ozyegin University in Turkey. Her research interests focus on Human-Robot interaction and Machine Learning.

受賞論文「Synergistic Human-Robot Shared Control Via Human Goal Estimation」
In this paper, we propose and implement a synergistic human-robot collaboration framework, where the robotic system estimates the intent or goal of the human operator while being controlled by the human in real-time. Having an estimate of the goal of the human operator, the system augments the human control signals by its own autonomous control output based on the goal estimate. Consequently, the net control command that drives the robot becomes a mixture of human and robot commands. The motivation for such a collaborative system is to obtain an improved task execution to surpass the performance levels that each party could achieve in solo. This is possible if the developed system can take advantage of the individual skills so as to cover the weakness of the other party. To test and validate the proposed system we realized the framework by using the 'ball balancing task' where an anthropomorphic robot arm was required to bring a ball on a tray attached to its end effector to a desired position. Task execution performance was quantified with completion time and positional accuracy. To test the validity of the framework, experiments were conducted in three conditions: full autonomous control, human-in-the-loop control, and shared control. Full autonomous control did not require any human subjects; whereas for the latter two conditions, 10 subjects for each condition were employed to measure task performance of naive solo operators and naive human-robot partners. The performance results indicate that the task can be completed more effectively by the human-robot system compared to human alone or autonomous robot execution in different performance measures.

○Young Author's Award

Mr. Daisuke TERADA (Member)
He received the B. E. and M. E. degree in Physical Engineering from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan in 2008 and 2010, respectively. After joining CHINO CORP., he has developed instruments of constituent measurement, thickness gauge and temperature measurement using infrared technology.

受賞論文「Semitransparent Properties of an Intrinsic Silicon Wafer and its Application to an Optical Fiber Temperature Sensor」
This paper proposes the two methods of a novel temperature measurement making use of temperature dependent semitransparent properties of the silicon wafer: (1) one is based on the absorption edge wavelength shift due to bandgap energy variation and (2) the other utilizes the transmittance, or the reflectance variation due to free- carrier absorption. At present, the temperature measurement is possible between -196 to 650 °C.
This paper describes mainly a newly developed reflecting type optical fiber sensor with vapor deposited metallic film on a wafer surface, the measurement range of which is from -196 to 150 degrees Celsius.
The optical fiber measurement system is composed of a halogen lamp and a spectrometer available between 1.0 and 1.3 μm. The temperature resolution of the method (1) is 3 °C with the use of a spectrometer of 1 nm resolution, and that of the method (2) is 0.1 °C with the use of a 12 bit resolution AD converter, respectively. The sensor is particularly applicable in harsh environments filled with electric noise like plasma processes and inflammable gases as well as corrosive media.

○Poster Presentation Award

Dr. Xiaoyong ZHANG
He received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Guizhou University of Technology, Guiyang, China, in 2000, and the M.E. degree in electrical engineering from Guizhou University, Guiyang, China, in 2007. He received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 2011. He is currently an assistant professor in Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University. His research interests digital image and video processing.

受賞ポスター「A Real-Time Homography-Based Tracking Method for Tracking Deformable Tumor Motion in Fluoroscopy」
In radiation therapy, respiration-induced tumor motion significantly limits the efficiency of the radiation delivery, and brings potential risk to healthy organs and tissues. In order to deliver a sufficient high-dose radiation in adaptive with the tumor motion, a kilo-voltage (kV) X-ray fluoroscopy imaging system has been used to monitor the tumor motion in real-time during the treatment. In this paper, we present a fast and robust tracking algorithm to track deformable lung tumor motion in the kV fluoroscopic image sequence. Given a kV fluoroscopy, the tumor motion is represented by a nonlinear homographic transformation of a pre-defined tumor template. The homographic transformation is then estimated by minimizing a sum-of-squared-difference (SSD) between the template image and the observed image. To improve the computational efficiency, an efficient second-order minimization method is employed to solve the problem of SSD minimization. The experimental results conducted on clinical kV fluoroscopies demonstrated that the proposed method is capable of tracking the tumor motion in real-time and its performance is superior to conventional tracking methods in terms of tracking accuracy and computational cost.