| Project Title | Japanese Principal Investigator | Position and Institution | Abstract of Research Project | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Israeli Principal Investigator | ||||
| 1 | Advanced ICT for Monitoring Freshwater Ecosystem Resilience | Michio KUMAGAI | Senior Scientist, Research Organization of Science and Technology, Ritsumeikan University | This project will establish an advanced ICT (Information and Communication Technology) for monitoring large lakes, interpreting their current condition and predicting variations as an essential tool for management. Project aims are: (1) early detection and location of toxic cyanobacterial blooms, a worldwide concern for drinking water safety in lakes or reservoirs, with ASV (Autonomous Surface Vehicle) routine monitoring; (2) prediction of their expansion using now-casting of aquatic ecosystems; (3) evaluation of risks to ecological resilience by means of non-linear causality analysis; and (4) showing how we can inform people of rising risks using SNS (Social Networking Service). We have successfully developed some aspects of these technologies over the last two decades and will now advance and incorporate them into a compact unified system. The proposed work will provide a system for Lake Biwa (Japan) and Lake Kinneret (Israel) that will be open to the public and other interested stakeholders. More generally, the ICT tools to be refined and integrated will help to solve difficult worldwide problems that will intensify with climate change, potentially abruptly, in near future. |
| Ilia OSTROVSKY | Full Professor, Kinneret Limnological Laboratory, Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research | |||
| 2 | Tourists’ Flow Patterns Identification and Information Provision for Safe Evacuation | Jan Dirk SCHMÖCKER | Associate Professor, Department of Urban Management, Kyoto University | Tourists are particularly vulnerable to be trapped in chaotic situations. In this project we suggest that smartphones can be utilized for better estimation of tourists’ travel patterns, as well as for providing fast, location specific evacuation information. We focus on situations where tourists are dispersed over wider areas. We firstly develop models for identifying tourists flow patterns using a range of available data with a focus on low-cost, low-energy sensing technologies. We aim to include short term predictions of flow to understand potential crowding. We then develop a design method of appropriate evacuation routes in case of natural disasters or other threats. Finally, we use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sensors to provide evacuation information to tourists in order to be independent from the cellular network. Experiments will be conducted in both Kyoto and Tel Aviv area comparing flow estimation models as well as different sensing technologies. As a result, it is expected to promptly provide adequate evacuation information corresponding to tourists’ current position and realize safe evacuation in emergency. |
| Yuval HADAS | Senior Lecturer, Department of Management, Bar-Ilan University | |||
| 3 | Realization of Sustainable Autonomous Self-Organizing Systems by Low-Functional Robots in Environmental Disaster Recovery | Fukuhito OOSHITA | Associate Professor, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology | In this project, we develop a framework (functions of robots and algorithms) to operate a huge number of low-functional robots in a self-organizing and self-stabilizing manner under circumstances with much disturbance. To achieve this goal, we tackle the following researches. (1) We develop an abstract robot system model close to real environments, and clarify functions and algorithms of robots required to construct a designated system in real environments. (2) We develop efficient methods to implement functions of robots assumed in the abstract robot system model. By these researches, we will contribute to the development of a swarm of low-cost and low-functional robots that is comparable to a high-cost and high-performance robot, and the results are expected to be utilized in disaster-affected areas and others. |
| Shlomi DOLEV | Professor, Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | |||