Vision and voice-based technologies are commonly utilized for human-robot interaction. But it is widely recognized that the performance of vision and voice-based interaction systems is deteriorated by a large margin in the real-world situations due to environmental and user variances. Human users need to be very cooperative to get reasonable performance, which significantly limits the usability of the vision and voice-based human-robot interaction technologies. As a result, touch screens are still the major medium of human-robot interaction for the real-world applications. To empower the usability of robots for various services, alternative interaction technologies should be developed to complement the problems of vision and voice-based technologies. In this paper, we propose the use of accelerometer-based gesture interface as one of the alternative technologies, because accelerometers are effective in detecting the movements of human body, while their performance is not limited by environmental contexts such as lighting conditions or camera's field-of-view. Moreover, accelerometers are widely available nowadays in many mobile devices. We tackle the problem of classifying acceleration signal patterns of 26 English alphabets, which is one of the essential repertoires for the realization of education services based on robots. Recognizing 26 English handwriting patterns based on accelerometers is a very difficult task to take over because of its large scale of pattern classes and the complexity of each pattern. The most difficult problem that has been undertaken which is similar to our problem was recognizing acceleration signal patterns of 10 handwritten digits. Most previous studies dealt with pattern sets of 8~10 simple and easily distinguishable gestures that are useful for controlling home appliances, computer applications, robots etc. Good features are essential for the success of pattern recognition. To promote the discriminative power upon complex English alphabet patterns, we extracted 'motion trajectories' out of input acceleration signal and used them as the main feature. Investigative experiments showed that classifiers based on trajectory performed 3%~5% better than those with raw features e.g. acceleration signal itself or statistical figures. To minimize the distortion of trajectories, we applied a simple but effective set of smoothing filters and band-pass filters. It is well known that acceleration patterns for the same gesture is very different among different performers. To tackle the problem, online incremental learning is applied for our system to make it adaptive to the users' distinctive motion properties. Our system is based on instance-based learning (IBL) where each training sample is memorized as a reference pattern. Brute-force incremental learning in IBL continuously accumulates reference patterns, which is a problem because it not only slows down the classification but also downgrades the recall performance. Regarding the latter phenomenon, we observed a tendency that as the number of reference patterns grows, some reference patterns contribute more to the false positive classification. Thus, we devised an algorithm for optimizing the reference pattern set based on the positive and negative contribution of each reference pattern. The algorithm is performed periodically to remove reference patterns that have a very low positive contribution or a high negative contribution. Experiments were performed on 6500 gesture patterns collected from 50 adults of 30~50 years old. Each alphabet was performed 5 times per participant using
Introduction: Diffusion is process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channel overtime among the members of a social system(Rogers 1983). Bass(1969) suggested the Bass model describing diffusion process. The Bass model assumes potential adopters of innovation are influenced by mass-media and word-of-mouth from communication with previous adopters. Various expansions of the Bass model have been conducted. Some of them proposed a third factor affecting diffusion. Others proposed multinational diffusion model and it stressed interactive effect on diffusion among several countries. We add a spatial factor in the Bass model as a third communication factor. Because of situation where we can not control the interaction between markets, we need to consider that diffusion within certain market can be influenced by diffusion in contiguous market. The process that certain type of retail extends is a result that particular market can be described by the retail life cycle. Diffusion of retail has pattern following three phases of spatial diffusion: adoption of innovation happens in near the diffusion center first, spreads to the vicinity of the diffusing center and then adoption of innovation is completed in peripheral areas in saturation stage. So we expect spatial effect to be important to describe diffusion of domestic discount store. We define a spatial diffusion model using multinational diffusion model and apply it to the diffusion of discount store. Modeling: In this paper, we define a spatial diffusion model and apply it to the diffusion of discount store. To define a spatial diffusion model, we expand learning model(Kumar and Krishnan 2002) and separate diffusion process in diffusion center(market A) from diffusion process in the vicinity of the diffusing center(market B). The proposed spatial diffusion model is shown in equation (1a) and (1b). Equation (1a) is the diffusion process in diffusion center and equation (1b) is one in the vicinity of the diffusing center.