How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Computing devices and applications are now used beyond the desktop, in diverse environments, and this trend toward ubiquitous computing is accelerating. One challenge that remains in this emerging research field is the ability to enhance the behavior of any application by informing it of the context of its use. By context, we refer to any information that characterizes a situation related to the interaction between humans, applications, and the surrounding environment. Context-aware applications promise richer and easier interaction, but the current state of research in this field is still far removed from that vision. This is due to 3 main problems: (a) the notion of context is still ill defined, (b) there is a lack of conceptual models and methods to help drive the design of context-aware applications, and (c) no tools are available to jump-start the development of context-aware applications. In this anchor article, we address these 3 problems in turn. We first define context, identify categories of contextual information, and characterize context-aware application behavior. Though the full impact of context-aware computing requires understanding very subtle and high-level notions of context, we are focusing our efforts on the pieces of context that can be inferred automatically from sensors in a physical environment. We then present a conceptual framework that separates the acquisition and representation of context from the delivery and reaction to context by a context-aware application. We have built a toolkit, the Context Toolkit, that instantiates this conceptual framework and supports the rapid development of a rich space of context-aware applications. We illustrate the usefulness of the conceptual framework by describing a number of context-aware applications that have been prototyped using the Context Toolkit. We also demonstrate how such a framework can support the investigation of important research challenges in the area of context-aware computing.

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A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications

While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context data and adapting systems behaviour accordingly. Especially in combination with mobile devices, these mechanisms are of high value and are used to increase usability tremendously. In this paper, we present common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. Based on these design principles, we introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. We discuss various approaches and analyse important aspects in context-aware computing on the basis of the presented systems.

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A survey on context-aware systems

Context-enabled applications are just emerging and promise richer interaction by taking environmental context into account. However, they are difficult to build due to their distributed nature and the use of unconventional sensors. The concepts of toolkits and widget libraries in graphical user interfaces has been tremendously successtil, allowing programmers to leverage off existing building blocks to build interactive systems more easily. We introduce the concept of context widgets that mediate between the environment and the application in the same way graphical widgets mediate between the user and the application. We illustrate the concept of context widgets with the beginnings of a widget library we have developed for sensing presence, identity and activity of people and things. We assess the success of our approach with two example context-enabled applications we have built and an existing application to which we have added context-sensing capabilities.

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The context toolkit: aiding the development of context-enabled applications

This paper presents the objectives and progress of the Context-aware Mobile Assistant Project (C-MAP). The C-MAP is an attempt to build a personal mobile assistant that provides visitors touring exhibitions with information based on their locations and individual interests. We have prototyped the first version of the mobile assistant and used an open house exhibition held by our research laboratory for a testbed. A personal guide agent with a life-like animated character on a mobile computer guides users using exhibition maps which are personalized depending on their physical and mental contexts. This paper also describes services for facilitating new encounters and information sharing among visitors and exhibitors who have shared interests during/after the exhibition tours.

C-MAP: Building a Context-Aware Mobile Assistant for Exhibition Tours

Understandings of human activity through wearable sensors will enable the next-generation human-oriented computing. However, most of researches on the activity recognition so far are based on small number of test subjects, and not well adapted for real world applications. To overcome the situation, we have started a project named "HASC Challenge" to collect a large scale human activity corpus. By the end of 2010, by the collaboration of 20 teams, more than 6700 accelerometer data with 540 subjects have been collected through our project. We also developed a tool named "HASC Tool" for management, evaluation and collection of the large number of activity sensor data.

HASC Challenge: gathering large scale human activity corpus for the real-world activity understandings

This paper describes a system called ComicDiary that automatically creates a personal diary in a comics style. ComicDiary is built as a sub-system of our ongoing project (C-MAP) to develop a personal guidance system for exhibition touring at museums, trade shows, academic conferences, cities, and so on. The aim of the C-MAP system is to provide users with personalized guidance according to temporal and spatial situations as well as individual interests. ComicDiary is designed as a casual tool for augmenting an individual user's memory as well as for encouraging communities of users to exchange personal memories. This paper presents the preliminary results of deploying the ComicDiary system as a digital assistant service for conference participants.

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ComicDiary: Representing Individual Experiences in a Comics Style

This paper presents a system called AgentSalon, which facilitates face-to-face knowledge exchange and discussion by people having shared interests, in museums, schools, offices, academic conferences, etc. This system was designed as a sub-system of our ongoing project to construct a personal agent system for tour guidance and knowledge sharing among users. AgentSalon has a big screen for two to five users. The screen shows conversations among animated agents belonging to the users. The personal agent usually runs on our mobile guidance system, called PalmGuide, and guides its user according to his/her individual interests and touring records. When users connect their PalmGuides with AgentSalon by infrared, their personal agents with their personal information migrate to AgentSalon and engage in automated conversation. Contents of the conversation include opinion exchange about tour experiences, mutual recommendations of exhibits on behalf of the users, etc. By observing a chat of the agents, users can effectively obtain appropriate topics: that is, tempts them to follow the chat. This paper shows the first prototype of AgentSalon provided to participants in an academic conference.

AgentSalon: facilitating face-to-face knowledge exchange through conversations among personal agents

In this paper, we propose a notion of facilitating encounters and knowledge sharing among people having shared interests and experiences in museums, conferences, etc. In order to show our approach and its current state, this paper presents our project to build a communityware system situated in real-world contexts. The aims of the project are to build a tour guidance system personalized according to its user's individual contexts, and to facilitate knowledge communications among communities by matchmaking users having shared interests and providing real and/or virtual places for their meetings. In this paper, we first show PalmGuide, a hand-held tour guidance system. After that, we show two systems designed to increase the level of “community awareness”. One is called Semantic Map, a visual interface for exploring community information, such as exhibits and people (focusing on exhibitors and visitors). The other is called AgentSalon, a display showing conversations between personal agents according to their users' profiles and interests.

Yasuyuki Sumi

Papers

C-MAP: Building a Context-Aware Mobile Assistant for Exhibition Tours

HASC Challenge: gathering large scale human activity corpus for the real-world activity understandings

ComicDiary: Representing Individual Experiences in a Comics Style

AgentSalon: facilitating face-to-face knowledge exchange through conversations among personal agents

Supporting the awareness of shared interests and experiences in communities