Aoyama Gakuin University

About: Aoyama Gakuin University is a education organization based out in Tokyo, Japan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Superconductivity & Thin film. The organization has 3494 authors who have published 6419 publications receiving 115648 citations. The organization is also known as: Aoyama gakuin daigaku.

The possibility of a rice green revolution in large-scale irrigation schemes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: This paper investigates the potential of and constraints to a rice Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa's large-scale irrigation schemes, using data from Uganda, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. The authors find that adequate irrigation, chemical fertilizer, and labor inputs are the key to high productivity. Chemical fertilizer is expensive in Uganda and Mozambique and is barely used. This is aggravated when water access is limited because of the complementarities between fertilizer and irrigation. Meanwhile, in the schemes located in four countries in West Africa's Sahel region, where water access is generally good and institutional support for chemical fertilizer exists, rice farmers achieve attractive yields. Some countries' wage rate is high and thus mechanization could be one solution for this constraint. Improvement of credit access also facilitates the purchase of expensive fertilizer or the employment of hired labor.

Therapeutic-assisted robot for children with autism

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a therapeutic-assisted robot for children with autism to ameliorate their skill of joint attention. The robot conducts a goal-directed based interaction to establish engagement between the child and robot in order to establish a beneficial learning environment for autistic children. An unsupervised Mixture Gaussian-based cluster method is proposed to detect the child's intention in real time to process the goal-directed task smoothly. The novelty of this approach is that does not require the use of any training data or a trained model to detect the child's intention. Our autonomous robotic system is tested with several autistic children at a School for the Disabled in Nagoya, Japan. The results of the initial interaction showed that the children enjoyed interaction with and feedback from the robot, which confirmed that the robot can be used as mediator or an object of joint attention. The unsupervised approach was able to detect the children's intention at every time segment to process the goal-directed task with a higher accuracy rate. The results of the goal-directed task showed that the proposed interaction was highly effective in enhancing their joint attention. Since most of the children attempted to imitate the robot's gestural behaviors and used a variety of learning patterns to attend to the robot's fingered object in the environment to obtain joint attention with robot.

Computational Complexity in Additive Hedonic Games

Abstract: We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under consideration, the existence problem of a stable coalition structure is NP-hard in the strong sense. Furthermore, the corresponding decision problems with respect to the existence of a Nash stable coalition structure and of an individually stable coalition structure turn out to be NP-complete in the strong sense.

Attitudes, affect and ideal L2 self as predictors of willingness to communicate

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine the structural relationships among variables that affect Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and frequency of communication in the L2 in Japanese university EFL classrooms: anxiety, motivation, integrativeness, international posture, ought-to L2 self, ideal L2 self (idealized L2 speaking self), L2 linguistic self-confidence, and valuing of global English. This purpose includes investigating Dornyei’s (2005) hypothesis that the interplay of linguistic self-confidence and the ideal L2 self positively influence L2 WTC. A sample of 373 Japanese university students participated in the study. Questionnaires were administered at the beginning of the semester and a hypothesized structural equation model based on the WTC model (MacIntyre 1994), the socioeducational model (Gardner 1985), and the concept of the L2 Motivational Self System (Dornyei 2005), was tested. The structural relationships yielded new perspectives on learners’ WTC, particularly the finding that the ideal L2 self was a significant predictor of L2 WTC. Pedagogical implications of the research findings are discussed.