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The spatial location of the face and body seen in daily life influences human perception and recognition. This contextual effect of spatial locations suggests that daily experience affects how humans visually process the face and body. However, it remains unclear whether this effect is caused by experience, or innate neural pathways. To address this issue, we examined the development of visual field asymmetry for face processing, in which faces in the upper visual field were processed preferentially compared to the lower visual field. We found that a developmental change occurred between 6 and 7 months. Older infants aged 7-8 months showed bias toward faces in the upper visual field, similar to adults, but younger infants of 5-6 months showed no such visual field bias. Furthermore, older infants preferentially memorized faces in the upper visual field, rather than in the lower visual field. These results suggest that visual field asymmetry is acquired through development, and might be caused by the learning of spatial location in daily experience.

Decision-diagram-based solutions for discrete optimization have been persistently studied. Among these is the use of the zero-suppressed binary decision diagram, a compact graph-based representation for a specified family of sets. Such a diagram may work out combinatorial problems by efficient enumeration. In brief, an extension to the frontierbased search approach for zero-suppressed binary decision diagram construction is proposed. The modification allows for the inclusion of a class-determined constraint in formulation. Variations of the generalized directed rural postman problem, proven to be nondeterministic polynomial-time hard, are solved on some rapid transit systems as illustration. Lastly, results are juxtaposed against standard integer programming in establishing the relative superiority of the new technique.

Determining loss minimum configuration in a distribution network is a hard discrete optimization problem involving many variables. Since more and more dispersed generators are installed on the demand side of power systems and they are reconfigured frequently, developing automatic approaches is indispensable for effectively managing a large-scale distribution network. Existing fast methods employ local updates that gradually improve the loss to solve such an optimization problem. However, they eventually get stuck at local minima, resulting in arbitrarily poor results. In contrast, this paper presents a novel optimization method that provides an error bound on the solution quality. Thus, the obtained solution quality can be evaluated in comparison to the global optimal solution. Instead of using local updates, we construct a highly compressed search space using a binary decision diagram and reduce the optimization problem to a shortest path-finding problem. Our method was shown to be not only accurate but also remarkably efficient; optimization of a large-scale model network with 468 switches was solved in three hours with 1.56% relative error bound.

In many real-life problems, we are often faced with manipulating families of sets. Manipulation of large-scale set families is one of the important fundamental techniques for web information retrieval, integration, and mining. For this purpose, a special type of binary decision diagrams (BDDs), called Zero-suppressed BDDs (ZDDs), is used. However, current techniques for storing ZDDs require a huge amount of memory and membership operations are slow. This paper introduces DenseZDD, a compressed index for static ZDDs. Our technique not only indexes set families compactly but also executes fast member membership operations. We also propose a hybrid method of DenseZDD and ordinary ZDDs to allow for dynamic indices., SEA 2014 : 13th International Symposium , Jun 29-Jul 1, 2014 , Copenhagen, Denmark

When large-scale disasters occur, evacuees have to evacuate to safe places quickly. In this paper, we propose an automatic evacuation guiding scheme using mobile nodes of evacuees. Each node tries to navigate its evacuee by presenting an evacuation route. It can also trace the actual evacuation route of the evacuee as the trajectory by measuring his/her positions periodically. The proposed scheme automatically estimates blocked road segments from the difference between the presented evacuation route and the actual evacuation route, and then recalculates the alternative evacuation route. In addition, evacuees also share such information among them through direct wireless communication with other mobile nodes and that with a server via remaining communication infrastructures. Through simulation experiments, we show that 1) the effectiveness of the proposed scheme becomes high with the increase of degree of damage and 2) the effect of information sharing through communication infrastructures is higher than that through direct wireless communication., MobiWis 2015 : The 12th International Conference on Mobile Web and Intelligent Information Systems , Aug 24-26, 2015 , Rome, Italy

Japanese cities always have risks of large-scale earthquakes. Thus, it is very important to establish crisis management systems against large-scale disasters such as big earthquakes, and tsunamis to secure evacuation centers for evacuees. In this respect, it is extremely important to provide sufficient evacuation centers and to appropriately partition the whole region into small areas, such that a unique evacuation center is located in each area and the people living in the area can easily evacuate to the center. However, it is hard to find an optimal region partitioning, due to the uncertainty, such as a fire or collapsed buildings. In this research, we propose a method to enumerate all partitioning patterns using Zero-suppressed Binary Decision Diagram (ZDD) that satisfy several conditions. We apply the proposed method to Kamigyo Ward of Kyoto City, Japan., ISORA 2013 : The 11th International Symposium on Operations Research and its Applications in engineering , Aug 23-25, 2013 , Yellow Mountain, China

Recent studies provide mixed results regarding whether the perception of facial attractiveness is increased or decreased by partial occlusion with a sanitary mask. One set of studies demonstrated that occluding the bottom half of a face increased facial attractiveness. This effect is thought to occur because the occluded area is interpolated by an average facial representation that is perceived as attractive. However, several groups of studies showed that partial occlusion can increase or decrease perceived attractiveness depending on the attractiveness of the original (unoccluded) face, due to regression to the mean. To reconcile this inconsistency, we propose that the occluded area is interpolated not by an average facial representation, but by a template of moderate attractiveness, shaped by the distribution of each viewer's experience. This hypothesis predicts an interaction between occlusion and the attractiveness of the original face so that occluded attractive faces are rated as less attractive, while occluded unattractive faces are rated as more attractive. To examine this hypothesis, the present study used attractiveness-rating tasks with mask-free versus masked faces in own-race and other-races categories. Viewers were familiar with own-race faces and unfamiliar with other-races faces. If moderate-attractiveness interpolation were the explanatory factor, the interaction between the occlusion and the attractiveness of the original face should be found only in the rating of own-race faces. Consistent with this hypothesis, the interaction between the occlusion and the attractiveness of the original faces was significant only for the own-race faces. Specifically, wearing a sanitary mask decreased the facial attractiveness of attractive faces in the own-race, while it increased the attractiveness regardless of the level of facial attractiveness in other-races. These findings suggest that the occluded area of own-race faces is interpolated by a facial template o