Faculty
Yasuhiko Kitamura
Major research activity
Sport Informatics studies how information and communication technologies can be applied to sports. We investigate novel methods to gather, store, analyze, and utilize sport specific data in three domains; real sport, virtual sport, and extreme sport technologies.
Real sport technologies to win the games: American Football is a sport in which intelligence and strategy are important to win the games. We are collaborating with K.G.FIGHTERS, which is the American Football college champion team in Japan, and have developed play video retrieving systems called FITERS to support the strategy analyzing team of K.G.FIGHTES.
Virtual sport technologies to promote physical activities: Virtual Kobe Marathon is a smartphone application to experience a marathon race virtually. A user runs with a smartphone, and a character moves along the Kobe Marathon course on the screen as far as the user.
He/she can virtually enjoy a race with other runners. Virtual Cycling is another virtual sport system consisting of an aero bike and a display. It reproduces scenery along a cycling route by showing Google Street View images one after another in accordance with the pedaling speed. The user can enjoy cycling anywhere he/she likes in the world.
Extreme sport technologies to make safe: Trekking Navigator is a smartphone application to navigate users trekking in the mountain area where mobile communication is unavailable or interrupted frequently.
It facilitates off-line map, off-line twitter, and opportunistic communication function using Bluetooth. The users can share information with each other even in the poor communication environment.
Major relevant publications
- Shota Hirose and Yasuhiko Kitamura. Preliminary Evaluation of Virtual Cycling System Using Google Street View,Persuasive Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9072, Springer, 65-70, 2015.
- Hirofuni Kishino and Yasuhiko Kitamura. Virtual Marathon System Where Humans and Agents Compete, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS14), Article No. 47, 2014.
- Yui Okuda and Yasuhiko Kitamura. Estimating Arrival Time of Pedestrian Using Walking Logs, PRIMA2013, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 8291, Springer, 494-501, 2013.
- Yasuhiko Kitamura, Shunsuke Nosaka, Hirofumi Kishino, and Yui Okuda. Trekking Navigation System Using Opportunistic Communication, Proceeding of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence,1:427-430, 2013.
- Tatsuya Narita and Yasuhiko Kitamura. Persuasive Conversational Agent with Persuasion Tactics, Persuasive Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6137, Springer, 15-26, 2010.