One of my research focus that is common to my several research themes is, in short, "fusion of digital and analog". There was so-called analog computer, but now it has become old fashioned. Nowadays, the word "computer" certainly means a digital computer. However, human senses are inherently analog, so I think computers should come close to analog senses for the sake of ease of use. It means that combination or fusion of good points of digital and analog is required. Although analog computers were dead, neural networks that replaced analog computers (?!) had some good points of analog things. Since I was stimulated by them, I thought of fusion of digital and analog very frequently.
In the research of CCM (Chemical Computation Model), I studied computation using production rules called reaction rules and evaluation functions called local order degrees. Here, reaction rules are digital, and local order degrees are analog. We can solve many problems, constraint satisfaction and optimization problems, using the combination of these two. In digital worlds, programs often do not stop at appropriate point but run away if writing a wrong program. However, combination with certain analog thing, i.e., using a function with a minimal value, probably makes the chance of such happenings less.
In axis-specified search, by specifying "search axis" in addition to search keywords, we can get search results that are well-organized along the axis. Here, a keyword search is digital, but it is combined with "axis", which is analog. For example, if we specify time as axis, we can get results sorted by time, i.e., we can get a chronological table. Or, if we specify geographical space as axis, we can get results on a map.
If we use voiscape (a virtual "sound room" based communication medium), two or more people can talk in a virtual sound space enabled by spatial audio technology. The objective of this research is to enable more natural human conversation through a medium by expressing feeling of direction and distance of voices by using spatial audio. In conventional media, such as telephone, the communication state was one of two digital states, i.e., connected to or disconnected from the other party. In voiscape, the other party can be in any distance and in any direction, i.e., it realizes analog states.
