A principal seeks production of a good within a limited time-frame with a hard deadline, after which any good procured has no value. There is inherent uncertainty in the production process, which in light of the deadline may warrant simultaneous production of multiple goods by multiple producers despite there being no marginal value for extra goods beyond the maximum quality good produced. This motivates a crowdsourcing model of procurement. We address efficient execution of such procurement from a social planner's perspective, taking account of and optimally balancing the value to the principal with the costs to producers (modeled as effort expenditure) while, crucially, contending with self-interest on the part of all players. A solution to this problem involves both an algorithmic aspect that determines an optimal effort level for each producer given the principal's value, and also an incentive mechanism that achieves equilibrium implementation of the socially optimal policy despite the principal privately observing his value, producers privately observing their skill levels and effort expenditure, and all acting only to maximize their own individual welfare. In contrast to popular "winner take all" contests, the efficient mechanism we propose involves a payment to every producer that expends non-zero effort in the efficient policy.

We present Kinect@Home, aimed at collecting a vast RGB-D dataset from real everyday living spaces. This dataset is planned to be the largest real world image col- lection of everyday environments to date, making use of the availability of a widely adopted robotics sensor which is also in the homes of millions of users, the Mi- crosoft Kinect camera.

The current era of internet-facilitated bigger data, better tools, and collective intelligence community computing is accelerating advances in many areas ranging from artificial intelligence to knowledge generation to public health. In the health sector, data volumes are growing with genomic, phenotypic, microbiomic, metabolomic, self-tracking, and other data streams. Simultaneously, tools are proliferating to allow individuals and groups to make sense of these data in a participatory manner through personal health tracking devices, mobile health applications, and personal electronic medical records. Health community computing models are emerging to support individual activity and mass collaboration through health social networks and crowdsourced health research studies. Participatory health efforts portend important benefits based on both size and speed. Studies can be carried out in cohorts of thousands instead of hundreds, and it could be possible to apply findings from newly-published studies with near-immediate speed. One operator of interventional crowdsourced health research studies, DIYgenomics, has several crowdsourced health research studies in open enrollment as of January 2012 in the areas of vitamin deficiency, aging, mental performance, and epistemology. The farther future of intelligent health community computing could include personal health dashboards, continuous personal health information climates, personal virtual coaches (e.g.; Siri 2.0), and an efficient health frontier of dynamic personalized health recommendations and action-taking.

This paper focuses on age-related change in sleep and improves our sleep estimation method by employing the feature of such relation between sleep stage and age. In particular, the wake stage increases as the age increases, while Non-REM stage decrease as the age increase. Using such distinctive features, we propose a new determination sleep stages, and introduce it into for our sleep estimation method based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs), which evolve the sleep stage for each person according to the fitness. To investigate an effectiveness of a new determination of sleep stages, we compare the estimated sleep stages of our method employing the proposed fitness function with that of Hirose’s method. The experimental results suggest that our method employed the proposed discretization of sleep stages has a capability to estimate the sleep stage accurately than Hirose’s method.

We are conducting a project to build a knowledge infrastructure to improve common understandings and knowledge among doctors, patients and researchers. The knowledge infrastructure consists of terms and semantic relationships among them, represented using the hypernetwork model. In order to build a merged knowledge representation, the terms used by the patients and doctors/researchers were analyzed. Less than fifth of terms were common, indicating differences in viewpoints.

This paper introduces the ongoing MyFinder project, which was launched in October 2010. The goals of this project are: (1) to propose an intimate personal genome information environment, MyFinder, which supports the search for our inborn talents and maximizes our potential for a meaningful life; and (2) to contribute to scientific discoveries in the biomedical or psychological research domains through intelligent community computing, or in other words, citizen science. This paper describes our research framework and the ongoing challenges to achieving these two goals. We also discuss the technical and social issues related to possible personal genome applications in non-medical domains.

A need for sleep monitoring is increasing in modern society. However, sleep stage scoring is time consuming, and large inconsistencies may exist among scorers. The settings for the recordings are also complicated and usually need to be professionally prepared. If simple small equipment could record human EEG and detect sleep stages, it would bring significant benefits to a large population. We thus developed a simple frequency-based sleep stage classifier by single EEG derivation, and evaluated the performance of the classifier. It showed a potential to work as well as the other known automated classifiers. The classifier was not based on specific frequency bands or EEG patterns. It could perform as well with poor quality signals and could easily be adopted to score any other biological signals.

Self-tracking technologies used by healthy self-experimenters and chronic illness patients are relatively new but offer potential to accelerate the discovery of evidence-based protocols in the fields of human biology and medicine. Among both academic researchers and real-world practitioners in these fields there is an ever-present body of misinformation, leading to the proliferation of myth-based protocols in health-promoting lifestyles and treatment. This collection of four case studies spanning seven years’ worth of observations in a self-experimenting endurance athlete and, later, chronically ill individual, aims to bring to attention themost common incorrect assumptions regarding: nutrition, athletic performance, sleep, and treatment of hypothyroidism. We hope that, with these insights about misleading scientific conclusions, artificial intelligence researchers and anyone interested in developing technological solutions for public health purposes, will explore ways to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world practice of optimizing human biology, and rid the misinformation on bothsides.

Although web-based information extraction systems draw much attention, most of such systems assume that the web directly reflects the real world. For instance, Google flu trend, which is one of the-state-of-the-art influenza surveillance systems, relies on the basic idea that the amount of the influenza related search queries directly correlates with the number of the influenza patients. However, the real patients suffering from influenza symptoms are invisible in the web, because they do not use Internet. Considering this gap, this paper employs an infectious model, assuming that a potential patient utilizes Internet at the first sign of flu. The proposed model improves two types of the state-of-the-art systems, Google based system (from 0.837 correlation to 0.928) and Twitter based system (from 0.898 correlation to 0.918). This study demonstrated that a simple model could easily improve the web-based surveillance.

This paper proposes a novel telemedicine system for type 2 diabetes patients. The proposed system supports the patient self-management via a set of telemedicine devices, consisting of health sensors and a smart phone. The proposed system covers not only the sensor data but also the diet (food) and exercise data. To capture the food information, we also developed the voice recognition module focusing on the food names. The basic feasibility of the system is practically demonstrated in the preliminary experiment.