Computer Industry Laboratory

/ Tsuneyuki Hiramoto / Professor
/ Makoto Ikeda / Professor
/ Lothar M. Schmitt / Associate Professor
/ Jens Herder / Research Associate

Application-oriented, the Computer Industry Laboratory tries to enhance production and engineering processes in industry. A deep understanding of the art of working is required.

Research at the university and in industry has to be brought together to achieve advances for humanity. To coordinate industrial development, to provide a basis for further products, and to save financial investment, it is necessary to introduce standards. The Computer Industry Laboratory would like to influence the standardization process in new areas and open it for future needs, not to re-establish existing systems.

Currently, Mr. Herder participates in the Intelligent Dental Care System Project where he manages the design of the user interface. The research of Professor Hiramoto is reliability theory, especially applied to the safety standards of nuclear power plants. Currently, Professor Ikeda is doing three kinds of academic projects related to incubation process modeling, electronic commerce, and information navigation systems. He wrote a report about the incubation mechanism of Silicon Valley Area, a book of Netscape Commerce Server for EC, and also a book about Java. Professor Schmitt participates in research on mathematical models for genetic algorithms used for chip placement problems. Furthermore, he participates in research on the modeling of semiconductor devices with computer algebra methods.

With a top-down education approach, students are involved in joint research projects with industry. They learn engineering by doing to it. This increases their motivation too.

Current Research Topics:

• Using operator algebra combined with Monte Carlo methods to reduce costly experiments in the production of integrated circuits.
• Image processing to help automate the assurance step in Sake production.
• System reliability and availability for fundamental processes.
• Virtual reality as a user interface for complex systems.
• Incubation Process Modeling that is the research to analyze the mechanism of how to incubate the industry.
• Designing of the Electronic Commerce modeling including the integrated technologies of EDI, SGML, STEP, WWW.
• Designing Applets for a Navigation System using Java.

Refereed Proceeding Papers

1. Jens Herder, Karol Myszkowski, Tosiyasu L. Kunii, and Masumi Ibusuki. A virtual reality interface to an intelligent dental care system. In Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 4, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, Volume 29, Amsterdam, Jan. 1996. IOS Press.

   The design and fabrication of teeth restorations in dentistry rely increasingly on cad/camtechniques. We present an approach for interactive design of the occlusal surface of teeth based on simulation of jaw articulation and computer-aided diagnosis of occlusal disorders. To bridge the cognitive gap between the dentist and the computer system, we propose a virtual reality user interface, which applies the metaphors of tools and techniques known in dentistry. This makes the restoration design more intuitive for dentists. The system uses Virtual Reality Modeling Language ( vrml) and html standards to generate a treatment report and exchange data in an electronic form. The simulation of jaw articulation requires fast calculation of multi-point contacts and detection of collisions between surfaces of teeth and restorations. We have developed a distance maps technique which exhibits realtime performance for objects with complex geometry and is suitable for other virtual reality systems dealing with complex contacts. The characteristics of contacts between teeth acquired during lower jaw motion are compactly represented as accumulated distance maps. These maps are then used for automatic removal of interferences between the restorations and the opponent teeth, and provide the dentist with information for further manual adjustments of the occlusal surfaces.

2. Karol Myszkowski, Galina Okuneva, Jens Herder, Tosiyasu L. Kunii, and Masumi Ibusuki. Visual simulation of the chewing process for dentistry. In Visualization & Modeling, Leeds, Dec. 1995.

   cad/cam techniques are increasingly used in dentistry for the design and fabrication of teeth restorations. Important concerns are the correction of articulation problems that existed before treatment and the prevention of treatment-generated problems. These require interactive evaluation of the occlusal surfaces of teeth during mastication. Traditional techniques based on the use of casts with mechanical articulators require manual adjustment of occlusal surfaces, which becomes impractical when hard restoration materials like porcelain are used; they are also time and labor consuming and provide little visual information. We present new visual tools and a related user interface for global articulation simulation, developed for the Intelligent Dental Care System project. The aim of the simulation is visual representation of characteristics relevant to the chewing process. The simulation is based on the construction of distance maps, which are visual representations of the distributions of the distances of points in a tooth to the opposite jaw. We use rasterizing graphics hardware for fast calculation of the distance maps. Distance maps are used for collision detection and for the derivation of various characteristics showing the distribution of load on the teeth and the chewing capability of the teeth. Such characteristics can be calculated for particular positions of the jaws; cumulative characteristics are used to describe the properties of jaw movement. This information may be used for interactive design of the occlusal surfaces of restorations and for jaw articulation diagnosis. We also demonstrate elements of a user interface that exploit metaphors familiar to dentists from everyday practice.

3. Karol Myszkowski, Jens Herder, Tosiyasu L. Kunii, and Masumi Ibusuki. Visualization and analysis of occlusion for human jaws using a functionally generated path. In IS & T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, Visual Data Exploration and Analysis III. The International Society for Optical Engineering, January 1996.

   Dynamic characteristics of occlusion during lower jaw motion are useful in the diagnosis of jaw articulation problems and in computer-aided design/manufacture of teeth restorations. The Functionally Generated Path ( fgp), produced as a surface which envelops the actual occlusal surface of the moving opponent jaw, can be used for compact representation of dynamic occlusal relations. In traditional dentistry fgp is recorded as a bite impression in a patient's mouth. We propose an efficient computerized technique for fgp reconstruction and validate it through implementation and testing. The distance maps between occlusal surfaces of jaws, calculated for multiple projection directions and accumulated for mandibular motion, provide information for fgp computation. Rasterizing graphics hardware is used for fast calculation of the distance maps. Real-world data are used: the scanned shape of teeth and the measured motion of the lower jaw. We show applications of fgp to analysis of the occlusion relations and occlusal surface design for restorations.

1. Makoto. Ikeda. Netware Guide Book. ASCII Publishing com., 1995.

2. Makoto. Ikeda. Windows NT Bible . OHM Publishing com., 1995.

1. Lothar M. Schmitt. On the convergence of the constant jacobi matrix method for finding roots of non-linear systems of equations. Technical Report, 95-2-007, December 21, 3pgs, The University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, 1995.

2. Lothar M. Schmitt. On the hilbert space $l^{2}$(a) over a $c^{*}$ -algebra a. Technical Report, 95-2-008, December 21, 2pgs, The University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, 1995.

3. Lothar M. Schmitt. Combining the bourne-shell, sed and awk in the unix environment for text and language analysis. Technical Report, 95-2-009, December 26, 10pgs, The University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, 1995.

4. Robert H. Fujii, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and Lothar M. Schmitt. On Genetic Algorithms, Technical Report, 95-1-024, June 8, 29pgs, The University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, 1995.