Universal Village: Our Desired Living Conditions

Figure 1: The three dimensions of research development for a universal village.

Figure 1: The three dimensions of research development for a universal village.

Due to the growing populations in cities, resources for city and village residents have become scare while costs for public services including medical services have become unaffordable for societies or residents in more and more areas. Research on universal villages has attracted a lot of attention to improve service efficiency and quality[1][2][3][4], to enhance residents’ health status, to effectively manage resources, and to reduce energy consumption for environmental protection. Such task is especially urgent for current society with a growing population of seniors, especially for countries with rapid development, large base numbers and a high growth rate of the senior population[5]. Our research plans to target these problems and address the related challenges.

We expect to develop technologies to understand humans’ and cities’ activities on multiple scales. A fuller understanding of daily family routines will help to provide intelligent safety monitoring, monitoring of children and seniors, cooking, room heating and cleaning, etc. More complete understanding of current human activities in buildings will make intelligent energy saving possible with the least disturbance. In-time understanding of traffic and road situations will allow a control center to respond to accidents faster than before. Systematic understanding of such information will allow cities to have intelligent reactions.  Intelligent health monitoring systems can provide early warnings for societies before diseases spread widely and before people feel physically sick. We also want to develop technologies that provide distributed medical treatment and tele-healthcare to provide patients more mobile freedom.

Our research is related to both systems engineering and system element studies, and we also want to explore region-dependent models, development paths, and key technologies. Our research subjects are in the three following dimensions in Figure 1: system components, applications and regional factors, and system integration. We believe that improving the quality of life depends not only on advances in health care, transportation, housing, communication, information, energy, etc., but also on system integration among multiple platforms, different fields, etc.

  1. I.~T.~S. of~America, “National intelligent transportation system program plan: A ten-year vision,” the United States Department of Transportation, Tech.  Rep., Jan. 2002. [↩]
  2. Y. Fang, S. Yokomitsu, B. Horn, and I. Masaki, “A Layered-based Fusion-based Approach to Detect and Track the Movements of Pedestrians through Partially Occluded Situations,” presented at IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2009. [↩]
  3. B. Horn, Y. Fang, and I. Masaki, “Hierarchical framework for direct gradient-based time-to-contact estimation.” IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 2009. [↩]
  4. Y Fang, B. K. P. Horn, and I. Masaki, “Systematic information fusion methodology for static and dynamic obstacle detection in ITS,” 15th World Congress on ITS, 2008. [↩]
  5. Y. Fang, B. K. P. Horn, and I Masaki, “Universal Village: What? Why? How?” 2013 International Conference on Universal Village. [↩]

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