2018年11月27日火曜日

The difficulty of commending open data


The Commendation Awards for the Voluntary Publishing of Open Data have been held. I was on the executive committee. This is the 4th year running for the event.
The event was hosted by Vitalizing Local Economy Organization by Open Data & Big Data (VLED).

- Grand Prize
Toyota InfoTechnology Center, Shizuoka City
Their entry was a joint project to create a new service by combining the data from Shizumichi Info, a road traffic control information system, with Toyota InfoTechnology Center’s automobile status data.

- Excellence Prize
National Strategy Office of Information and Communication Technology, Cabinet Secretariat
They removed the line forbidding “usage that violates laws and ordinances, regulations, or public policy” from the Government of Japan Standard Terms of Use.

- Excellence Prize
Geospatial Information Authority of Japan
Geospatial Information Authority of Japan provides open data and information on GitHub.

- Wide Range Data Prize
Fukui prefecture and 17 Fukui cities
The data of Fukui prefecture and 17 of the prefecture’s cities were combined into a single file and made public as “Public Resource Information,” “Garbage Collection Day Information,” “Garbage Separation Information,” “Evacuation Shelter Information” lists.

- CiP Conference Prize
WELMO Inc.
They aggregated the data of services such as nursing, making them manageable via PC, tablet, or cloud services. By their cooperation with municipalities and the governments, this open data allows citizens to chose the right social welfare services for them.

- New Media Risk Association Prize
Asahi Shimbun
They gathered, stored, and totalized the information gathered for articles and made the data public in CSV file form.

- You Go Lab Prize
KDDI Corporation
They develop and sell B2C IoT products. Their service involves linking common objects such as umbrella stands and garbage bins with smartphones to inform their users about things such as umbrella presence and garbage collection.

The Grand Prize went to Sabae, Fukui in year 1, a community group in year 2, and a public interest company called Tokyo Metro in year 3. This year, the Grand Prize was awarded to a municipality and corporation working together. I believe that the spread of open data is growing larger each year. This year, we had two winners for the Excellence Prize. Japan is working hard at adopting open data.

2018年11月13日火曜日

JAPAN DRONE NATIONALS



JAPAN DRONE NATIONALS.
This competition was held at XEBIO ARENA in Sendai. It was a full house, with attendees standing to watch.

The race was in FPV (First Person View) style. Competitors are referred to as pilots. A camera is attached to the pilots’ drones, sending real-time footage to their HMDs which they watch and use to steer the drones to compete for the best times. Some of the more skilled pilots can fly their drones at speeds exceeding 100km.

The drones used in this competition are handmade. Each of them has its own unique qualities. The large arena is used as the course for the competition, and the pilots compete in the preliminaries by ranking the time taken to fly a single lap. The semifinals require three laps, and rank pilots by position instead of time. The finals have five laps and use a points system to determine the winner. 27 pilots made it past the preliminaries.

Drones fly through and around red, blue, and green poles and gates at breakneck speeds. All of the steering is done from afar by looking at footage sent to a pair of goggles. When you are at the event and get to see actual footage, it is clear as day that these pilots are superhumans.

They assault, breach, and crash. There are many strategies involved in the sport, some ending in success, others in failure. The speed, intensity, and sensation surpassed all expectations.

While the top competitors contended and crashed into one another, the checkered flag was waved for the pilot who remembered that slow and steady wins the race. The winner’s name is Koji Owada, a 43-year old father of three. Well done!

I was a commentator for the race on a TV show.

Q. What draws people to drones?
A. Two reasons: drones are useful, and also fun. Drones are popular because they can be used to carry things and record footage from places that we cannot reach ourselves, but I would like for more people to focus on the fun aspect.

Q. What do you mean by fun?
A. The fun of flying a drone, and the fun of flying. Drones are more easily accessible than remote-controlled planes, and can be easily flown by both children and adults. There are many toy drones on the market now. Through the drone’s camera, we can experience the sensation of flying ourselves. Drones let us make humanity’s dream of soaring through the skies come true.

Q. Do you think that flying drones has the potential to become a sport?
Flying drones is an IT sport that uses radio waves and video footage. The Olympics only consisted of agrarian society sports up until the 19th century, then motor sports were included for the industrial society and 20th century. For the information society and 21st century, we need new sports like these. I look forward the rise of a star athlete for drone flying.