Volunteer Activities in Time of Disaster in Japan＇s Highly Information-Oriented Society

This study aims to clarify the characteristics of volunteer activities in times of disaster, while taking into account the influence of the orientation towards information intensity, which is an important feature of contemporary Japanese society, and focusing on the volunteer activities for recovery and reconstruction in the disaster-stricken areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake. In modern Japanese society, because volunteer activities are being conducted in a variety of forms, those who wish to volunteer can participate in volunteer activities that suit their own situation. Further, in a highly information-oriented society such as modern Japan, many kinds of information systems can be used to conduct a variety of volunteer activities. Also, know-how concerning the introduction and methods of volunteer activity and recruitment for participants in volunteer activities are introduced using various information media, and there are many volunteer activities to choose from. Therefore, it is possible that through the diversification of volunteer activities, many people become involved in volunteer activities on a long-term basis, using ways of doing so that are possible for themselves.

Improvement in the information-oriented construction of temporary soil-retaining walls using sparse modeling

This fundamental study investigates how“super-resolution”technology based on sparse modeling,which has attracted attention in various fields,can be applied to the information-oriented construction of temporary soil-retaining walls.The machine learning process adopted here is based on the analytical results of numerical computations that involve many preliminary assumptions related to soilretaining walls,rather than the collection of images utilized in the image reconstruction technology.Consequently,bases for vectors related to the displacement of retaining walls are generated using efficient inverse analysis and“super-resolution”processing from sparse amounts of physical observation data.The purpose is to improve the properties of the inverse problem by artificial interpolation based on numerical analysis.It has been shown that the inverse analysis related to the displacement of retaining walls can be performed efficiently and that highly accurate predictions can be achieved even with limited physical observations.In general,the inverse analysis of retaining walls is an ill-posed problem.However,if the number of apparent observations reconverted by“super-resolution”technology exceeds the number of unknown parameters,then the displacement distribution of a retaining wall can be estimated efficiently.Another original idea is to break down the inverse problem into two separate problems by addressing the earth pressure distribution acting on the retaining wall.This makes it possible to identify the part to which the nonlinear inverse problem can be applied and to facilitate the efficient estimation and interpretation of the results.