WEIMS09 Proceedings

Full and effective participation and inclusion in society is recognized as a general principle, general obligation and a right, as indicated in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted by the United Nations General Assembly - 13 December 2006. To fulfill truly inclusive society, however, it is clear that we have still many problems unsolved for making mathematical or scientific information more accessible. For instance, since most of digitized scientific contents such as online journals, e-learning math contents are not necessarily accessible for visually disabled people, it is still hard for them to share the same contents with sighted people. The Workshop on E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science 2009 (WEIMS09), supported by the Mathematical Research Center for Industrial Technology of Kyushu University, intends to bring together experts from around the world to present and discuss the state of the art, the actual research and development activities and the future perspectives in this field.

Main topics of the workshop will be, but not be limited to, - Technology to digitize mathematical or scientific contents with taking e-inclusion in consideration
- Assistive technology for disabled people to access mathematical or scientific information
- E-learning, online services other applications considering e-inclusion in scientific field,
- Other related topics.

Keynote Lecture
Robert Kelly
Director, Journal Information Systems, The American Physical Society Mr. Robert Kelly is a leader of an outstanding project in APS. This project is aimed at making the content of "Physical Review Letters," one of the most prestigious academic journals in physics, accessible in DAISY format. The project is a collaboration with ViewPlus Technologies, Inc. Dr. John Gardner will demonstrate some prototype APS DAISY articles.

John Gardner
Chief Technical Officer and President, ViewPlus Technologies, Inc.

Hiroshi Kawamura
President, the DAISY Consortium
Mr. Hiroshi Kawamura has been achieving great results in the field to develop and spread assistive technologies for various printe-disabled people such as the blind, the dyslexic etc. In particular, he is actively involved in the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) project, for long years.

Hiroshi Tanaka
Researcher, Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd.
Hiroshi Tanaka is one of experts on various computerized recognition technologies such as hand-Writing recognition, optical character recognition, speech recognition and so on.

Akiyoshi Takamura
National School for the Blind of Tsukuba University
Mr. Akiyoshi Takamura is one of leaders in math education for visually disabled students in Japan. He has been studying for long years how they should access and do math.

The workshop will be held from Dec. 12 morning to 13 afternoon, 2009. The detailed program will be available soon on the web site, http://www.mrit.kyushu-u.ac.jp/weims2009.

WEIMS'09 is set as the international satellite event of The 9th Asian Symposium on Computer Mathematics (ASCM 2009) which will be held in Fukuoka, 14 -17 December 2009 jointly with MACIS 2009. For further information on ASCM-MACIS. please visit http://gcoe.math.kyushu-u.ac.jp/ascm-macis2009/. The location of WEIMS'09, JST Innovation Plaza Fukuoka, is an enjoyable walking distance from ASCM2009 at Sea Hawk Hotel. As you can see on the web site, the special thematic session on "Digitizing Mathematics -- From Pen and Paper to Digital Content" will be organized by Volker Sorge and Alan P. Sexton (University of Birmingham, UK), in ASCM 2009. We warmly encourage participants in WEIMS09 to attend this session as well.

If you have any questions, please contact The workshop contact office: weims2009"@"math.kyushu-u.ac.jp (Please remove quotation marks when posting e-mail.)