We investigate period maps of polarized variations of Hodge structures of weight one or two. We treat the case when the period domains are bounded symmetric domains. We deal with a relationship between canonical extensions of some Hodge bundles and automorphic forms. As applications, we obtain a canonical bundle formula for certain algebraic fiber spaces, such as Abelian fibrations, K3 fibrations, and solve Iitaka’s famous conjecture Cn,m for some algebraic fiber spaces.