Master’s Thesis Presentations by autumn graduates!

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On August 28, the Master’s thesis presentations of Oat and Rahman was implemented. They are both preparing to graduate this fall. Each gave a 30-minute talk followed by Q&A, where they shared the results of their two years of research.

After their presentations, they also gave us some personal reflections:

Oat: A Transformative Journey: Reflecting on My Master’s in Interactive Media and Design Lab

“My decision to pursue graduate studies was born from a deep-seated passion for international experience and a desire to elevate my professional capabilities. After four years as a software engineer in the banking and software sectors, I found myself at a critical juncture. Observing many of my colleagues pursue advanced degrees, whether through specialized courses or full-time enrollment, prompted a period of self-reflection on my own career trajectory. This led to what would become one of the most significant and rewarding decisions of my life ‘returning to school once again’.

My undergraduate experience had planted the seeds for this next step. A course on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) had fundamentally altered my perspective on technology. It taught me that innovation is not solely about possessing the fantasy features and application, but about deeply understanding the user. This human-centered approach, rooted in the principle of empathy, resonated with me on a profound level and solidified my conviction that if I were to pursue further education, HCI was the field I would choose.

Two years ago, I embarked on this journey, joining the Interactive Media and Design Lab in Japan. The experience has exceeded my expectations in every regard. The research conducted here is dedicated to improving the human experience through technology. It goes beyond the purely technical and focuses on creating solutions that genuinely enhance people’s lives. This ethics of empathy extends beyond the projects and permeates the entire lab environment. Professors and fellow students alike embody a spirit of collaboration and understanding, recognizing and supporting the unique strengths of each individual. This collective empathy has been truly remarkable to witness and be a part of.

For my master’s research, I am developing a training system to support individuals struggling with communication skills. This project has required me to conduct extensive literature reviews across diverse fields, from computer science to psychology, to identify effective methodologies for communication skill development. Through this work, I have gained invaluable insights into HCI methodologies, academic research practices, and cutting-edge technologies like virtual reality and 3D design. Coming from a corporate background, this academic immersion has been an incredibly eye-opening experience.

The knowledge and skills I have cultivated at this lab will be instrumental in my future career. The principles of human-centric design I’ve learned here will allow me to be a more empathetic and effective engineer, capable of creating solutions that are not only technologically sound but also deeply aligned with user needs. Just as the business world has embraced a “customer-centric” approach, this lab has instilled in me a human-centric mindset that I am confident will be an invaluable asset. My decision to pursue this master’s degree has undoubtedly been one of the best of my life.”

[Oat during his presentation]

Rahman: Master’s Thesis Presentation at NAIST

“I am pleased to share that I recently delivered my Master’s thesis presentation at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan.

My thesis, titled:
“Smart Rehabilitation for Augmenting Therapists’ Skills: A Mixed Reality System for Simulating AI-Generated Patient-Specific Impaired Walking Motions and an Assistive Robotic Walker,”
focused on developing innovative systems that combine Mixed Reality, AI-driven motion generation, and robotic assistance to support therapist training and patient rehabilitation.

This presentation was an important milestone, giving me the opportunity to present two years of research and receive constructive feedback from my professors and peers. I am also grateful for the chance to collaborate with the Kyoto University, Japan and University of Trento (MIRO-Lab, Italy) whose expertise and insights greatly shaped this work.

The official result is not yet announced, but I feel encouraged and motivated by completing this stage, and I look forward to the next steps in advancing immersive technologies for healthcare.”

Both Oat and Rahman shared thoughtful insights that reflect not only their research achievements but also their personal growth during their time in the lab. We warmly congratulate them on reaching this milestone and look forward to seeing their next steps!

[Rahman during his presentation]

Interaction 2025

We participated in Interaction 2025 held at Hitotsubashi Auditorium for three days as a demonstration presentation. Our presentation, “Investigation of the sense of life through the experience of feeding a bird-like robot,” was given on the first day of the event, and we had a very fruitful discussion with the participants.
We had a wide range of discussions with the participants and had a very fruitful time.
Two of the most frequently asked questions from the participants were whether the stuffed animals were handmade or not, and whether the robot could walk.

When I told them that I had already used a stuffed animal for the former question, they replied that they had never heard of a company that sold realistic, full-scale stuffed animals of a penguin.
Many of them were surprised that there are companies that sell realistic stuffed animals of real size. We also talked about how difficult it is to make something from scratch when conducting research and experiments.


“Favorite Research Auditing Penguin”
by Kaito Nakamura

Visiting Sir Robin Saxby

Article by Yoshinari Nishiki

Main Topic:
Sir Robin Saxby is an English engineer and most known for his work as the founding CEO and chairman of ARM Holdings, which is now a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. Through personal connections, I somehow became acquainted with Robin from around 2016. While I exchanged with him many opinions on the possibilities of business applications for my artistic concepts, I had only met him in person twice. This was our third time to physically meet, being invited to his residence in a suburb of London and to have lunch in the area. Typically around this time of the year, Robin is hiding away in the mountains of Switzerland (skiing), but luckily for me, he happened to be in England for some days, and at a time that I was planning to visit the country.

Upon arrival to Robin’s place, which is a former residence of a local vicar (senior priest) built in the early 19th century, he showed to me all of the paintings he had made over the years in different spots he visited for various reasons. Robin then took me to his “lab”, which also functions as a museum and a sports gym. The lab was built inside a former horse barn on the premises, and he works on past technologies in his spare time, which is very little.

“When I was 13, I started to fix electronics to earn money.” It was the beginning of Robin’s journey as an engineer. He showed me one of the oldest transistors, of which he said, “the number of transistors evolved from 50 to 50 billion (50,000,000,000).” At that moment, I saw a clear connection from what he was occupied with as a teenager, to the founding CEO of ARM. Like it’s mentioned in the book Mobile unleashed: the origin and evolution of ARM processors in our devices, it was not a straight forward process to make the ARM architecture, but in a sense it was a natural process for Robin, that’s the feeling I got.

For Robin, old technologies are not obsolete, but rather useful in terms of determining the solidness of a piece of technology from a given moment. Since latest technologies are not necessarily the best, understanding old technologies helps you go back to a historical point and allows you to rethink the state of now.

Robin also claims that he has been “(un)making throughout his life.” (Un)making is the topic of my PhD research which is a variant of unmaking (please notice it is without a pair of brackets), which is a counterpart to making (as in the Maker movement). Unmaking looks at reframing the general goals of making in order to better address the environmental urgency of our planet. To extend unmaking to an extreme, (un)making focuses on creativity in avoiding production to foster ecological value creation.

In the “museum” he built inside the barn were a number of gramophones and vintage machines. A demonstration of how a TV works before its existence drew my attention in particular. It reminded me of when I had to explain what AR was to non-researchers before Pokemon GO came about.

Conversation over (un)making: The reason why I wanted to meet Robin was to discuss about (un)making. I had already sent him some descriptions about the concept in advance so he already knew the outlines, but he asked me, “among all the world’s problems we have today, what can (un)making fix?”

My answer was, “(un)making can resolve the duplications in production and people’s efforts.” Since everybody has to make their own ends meet, they engage in some kind of productive activities. However, the scope of these activities are too biased by how monetary value is generated, people end up with more or less the same kinds of things, making duplications of production.

Robin listened to me for a while before saying, “for me, the biggest problem is having to show quarterly earnings growth.”

I felt that we basically have the same view, but Robin sees the problem lying in the basic protocol of how a business operates.

I also talked about my own ambition about where I’d like to take (un)making to, and how it may have some similarities to the way the ARM architecture is situated in the current economic climate. My PhD research has been somewhat loose in terms of approach, but after the appointment with Robin was fixed, I was thinking my approach should be more systematic, or in my own word, mechanical.

About the AI hype: We naturally ended up talking about the current AI hype. One of the issues that Robin sees is that companies compete with each other rather than sharing. After all, OpenAI is not open at all.

However, the biggest issue of the AI hype is that “[t]hey can do the complicated stuff really well but quickly fall over on the stuff that 5-year-old children can do, implying that they are not really reasoning but merely offering a sophisticated simulation of it.” (this is from a link later shared by Robin [1])

Robin said, “AI is fear of missing out, money, and power.”

Unpredictable political situation: In the age of techno feudalism (the owners of big tech became the world’s feudal overlords) [2], we are re-witnessing global conflicts akin to before WWII. When the world is full of garbage, both online and offline, Robin says that it’s important not to overreact.

Conclusion: After the conversation, we moved to a local pub/restaurant for lunch. Robin had several appointments after ours, but postponed them slightly so that we could finish an entire bottle of white wine!

 

References:

  1. https://www.radiofreemobile.com/artificial-intelligence-spray-and-pray/
  2. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781529926095

New device join!

IMD (Interactive Media Design Laboratory) has a variety of state-of-the-art devices.

A new member has joined them.

Name: Apple Vision Pro

Of course, we will have more research and study sessions using this new tool in the future.

At first, the student experience started! Everyone had a great time.

HCG Symposium 2023_the Student Outstanding Interactive Presentation Award!

Koudai Nieda won the Student Outstanding Interactive Presentation Award!

Awarding Organization/Academic Society: Human Communication Group, The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (HCG Symposium 2023)

Outline, purpose, and date of the conference/event
The HCG Symposium is an academic conference attended by researchers in fields closely related to human communication such as psychology, cognitive science, social science, physiology, and design studies, in addition to the engineering field.

Name of Award: Student Interactive Presentation Award

Date of Award: 12/13/2023

Awardees :
Kota Nieda, Taishi Sawabe, Masayuki Kanbara, Yuichiro Fujimoto, and Hirokazu Kato

Research theme
“Evaluation of the Reduction Effect of Pain Perception by “Talking and Stroking” Motion of a Robot”.

When caring for a patient, people perform a “talking and stroking” action that gives pleasant feelings to the patient. In recent years, advances in artificial intelligence and robotics technology have made it possible for people to interact with robots.
It has become clear that “talking and stroking” gives people more pleasant feelings than “talking” alone or “stroking” alone. The purpose of this study is to verify whether the “talking and stroking” behavior by the robot alters the perception of physical pain as well as psychological effects. The results of an evaluation experiment with 37 subjects showed that both “stroking” and “talking while stroking” were effective in reducing the perception of pain, and that “talking while stroking” had a greater psychological impact than “stroking. The results of the evaluation experiment with 37 subjects were both supportive of the results.

Comments on the Award
I am truly honored to receive this award. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the professors and students in my laboratory for their guidance, discussion, and cooperation. We will continue to make further efforts to reduce pain through robotics.

SIGGRAPH Asia at Australia

Hi everyone,
Nice to meet you, I’m M2 Soshiiro Ueda.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 was held in Sydney, Australia.

December in Australia was in the middle of summer, with temperatures exceeding 38 degrees Celsius on some days!

SIGGRAPH Asia is a conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive technologies, in which we participated as exhibitors.

We demonstrated for 3 days the “AR (Argument Reality) task support system” that we are currently researching.

Since researchers from from various fields attended at the exhibition, we were able to ask for feedback on the our demo and discuss the research we were doing.

We were able to get advice from various perspectives, which was very helpful and exciting.

I was very tired because I was on my feet for almost all of the three days, but it was a wonderful experience.

Next year’s SIGGRAPH Asia will be held in Tokyo. I am very much looking forward to it!

 

HAI2023 at Gothenburg(Sweden)

Hej, Hur mår du?

Jag heter Sawabe.

HAI (Human-Agent Interaction) 2023 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden.

IMD gave one oral presentation and two poster presentations.

It was cold and snowy in Sweden in December, but we had a lot of fun in discussions with various researchers at the venue.

The discussions with various researchers at the venue were very exciting.

I met Manuel (poster presenter), who used to come to IMD as an internship from Germany, after a long time,
(He came from Germany by plane to Sweden, but his flight was suddenly canceled due to heavy snow in Munich the day before.)

We talked about each other’s recent situation and our next research projects, etc. It was a very productive conference.

Since researchers from various countries were present at the local presentations, we were able to discuss the research we were doing

(especially when we expressed the nuances of Japanese in English).

We were also able to get advice from various perspectives, which was very helpful.

It was great to get advice from various perspectives.
(I am currently writing a paper at the airport in transit on my way home based on my findings here: ☺️😪)

Above: Gothenburg (Sweden) in the snow, it was so cold to the venue that I almost lost my ears (hat must).

Good luck for the next one!

Lab Retreat in Yoshino (吉野)

Hi everyone!　Nice to meet you, I’m M1 Nieda!

This time we had a lab camp at Taiko-ban Hanamu Hanamu in Yoshino, Nara Prefecture for two days on November 11 and 12.

I would like to introduce how the two days went!

Day 1 (M2 students present their research and new members introduce themselves)

M2 students presented their research and new members (Md Mustafizur Rahman, Tuwaemuesa Thapakorn, and intern Liu Jiayin) introduced themselves.

自己紹介の様子

Day 2 (Demonstration presentations by M1 and doctoral students)

In pairs, M1 students and PhD students challenged themselves to “create a demonstration of an interesting and fun idea” and gave presentations.

発表の様子

デモ展示の様子

感想

It was a good opportunity for us to communicate with professors, doctoral students, international students, and other people with whom it is usually difficult to communicate.

During free time, we went sightseeing in Yoshino and enjoyed the vast nature, famous places, and local specialties.

I regret a little that we visited Yoshino just before the autumn leaves turned red….

Finally, we would like to hold the camp again next year.

See you again.

Prof. Kato received ISMAR 2023 Career Impact Award

Prof. Kato received ISMAR 2023 Career Impact Award.

Congratulations, Prof.

・授賞団体/学会：The 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2023)

・学会・イベントの概要、主旨、開催日
IEEE ISMARは、拡張現実感（AR）、複合現実感（MR）、仮想現実感（VR）に関する最高峰の会議であり、学術界と産業界の両方から世界有数の研究者が集まります。
IEEE ISMAR is the premier conference for Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR), which attracts the world’s leading researchers from both academia and industry.

・受賞名： ISMAR 2023 Career Impact Award

・受賞日：2023/10/18

・受賞者 加藤博一 Hirokazu Karo

・受賞の概要
この度、加藤教授の長年にわたる研究が当該分野へ多大な影響を与えたことが評価され、Career Impact Awardが贈られました。
In recognition for the significant impact his lifelong research has had to the field of Augmented Reality

・受賞コメント　等
拡張現実感に関する研究に９８年から２５年間取り組んできましたが、このような形で評価いただき、光栄に思います。
短かったようにも感じますが、当時は実験システムの構築だけで一苦労だったのが、
今では誰もが持っているスマートフォンにその技術が搭載されており、技術の進化を実感できます。
拡張現実感技術の発展に少しは貢献できたことを嬉しく思います。
“I am very honored to receive this award.
I have been working on research on augmented reality for 25 years since 1998.
When I started this research, even building the experimental system was challenging.
However, this technology is now installed in the smartphones that everyone owns, and I can truly see the evolution of technology.
I’m glad that I was able to make a small contribution to the development of augmented reality technology.”