Discover new value of human through research on robotics

Q　What was your motivation for joining the program, and what about the program appeals to you?

I believe that the appeal of this program is that it allows me to be exposed to knowledge in a field that I am not familiar with. In my laboratory, although I am in the field of robotics, I often conduct experiments related to cognition. In the field of cognition, I can refer to the knowledge of people in the biological field, and at the same time, since I do programming in our research, I can refer to the knowledge of people in the information field.
Therefore, due to the feature of my laboratory, this program was inevitably attractive to me, so I applied for it.

Q　What is your expertise and how do you want to develop it with the program?

My expertise is “communication with robots”. I don’t know if I can call it my specialty, but I feel that conversations using avatars will become more and more popular as society continues to develop. I think this trend is accelerating, especially with the Corona disaster. Therefore, in this program, I would like to develop this specialized field by integrating it with other fields. In cognitive research, the evaluation method is mainly based on the results of questionnaires from the person, so I think it would be interesting if we can evaluate the results as an objective index by integrating with biological research, and I think it would be good if we can smooth the behavior of robots during interaction by integrating with information research.

Q　What are your future dreams and goals?

My goal for the future is to develop robots or avatars that will allow humans to essentially improve the real world. In other words, I want to develop robots that will not let technology dictate their behavior, but will use technology as they want to use it, in harmony with humans.