Toward the Future Where Humans and Robots Become Friends

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

My motivation for joining this program stems from the belief that my engineering knowledge alone is insufficient to achieve my research goal: Toward the Future Where Humans and Robots Become Friends.
My research seeks to answer a fundamental question: What functions must robots have for humans to perceive them as friends? Answering this question requires insights from a variety of academic fields, such as the theory of attachment formation in psychology, the dynamics of friendships in sociology, and the mechanisms of empathy in neuroscience. Therefore, the opportunity to interact with students from diverse academic backgrounds and learn from their multifaceted perspectives is what appeals to me most. This environment would be invaluable for exploring my deep curiosity about the relationships between humans and robots.

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

Androids-robots with a human-like appearance. My approach is based on psychological insights, according to the process in which people form relationships with each other. Specifically, I am designing a mechanism that enables an android to form a unique personality by gaining its own “values” such as “likes and dislikes” throughout the accumulated “memories” of dialogue with humans. Just as we are drawn to friends for shared memories and their unique point of view and thought process, people can build deep, long-term relationships with androids endowed with their own individuality.
However, the question of what constitutes a “pleasant personality” is extremely subjective and cannot be answered by engineering alone. By deepening my understanding of humanity itself through this program, I would like to truly merge technology and psychology together, and to advance my research toward creating partner androids to whom anyone can feel safe opening up.

Q　What are your future dreams and goals?

The letter “龍” (Ryū) in my first name represents an unimaginable legendary creature that soars high into the sky, the dragon. As a researcher, like this dragon, I wish to bravely overcome the barriers of convention and cross the borders of specialization, and hope to challenge myself to create a future that no one has seen ever before where humans and robots become true companions. This is a world like the ones shown in ‘Doraemon’ and ‘Astro Boy,’ where robots stand by us as family and best friends.

Realizing this vision will not be easy to go through. However, just like the dragon watches over people from above the sky, it is an ambition of my lifetime to create a technology that can stand by people’s everyday life and can become a bridge that connects hearts.