Research

As a part of Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Nishida Laboratory is dedicated to research and education on applied intelligent information processing.  Our research centers on Social Intelligence Design and Conversational Informatics. Social intelligence design [1] is a field of research aiming at understanding and augmenting social intelligence based on a bilateral definition of social intelligence as an individual’s ability to better live in a social context and a group’s ability to collectively solve problems and learn from experiences. Conversational Informatics [2] focuses on understanding of human conversational behavior as well as on the design of conversational artifacts that can interact with people in a conversational fashion. We shed light on meaning creation and interpretation resulting from the sophisticated mechanisms in verbal/nonverbal interactions during conversation, in search of better methods of computer-mediated communication, human-computer interaction, and support for knowledge creation.
Our research activities are grouped into three categories: interaction measurement, analysis and modeling; intelligent interactive systems, and cognitive design.  For more details, please follow respective links below.
1. Interaction Measurement, Analysis and Modeling
We aim at uncovering principles of verbal and nonverbal interactions that people engage everyday as a part of intellectual activities and developing a suite of technologies to help people benefit from conversational interactions.

2. Intelligent Interactive Systems
We aim at building and applying an intelligent agent that can communicate with people in a natural fashion. We also work on machine learning techniques that will allow the agent to build a communication protocol from experiences.

3. Cognitive Design
We aim at designing the expressions, functions, control, and interactions of artifacts based on a physio-cognitive approach.

4. Joint/Related Projects

5. Tools
Here are an inventory of tools available from us.

6. Showcase videos in YouTube
See individual pages for more details.  You might be interested in recent YouTube videos from our research group.

References

[1] Toyoaki Nishida: Social Intelligence Design and Human Computing.  T.S. Huang et al. (Eds.): AI for Human Computing, LNAI 4451, pp. 190–214, 2007.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-72348-6_10
[2] Toyoaki Nishida (ed.): Conversational Informatics: an Engineering Approach, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, London, 2007.
<Wiley’s page>