Prof. Yoshifumi Kitamura received the Lifetime Community Contribution Award at the 4th Japan ACM SIGCHI Chapter Awards in 2024.
This award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of science and technology related to the interaction between humans and information technology. In addition to making significant contributions to the development of the field through his own research and community activities, he has also promoted activities that connect the global and Japanese research communities, and has worked to enhance Japan’s presence in the international research community.

https://sigchi.jp/award/2024/result.en.html#YoshifumiKitamura

Mr. Gu Lin from RIKEN visited us and gave a lecture. In addition, he had the opportunity to experience our research.

We held End-of-Year Meeting/Party.

Prof. Makoto Okabe of Shizuoka University visited us and gave us a talk.

The following researchers visited our laboratory and gave symposium-style talks. We also gave demonstrations of our research and discussed various topics.

• Rob LINDEMAN Professor, HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
• Susanne SCHMIDT Lecturer, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
• Donald DEGRAEN Senior Lecturer, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
• Samara MORRISON Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
• Benjamin WATSON Associate Professor, North Carolina State University, USA
• Benjamin TAG Senior Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Australia

Selected for JST “ASPIRE for TOP,” Adopting Sustainable Partnerships for Innovative Research Ecosystem.
Title: Mental Well-being Intelligence: A Data-driven Research Community on Human Psychological Health

We participated in the 58th Joint Relay Race of ECEI and RIEC.

Prof. Yuki Igarashi of Ochanomizu University came and gave us a talk.

We enjoyed a Farewell Party for Jacob and Dinner Party for Dr.Froehlich.

Prof. Bernd Froehlich of Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar, Germany, staying in our lab, gave us a talk.

People from the NTT Research visited our laboratory.

The Tohoku University Collaboration Forum on Electrical and Information Technology was held at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC), where Professor Yoshifumi Kitamura gave a lecture titled “The Future of Connecting Empathy: Tohoku University’s RIEC Working with You to Create a Rich Telecommunications Environment.
Research demonstrations and discussions were also held for the visitors.

Our paper has been published in ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

• Kazuyuki Fujita, Keito Uwaseki, Hongyu Bu, Kazuki Takashima, and Yoshifumi Kitamura. 2024. ConfusionLens: Focus+Context Visualization Interface for Performance Analysis of Multiclass Image Classifiers. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. (October 2024).

The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2024, one of the top conferences in our field, was held in Pittsburgh, USA, and Tetsushi Ikeda gave an oral presentation on the paper that was accepted for the conference.

• Tetsushi Ikeda, Kazuyuki Fujita, Kumpei Ogawa, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura, LoopBot: Representing Continuous Haptics of Grounded Objects in Room-scale VR, UIST ’24: Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 60, 1-10, October 2024.

We had a Imoni (Japanese Taro Soup) Party and a welcome party.

【Press Release】
Tohoku University Hospital, Tenda Co., Ltd. and CERCIT Co. have launched an initiative to build a Tohoku-based medical learning platform in cooperation with Tohoku University Hospital, Tenda Co. and CERCIT Co. Anesth-on-the-Go” is an educational application that enables students to learn perioperative management of general anesthesia through simulations, and is a revolutionary tool that allows students to acquire practical skills on their own initiative. Through this industry-academia collaboration, we will promote verification and improvement of the application in educational settings and contribute to the further development of medical education.
Press Release

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This news was published in several media.

NIKKEI, NIKKEI COMPASS, NIKKEI BIOTECH, Excite news(Reprint in DIGITAL SHIFT TIMES), 3rd News, TECHABLE, JANU, XEXEQ, GamePress AI

Related Paper

• Yuki Onishi, Eiko Onishi, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura: Anesth-on-the-Go: Designing Portable Game-based Anesthetic Simulator for Education, Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article No. 45, 2024

The book “Educational Use and International Collaboration of Metaverse and XR Technologies – The 1st International Symposium of Tohoku University Designing Future Society Program” edited by Masako Hayashi has been published by Tohoku University Press. Professor Yoshifumi Kitamura is in charge of writing Chapter 15, “Humanistic Communication Utilising Nonverbal Information – Towards Future Metaverse Applications”.

Two papers, one presented by Jiawei Huang at SIGGRAPH 2024 and the other by Kinfung Chu at SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, were invited as invited talks at the SIGGRAPH Invited Talk Session at Visual Computing 2024.

• Jiawei Huang, Akito Iizuka, Hajime Tanaka, Taku Komura, and Yoshifumi Kitamura. 2024. Online Neural Path Guiding with Normalized Anisotropic Spherical Gaussians. ACM Trans. Graph. 43, 3, Article 26 (June 2024), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649310
• Kinfung Chu, Jiawei Huang, Hidemasa Takana, and Yoshifumi Kitamura. 2023. Real-Time Reconstruction of Fluid Flow under Unknown Disturbance. ACM Trans. Graph. 43, 1, Article 4 (February 2024), 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3624011

Mr. Maakito Inoue gave an invited talk at Top conference session “BirdViewAR:  Remote Drone  Piloting Interface using Augmented Third-Person Perspective to Support Understanding of Surroundings” at The 23rd Forum on Information Technology in Hiroshima, Japan.

A paper has been published summarising research findings that not only deepens our understanding of human-like movements but also addresses an important gap in current research, offering practical guidance for enhancing the realism of AI-generated motion.

• Yang, X.Y., Cheng, M., Fujiwara, K., Kitamura, Y., Shioiri, S., & Tseng, C.-H. (2024). What makes a movement human-like? Japanese Psychological Research.