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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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.

• Xiaoyue Yang, Miao Cheng, Ken Fujiwara, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Satoshi Shioiri, Chiahuei Tseng. What makes a movement human-like? Japanese Psychological Research, Volume 66, Issue 4, pp. 473-492, October 2024.

Jiawei Huang (alumnus) gave an oral presentation at SIGGRAPH 2024 held in Denver, USA, on a paper published in ACM Transactions on Graphics.

• Jiawei Huang, Akito Iizuka, Hajime Tanaka, Taku Komura, Yoshifumi Kitamura: Online Neural Path Guiding with Normalized Anisotropic Spherical Gaussians, ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 43, Issue 3, Article No. 26, April 2024

As a part of Tohoku University Open Campus 2024, we brought four research demonstrations from our laboratory to the School of Engineering Open Campus held at the Aobayama Campus. About 10,000 people visited the School of Engineering over the two days.

The 2024 laboratory video was available.

Dr. Mingze Xi, Research Scientist, Immersive Environments Lab, CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) ) Data 61 and Dr. James Walsh, Senior Lecturer, Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments, The University of South Australia, visited us and gave us a talk.

We gave poster presentations on four research projects at the Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) held in Singapore.

• Decoding Emotion from Motion: A Comparison of Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN) and Human Accuracy
  Miao Cheng, Dylan Dumay, Shoi Higashiyama, Chiahuei Tseng, Taku Komura and Yoshifumi Kitamura
• Friendliness and Hostility in Action: Encoding/Decoding Principles and Cultural Influence
  Zhan Dai, Miao Cheng, Ken Fujiwara, Shoi Higashiyama, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Satoshi Shioiri and Chia-Huei Tseng
• Culture Matters: Performance and Perception of Human-like Body Motion between Taiwan and Japan
  Xiaoyue Yang, Miao Cheng, Ken Fujiwara, Shoi Higashiyama, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Satoshi Shioiri, Chia-Huei Tseng and Yangyang Cai
• Cultural Variance in the Emotion Perception of Body Actions by Asian Performers
  Rongdi Zhang, Miao Cheng, Ken Fujiwara, Shoi Higashiyama, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Satoshi Shioiri and Chia-Huei Tseng

Twenty-nine students from the University of Washington and Pennsylvania State University visited our laboratory as part of the Tohoku University STEM Summer Program 2024. After the lecture by Prof. Kitamura, our students gave a demonstration of their research and enjoyed exchanging ideas with them.

Dr. Andrew Cunningham, Senior Lecturer, Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments, The University of South Australia, visited us and gave us a talk.

UCL (University College London) in the UK and Tohoku University jointly held a workshop on “Exploring the Future of Smell“.

Professor Marianna Obrist from UCL (University College London) visited us and gave us a talk.

The stay was part of a joint research project, A Cross-Cultural Dialogue on the Potential of the Sense of Smell for Health and Wellbeing, which is being funded by matching funds from Tohoku University and University College London.

CHI 2024 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System) was held in Honolulu, Hawaii. Our lab. made the following three presentations.

• Taichi Murakami, Kazuyuki Fujita, Kotaro Hara, Kazuki Takashima, Yoshifumi Kitamura: SwapVid: Integrating Video Viewing and Document Exploration with Direct Manipulation, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article No.: 1035, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642515 (Papers).
• Ryota Gomi, Ryo Suzuki, Kazuki Takashima, Kazuyuki Fujita, Yoshifumi Kitamura: InflatableBots: Inflatable Shape-Changing Mobile Robots for Large-Scale Encountered-Type Haptics in VR, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article No. 423, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642069 (Papers).
• 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, https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650866 (Late-Breaking Work).

Prof. Anatole Lecuyer of INRIA Rennes visited our lab.

After a demonstration by a student, He gave us a talk.

We enjoyed cherry-blossom viewing at Katahira campus.

Prof. Tony Tang of Singapore Management Univerisity visited our lab and gave us a talk.

Mr. Tetsushi Ikeda received the Dean of Engineering Award.

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