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Ongoing Research Projects:

 

Knowledge Creation and Communication Cycle (KCCC) Project

RCAST, Open Laboratory Project

Directed by Koichi Hori (RCAST, University of Tokyo)

(April 2002 - March 2006)

http://www.kccc.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ (in Japanese)

 

Human-Centric Media-Interaction Environments for Knowledge Construction and Resturing

MEXT, Scientific Research Program (A)(1)

(April 2004 - March 2008)

 

Dynamic Community:
A New Approach to Collaborative Knowledge Construction

MEXT, Innovative Technology Development Program

Directed by Kouichi Kishida and Yunwen Ye (SRA Key Technology Laboratory Inc.)

(October 2003 - March 2006)

http://www.sra-ktl.co.jp/dync/ (in Japanese)

 

Understanding Social Capital through
Multi-Dimensional Visualizations of Interaction Histories

MEXT, Exploratory Research Program

(April 2004 - March 2007)

 

 

 

Research Projects in the Past:

 

Human-Computer Interaction Patterns for Supporting Intellectual Creative Tasks

PRESTO "Intelligent Cooperation and Control" Group, Japan Science and Technology

(October 2000 - September 2003)

The quality of interactive software depends both on its functions and on its human-computer interaction patterns. Our approach is to develop a catalog of task-independent interaction patterns that help us design software for intellectual creative tasks. Our approach is to represent an interaction pattern from three perspectives: content domains, individual users, and cognitive modes.

We collect interaction patterns, apply them to other task domains to validate their task-independence, construct models of interaction, identify cognitive modes that they support, and develop a catalog of interaction patterns that is helpful for software designers.


 

Collective Creativity: Design, Implementation and Assessment of Cooperative Computational Support for Creative Information Design

PRESTO "Information and Human Activity," Japan Science and Technology

(October 1997 - September 2000)

Collective creativity is a term coined to describe the phenomenon where concepts and understanding emerge in people's mind through interacting with knowledge in the world--with external representations, with other people, or with computer systems.

This research aims at designing computational tools that go beyond paper-and-pencil, and that enable us to collaborate with other people mediated by computer systems.

 

An Integrated Environment for Computer-Aided Empirical Software Engineering (CAESE)

in collaboration with Kenichi Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)

NEDO, METI

(July 1999 - March 2002)

 

CCC & C: The Role of Computers in Support of Culture, Communication and Creativity

Recent advent of computer technologies, especially multimedia information technologies, have freed us from the burden of symbolic nature of the world of computers. The technologies enabled us to communicate our context and intent via computer networks with people from different cultures through not only symbols but also color, music, visual images, and movies.

We experience cross-cultural communication in our everyday life. A culture is a character of a group of people. A culture represents specifics of languages, representations, way of thinking, and norms. Cultures are formed based on nations, races, and geographic locations. Religion, sex, age, organizations, and professions also form their own culture. In software development, for instance, users and developers, who belong to different work cultures, work together to produce software artifacts. Human-computer interaction can also be viewed as cross-cultural communication between a culture of users and that of computer systems.

A challenge to support such cross-cultural communication goes beyond language translation. People have to present their intent in a way that minimizes miscommunication, and to understand the other people's ways of thinking. On the other hand, by trying to express our own ideas to those who have different perspectives and to understand their feedback, we become aware of new aspects of our own thoughts. It also enables us to explicitly represent previously vague, tacit ideas. This effect of cross-cultural communication plays an important role for people to be creative.

In my research, I am interested in the use of computers as media to support cross-cultural collaboration, and ultimately, to support people to design artifacts in a creative manner. Rather than making computers creative, our approach is to design computer systems to augment people's creativity, an idiosyncratic nature of human beings. Computers help cross-cultural communication by using the power of fast and precise representation and manipulation of information. By experiencing cross-cultural collaboration supported by such computer systems, people's creative aspects of design activities will be invoked, resulting in the support of thoughts in the both diverging and converging directions.