Educations

• Ph.D. Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 2014.
  Thesis: Spoken Dialogue System for Information Navigation based on Statistical Learning of Semantic and Dialogue Structure.
  Supervisor: Prof. Tatsuya Kawahara
  
  
• M.S. Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, 2011.
  Thesis: Spoken Dialogue System based on Information Extraction using Similarity of Predicate Argument Structures.
  Supervisor: Prof. Tatsuya Kawahara
  


• B.A. Environment and Information, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, 2009.
  Thesis: Dialogue Topic Segmentation based on Boosting Algorithm for Tree Classification.
  Supervisor: Prof. Shun Ishizaki
  

Activities

Work Experiences

Fulltime or Research Assistant

• Associate Professor (PI), Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2024 -
• Team Leader, RIKEN, 2020 -
• Assistant Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 2016 - 2020
• Project Assistant Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology Bigdata Project, 2015-2016
• Research fellow (PD), Japan Society for Promotion of Science, 2014 -- 2015
• Research fellow (DC2), Japan Society for Promotion of Science, 2013 -- 2014
• Research Assistant, Kyoto University ACCMS, 2011 -- 2013

Others

• Affiliate Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Intelligent Robot Dialogue Laboratory, 2022 -
• Affiliate Associate Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Augmented Human Communication Laboratory, 2020 - 2022
• Guest Researcher, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2019 - 2020
• Technical advisor, Hakuhodo, 2019 - 2020
• Researcher, RIKEN AIP, 2018 - 2019
• Researcher, PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, 2016 - 2020
• Technical advisor, Net Smile, Inc., 2015- 2020

Internships

• Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MA, USA), Dec. 2012 -- Mar. 2013.
  Topic: Spoken Dialogue System. Supervisor: Dr. Shinji Watanabe and Dr. John R. Hershey
• NICT (Kyoto, Japan), Aug. 2009 -- Sep. 2009.
  Topic: Sentence Extraction for Spoken Dialogue System. Supervisor: Dr. Teruhisa Misu
• NTT CS Lab. (Kyoto, Japan), Sep. 2008.
  Topic: Key Sentence Extraction for QA System. Supervisor: Dr. Ryuichiro Higashinaka

Activities in Academic Societies

Editor

• Transaction of Association for Natural Langauge Processing
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, special issue "The 9th and 10th Dialogue System Technology Challenge."
• Computer Speech & Language special issue "Results from the 7th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC7)"
• Computer Speech & Language special issue "Results from the 6th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC6)"
• Journal of JSAI special issue "Intelligent Dialogue System"
• ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

Journal Reviewer

• Transaction of the Association for Computational Linguistics
• Advanced Robotics
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing,
• Computer Speech & Language
• Transaction of JSAI
• Transaction of IPSJ
• Transaction of IEEJ
• IEICE Transaction
• Transaction of ANLP

Conference Reviewer

• 2024: IEEE-ICASSP, ARR, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL
• 2023: IEEE-ICASSP, ARR, RO-MAN2023, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, AACL-IJCNLP, IEEE-ASRU
• 2022: AAAI, IEEE-ICASSP, ARR, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, COLING
• 2021: AAAI, IEEE-ICASSP, NAACL (AC), ACL (AC), ACL-demo, SIGDIAL (SPC), INTERSPEECH
• 2020: AAAI, DSTC8, LREC, IEEE-ICASSP, IWSDS, ACL, ACL-demo, SIGDIAL (SPC), INTERSPEECH, COLING, IEEE-SLT
• 2019: AAAI, DSTC7, IWSDS, HRI, IEEE-ICASSP, HRI, IJCAI, ACL, ACL-best-paper, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, CoRL, ICMI-CATSLU, IEEE-ASRU
• 2018: IEEE-ICASSP, IWSDS, ACL, IJCAI, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, CoRL, IEEE-SLT
  
• 2017: IEEE-ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, IJCNLP, IEEE-ASRU, DSTC6
  
• 2016: INTERSPEECH, SIGDIAL, IEEE-SLT
  
• 2015: HAI, MLSLP, IEEE-ASRU
  

Committee

• Vice Chair, The 15th dialogue system symposium, 2024
  
• Senior Program Committee, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2024
  
• Area Chair (Dialogue, Conversational Systems, Chatbot, Human-Robot Interaction), The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (2023.10-2024.5)
• Area Chair (Natural Language Processing), IEEE the 49th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP2024) (2023.9-2024.4)
• Board Member, ACL & ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial) (2023.9-present)
• Area Chair (Speech and Multimodality), The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2023.7-2023.12)
• Program Co-chair and Local Arrangement Chair, The 14th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS2024), 2024
  
• Vice Chair, 14th dialogue system symposium, 2023
  
• Board Member, Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial), 2023-2024
  
• Area Chair, Speech and Multimodality The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
  
• Committee Member, Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, 2023-2025
  
• Program Co-chair, The 13th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology, 2023
  
• Organizing Committee, 13th dialogue system symposium, 2022
  
• Organizing Committee, 12th dialogue system symposium, 2021
  
• Senior Program Committee, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2021
  
• Area Chair, Machine learning, The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2021
  
• Area Chair, Dialogue & interactive systems, 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021
  
• General Chair, Dialogue system technology challenge 10, 2021
  
• Program Committee, 27th ANLP meeting, 2021
  
• Organizing Committee, 11th dialogue system symposium, 2020
  
• Senior Program Committee, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2020
  
• Program Committee, 26th ANLP meeting, 2020
  
• Organizing Committee, 10th dialogue system symposium, 2019
  
• Publicity chair, Annual conference of the joint ACL/ISCA Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), 2019
  
• Best Paper Award Committee, The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019
  
• Challenge Chair, Dialogue system technology challenge 7, 2018
  
• Publicity chair, International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation, 2017
  
• Organizing committee, Dialogue system technology challenge 6, 2017
  
• Organizer, Multimodal Agent for Ageing and Multicultural Societies, Shonan meeting, 2018
  
• Organizer, The 36th RSJ meeting Organized session "Deep Learning", 2018
  
• Publicity chair, International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation, 2017
  
• Organizing committee, JSAI SIG-SLUD 8th Dialogue System Symposium, 2017
  
• Organizing committee, Dialogue state tracking challenge 5, 2016
  
• Organizing committee, JSAI SIG-SLUD 7th Dialogue System Symposium, 2016
  
• Organizing committee, Young Researcher Association for NLP Studies, 2012 -- 2013
  

Student Volunteer

• IEEE-ICASSP 2012
  

Research Grants

Main Proposer

• 2022 -- 2026, Japan Science and Technology Agency, MoonShot, "Multimodal Hypothesis Generation using Knowledge Inference and Dialogue," Transdisciplinary AI by Ushiku for Research Operations
• 2022 -- 2025, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Scientific Research (B), "Knowledge Inference System for Robots by Bridging Text Commonsense and Real-world Observation"
• 2022 -- 2023, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Innovative Areas, "Dialogue Management and Response Expressions in Persuasive Dialogue toward Building Long-term Relationships"
• 2020 -- 2021, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Innovative Areas, "Multimodal Dialogue Robot for Persuading Users"
• 2019 -- 2019, Adobe Research Gift, "Image Editing System with Natural Language"
• 2016 -- 2019, Japan Science and Technology Agency, PRESTO, "Spoken Dialogue System based on Incremental Language Understanding and Knowledge Acquisition"
• 2017 -- 2018, Microsoft Research Asia Collaborative Research, "Sentence Generation based on Integration of Various Observations"
• 2015 -- 2016, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Start-Up, "Research of Practical Spoken Language Processing"
• 2013 -- 2014, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, JSPS-Fellowship, "Multi-modal dialogue system based on Information Extraction Adaptive to Users and Domains"

Member

• 2024 -- 2028, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, (A), "Knowledge Extension and Environment Recognition Infrastructure through Active Open-world Recognition"
• 2024 -- 2027, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, Innovative Area, "A real-world, human-centered approach to cognition and behavior by combining psychology with AI and robotics"
• 2017 -- 2020, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, (S), "Next Generation Speech Translation"
• 2017 -- 2020, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - JAPAN, KAKEN, (A), "Simultaneous Speech Translation with Para-Linguistic Information"
• 2016 -- 2018, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Contract research, "IoT-to-Human System for Kyoto Inbound Tourism"
• 2015 -- 2017, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications - JAPAN, SCOPE, Local ICT, "ICT for Elderly Monitoring System"

Awards

• Best Paper Award, 14th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology, September 2024.
• 3rd-prize, The 5th Dialogue System Live Competition, JSAI-SIG-SLUD, 2023.
• Commissioner's Special Award, ANLP, March 2023.
• SIG Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, September 2022.
• SIG Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, June 2022.
• SIG Research Award, JSAI, June 2021.
• Best Paper Award, 11th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology, September 2020.
• Best Video Finalist, 11th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology, September 2020
• Outstanding Research Award, ANLP, March 2020.
• SIG Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, August 2019.
• Best Paper Award, ACL2019 1st workshop on NLP for Conversational AI, NLP for ConvAI workshop committee, August 2019.
• Outstanding paper Award, ANLP, March 2019.
• Best Paper Runner-Up (finalist), International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology, IWSDS organizing committee, May 2018.
• IPSJ SIG Recommended PhD Thesis, September July 2015.
• The 1st IPSJ-ONE presenter, March 2015.
• SIG Research Award, JSAI, June 2014.
• Student Incentive Award, IPSJ SIG-NL and SIG-SLP, May 2012.