Kansei Robots
In recent years, robots have become a bigger part of our everyday lives. People are especially interested in communication robots like SONY's AIBO and SoftBank's Pepper. These robots can respond to human speech, and they entertain us with gestures, showing emotions, and talking.
Kansei Retrieval Systems
In today's modern world, if you want information, you can easily find it by searching keywords on the internet. But there's so much information that pops up, it's hard to find exactly what you're looking for.
For example, if you try to buy fashion items online, you get too many results. It's really tough to look at every single item to find one that matches what you like.
We're working on solving this problem by making machines understand and address people's preferences.
Health and Exercise Support System
In today's world, lifestyle-related diseases are becoming a bigger threat. Because of this, people are paying more attention to ways to deal with these diseases. Recently, devices like Apple Watch and Fitbit have come out, making it easy to check how our bodies are doing. This means people can now take care of their health more easily, and they're becoming more aware of their daily habits.
Interactive Evolutionary Computation
Interactive Evolutionary Computation is a method in which humans and computers collaborate through communication to create outputs that align with human sensibilities. These outputs can take many forms, such as clothing designs and color schemes, shoe designs and fashion coordination, music enhanced with sound effects, or video expressions like camera work in 3D spaces.
We conduct research focusing on kansei-related themes, not only in evolutionary computation, neural networks, and robotics but also beyond these fields.
(The Japanese word “kansei” means sensitivity and intuition, including but not limited to emotions. It is broader than the word “emotion,” which refers only to feelings.)
