Jun Kato
Human-Computer Interaction researcher, Ph.D.

Research area

I am interested in the broad area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and have been particularly passionate about how computing can contribute to cultural diversity. As such, I have focused on the design of user interfaces and integrated environments for creativity support. Improving Programming Experience (PX) is an important sub-goal to support the creativity of people with diverse technical backgrounds.

Bio

He is a Senior Researcher at AIST and the Technical Advisor (PI) at Arch Research with a focus on PX and creativity support research. Since April 2024, he has been a Visiting Scientist at Ex-Situ group, LISN, Université Paris-Saclay. He received a Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo (2014) and has regularly gained academic recognitions such as Honorable Mentions at ACM CHI (2013, 2015, 2023) and IPSJ/ACM Award (2021).

Recent updates

March 14, 2025
The permanent exhibition facility of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) is being renewed as "AIST-Cube", as publicly announced. I contributed to the exhibition production related to the Lyric App Framework.
March 4, 2025
Delivered a keynote talk at the international workshop Intelligence Augmentation and Amplification plus Society Forum (IAA+Soc 2025). Also participated in the panel discussions over the following two days.
February 12, 2025
Organized A Workshop on Creativity Support for Hand-drawn Art Practices (CHAP 2025 Paris) in Paris over three days, from February 10 to 12, 2025. Researchers and artists from Japan and France, where animation and manga/bande dessinée are both vibrant yet culturally distinct practices, participated in the event.
February 4, 2025
Visited the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and gave a talk titled "Being a toolsmith researcher: a constructive approach to science of tools?" Also visited the HCI and Software Architecture groups at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and delivered a talk. In Hamburg, I visited The New Institute and met with Kohei Saito.
January 23, 2025
Paid a courtesy visit to the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology following the selection for Researchers with Nice Step 2024 for notable contributions to science and technology.

Projects

Products

The following services and tools are beyond research prototypes and used in production.

TextAlive

An integrated design environment for kinetic typography; desktop app revamped as a web service in 2015.

2014-2025CHI '15
Griffith

Griffith is a web-based authoring tool for Japanese animation (anime) storyboards.

2019-2025CHI '24
Songle Sync

The Songle Sync platform allows controlling numerous devices in synchrony with the songs with its SDK.

2017-2023MM '18
f3.js

A parametric design tool for physical computing devices for both interaction designers and end-users.

2015-2018DIS '17

Research topics

Creativity Support Environments

To realize a creative society in which people want to create content with the help of AI technologies, a sustainable ecosystem in which content inspires the next creation serves a critical role.

I shed light on the creative culture in such an ecosystem, build a "creativity support environment (CSE)" that supports the content creation and distribution process, and aim to establish Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) technologies that engineer, nurture, and maintain the creative culture.

Programming as Communication

Programming should be a more social activity than what it is right now. A programming environment does not need to be only for programmers. It should instead be designed for users with diverse technical backgrounds.

Such inclusive design enables the users to communicate with each other through programming-related activities, delivers benefits of programming to all of them, and would give empowerment to them.

User Interfaces for Live Programming

Live programming eliminates the gulf between code and execution. User interface design plays the key role in providing live programming experience.

With appropriate user interface design, live programming can potentially benefit end-users, be used for applications whose computation takes a long time, and mean much more than merely providing real-time information of the running program.

Programming with Examples

The programming-with-examples (PwE) workflow lets developers create interactive applications with the help of example data. It takes a general programming environment and adds dedicated user interfaces for visualizing and managing the data.

This is particularly useful in developing data-intensive applications such as physical computing, image processing, video authoring, machine learning, and others that require intensive parameter tuning.

For the exhaustive list of projects, see Projects.

Contact

Please contact me via email or social networking sites rather than telephone if possible. I rarely check these conventional machines.

Collaborations?