Jun Kato

Human-Computer Interaction researcher, Ph.D.

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 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.

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.

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.