Human-Computer Interaction researcher, Ph.D.
Jun Kato
Research area
I am interested in broad area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and have been especially focused on designing user interfaces and integrated environments for creativity support. Improving Programming Experience (PX) is an important subgoal to support the creativity of people with diverse technical backgrounds.
Bio
Jun Kato is a HCI senior researcher at AIST, Japan, and also serves as a technical advisor at Arch Inc. He worked for Microsoft and Adobe and received a Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo in 2014. He has focused on PX research, founded SIGPX, and regularly gained academic recognition such as ACM CHI 2013/2015 Best Paper Honorable Mention.
Recent updates
3/16/2021
Gave an invited talk titled "Creativity Support for People with Diverse Technical Background" and presented a poster on the ongoing project for Japanese animation storyboards from Arch Research at ISID 2021, which got one of the Best Poster Awards!
9/20/2020
Released TextAlive App API, a JavaScript library for building "lyric apps" (cf. lyric videos) that show lyrics synchronized with the music playback. Songle Sync (ACM Multimedia 2018) was used to celebrate Hatsune Miku's birthday with over 10,000 participants. Thank you for your birthday messages!
5/31/2020
Appeared in the Microsoft Research article celebrating the 20th year of MSRA Fellowship, titled "A Story That Has Lasted Twenty Years, A Fellowship That Has Changed a Group of People".
5/15/2020
Added a preprint of the paper on Rethinking Programming "Environment" in the Programming as Communication project page.
5/9/2020
Presented Rethinking Programming "Environment" in Convivial Computing Salon 2020, as part of my Programming as Communication project. The recording and slides of my talk are already available.
Research topics
While I am interested in broad area of HCI and have a high-level goal of supporting people's creativity, I have been especially focused on the following topics. For the list of concrete projects, see Projects.
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.
Contact
Please reach me via email or social networking services rather than telephone and facsimile when possible. I rarely check these conventional machines.
Central 2, 1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8568, Japan
Interested in collaborations?
Collaborations
I am actively looking for collaborators in both academia and industry. Click to show more details.