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
He is a Senior Researcher at AIST and the Technical Advisor (PI) at Arch Research with a focus on PX and creativity support research. He received a Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo (2014) and has regularly gained academic recognitions such as Best Paper Honorable Mentions at ACM CHI (2013, 2015) and IPSJ/ACM Award (2021).
Recent updates
6/30/2022
Presented Past, Present, and Future of "Toolsmiths" in Japanese Animation in the "Machine Learning and AI in animation" session of SAS 2022. This is a follow-up work to the SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 panel session and last year's presentation at SAS 2021.
3/15/2022
Gave a poster presentation titled Griffith: Prototype of A Web-based Tool for Authoring Japanese Anime Storyboards at ISID 2022 and received one of the Best Poster Awards.
2/16/2022
Participated in the art exhibition titled Design Alternative Realities and discussed "Democratization of the Process and Outcome of Computer Science Research."
12/7/2021
Will lead the featured session titled R&D for Anime Production: State-of-the-Art and Future Prospects and also serve as the Real-Time Live! Chair at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2021.
9/4/2021
Participated in the German anime and manga convention Connichi and presented in the panel session "How Academics Contribute to Anime's Future" -- glad to be in Germany (virtually), my country of birth!
Projects
Products
The following products are beyond research prototypes and generally available to public.
TextAliveAn integrated design environment for kinetic typography; desktop app revamped as a web service in 2015.
2014-2022CHI '15
GriffithGriffith is a web-based authoring tool for Japanese animation (anime) storyboards.
2019-2022SAS '21
Songle SyncThe Songle Sync platform allows controlling numerous devices in synchrony with the songs with its SDK.
2017-2022MM '18
f3.jsA parametric design tool for physical computing devices for both interaction designers and end-users.
2015-2018DIS '17
Research topics
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 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.