Up to now, I have been carrying out various studies to develop an artifact that can create an intimate interaction with users, and one that can become "the one and only" or "indispensable" one for users. My collaborators and I advocate these kinds of studies as a "human-agent interaction (HAI)" research area, and recently, studies on HAI are drawing keen attention from various research fields such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human interfaces. Within HAI studies, I have been focusing on achieving a mutual adaptation process between users and artifacts. That is, they continue to learn to respond more appropriately to each other' behaviors. It can be said that these studies focused on "how artifacts adapt to users," e.g., how artifacts should behave in front of users.

However, conducting studies in only the above research direction is not enough to achieve a mutual adaptation process between users and artifacts. Therefore, conducting studies about "how artifacts induce users' adaptations," e.g., how should an artifact induce the users' natural speeches, is an absolutely necessity. Actually these kinds of studies have not been recognized as an important issue in HAI and various related research fields, though the studies about "how artifacts adapt to users" has. Therefore, I am planning to conduct or am in the process of actually conducting the following studies:

->Proposing a methodology or a computational model to induce users' emotional involvement or their empathy toward the artifact by means of users' biological signals or biofeedback
->Investigating what kinds of subtle expressions can induce a user's appropriate behaviors unconsciously or implicitly by extending studies on applicant's subtle expressions
->Proposing a meaning acquisition model that can figure out the subtle nuance of the users' intuitive or unconscious expressions, such as onomatopoetic expressions or prosodic information
->Investigating how the relationship between the artifacts' appearance and its own function affects the user' impressions

These studies will complement the current researches and could contribute to achieving a mutual adaptation process between users and artifacts. Moreover, these studies inducing humans' emotional involvement into the interaction could provide fresh perspectives on current HAI studies and various related studies in which most researchers have focused on the methodology to make artifacts clever. Therefore, I assume that these studies can be transmitted as my original research from Shinshu University to the world.

I would like to push strongly forward with my researches to be a researcher who is active internationally in this favorable environment through the collaboration with researchers in/out of Japan/Shinshu University.