ConTEL 2009

Conversational Informatics for Situated Communication

Toyoaki Nishida
Kyoto University
Japan

Abstract:

Messages need to be situated for communication to make real sense in our life.  Conversation allows us to exchange situated messages in simultaneous streams of social interactions at multiple levels.  Conversation provides an effective means for circulating knowledge in a community.  Conversational Informatics comprises a theoretical foundation of our endeavors of  understanding and augmentation of conversations.  It consists of four research areas: conversational artifacts, conversational contents, conversational environment design, and conversation measurement, analysis and modeling.  As for conversational artifacts, we aim at building embodied conversational agents and conversational robots that can participate in conversational interactions among people.  As for conversational contents, we develop technologies that will allow us to capture knowledge arising in a conversational situation and reuse it to enhance later conversations. As for conversational environment design, we design smart environments that can sense conversational behaviors to either help participants become involved in a collaboration, or record conversation for later use.  As for conversation measurement, analysis and modeling, we take a data-driven quantitative approach to understanding conversational behaviors.  I will overview recent results in conversational informatics and discuss new challenges.  

Biography:

Toyoaki Nishida is Professor at Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He received the B.E., the M.E., and the Doctor of Engineering degrees from Kyoto University in 1977, 1979, and 1984, respectively.  His research centers on artificial intelligence and human computer interaction.  He founded an international workshop series on social intelligence design in 2001.  He opened up a new field of research called Conversational Informatics in 2003. Currently, he leads several projects on social intelligence design and conversational informatics. His representative work may be found in Nishida (ed.) Conversational Informatics -- An Engineering Approach, Wiley, 2007. He serves for numerous academic activities, including a vice president of JSAI (Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence), an associate editor of the AI & Society journal, an area editor (Intelligent Systems) of the New Generation Computing journal, a technical committee member of Web Intelligence Consortium, the IFIP TC12 representative from Japan, and an associate member of the Science Council of Japan.