MYSELF

Updated: 4/21/05

I live with my wife and two daughters in a mountainous area near the Kanazawa city in Japan. I used to teach logic and information-theoretic cognitive science at the Graduate School of Knowledge Science of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Since April 2005, my main working place has been Faculty of Cuture and Information Science of Doshisha University in Kyoto.

In 1996, I received the degree of Ph.D. from the philosophy department at Indiana University, where Professor Jon Barwise supervised my work in the pleasant academic environment of the Indiana University Visual Inference Laboratory.

From 1996 to 1998, I worked as a member the the Human Communication Science Group, directed by Dr. Yasuhiro Katagiri, at ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Laboratories. I studied information flows in human dialogues in collaboration with Dr. Katagiri and Dr. Hanae Koiso.

I was also associated with ATR Media Information Science Laboratories from 2000 to 2005. I worked with Ichiro Umata and Yasuhiro Katagiri, mainly focusing on the use of graphical representation in human task-oriented dialogues.

My long-term research agenda is formal semantics of graphical representation systems that explicates the informational base on which graphical representations facilitates (an impare) human reasoning and communication.

• As a philosopher, I like to think. My research interacts with psychology, linguistics, logic, and computer science, and I try to employ any method suitable for my agenda, but thinking is by far my most favorite activity.
• As an educator, I like my students to be persons who are faithful to their conscience, whether in personal life or in professional life. I myself try to be such a person.
• As a human, I like to browse around nearby fish markets to find good and fresh sashimi for the evening. I seriously suspect that Kanazawa and its neighborhoods may be the best sushi places in the world.