Yoichi MATSUYAMA Ph.D
松山 洋一，博士（工学）

Founder and CEO,
Equmenopolis, Inc.
Associate Research Professor,
Perceptual Computing Laboratory, Waseda University

Yoichi Matsuyama is the Founder and CEO of Equmenopolis, Inc. and Associate Research Professor of the Perceptual Computing Laboratory, Waseda University in Tokyo. Prior to the current position, he was a Post Doctoral Fellow (Special Faculty) in the ArticuLab in the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.

He has been designing and developing a number of conversational AI media systems for more than a decade. His research interest lies in computational models of human conversations, which combine artificial intelligence, social science, and human-computer/robot interaction. His projects were featured in numerous major media, such as MIT Technology Review, Washington Post, CNBC, BBC, CNET, Popular Science and Science Friday. He received B.A. in cognitive psychology and media studies, M.E. and Ph.D in computer science from Waseda University in 2005, 2008 and 2015 respectively.

早稲田大学基幹理工学研究科情報理工学専攻 博士（工学）．イタリア工科大学認知ロボティクス研究グループ客員研究員，カーネギーメロン大学 ヒューマン・コンピュータ・インタラクション研究所および言語技術研究所 博士研究員，早稲田大学 GCS研究機構 知覚情報システム研究所 主任研究員（研究院 准教授）を経て，2022年に会話AIエージェント開発会社「エキュメノポリス」を創業．研究のミッションは「社会的知能を有する会話AIメディアの実現」．言語学，認知科学，機械学習，ロボット工学，UI/UXデザイン等の融合する，メディアとしての会話AIの研究と実用化に人生を掛ける．

Mission Statement

Designing Socially Expressive Conversational AI Media
to Assist and Entertain Human Lives.

Since the beginning of time, humans talk with one-another. Conversation is an essential and innate way for human cognition when interacting with other people. Therefore, conversational user interfaces (UIs) with AI systems and new ways of information processing in the society – here I call it the conversational AI media – recently emerges in the markets, a novel user experience (UX) design area has arisen. However, the existing commercial products (e.g., virtual assistants) play a minimal role, aside from querying using voice input and output. These products only fulfill limited functions that a human assistant may accomplish because they lack deep understandings of the human conversational process. Similar to what Marshall McLuhan proposed in his media theory, the conversational AI can be regarded as a novel media that has a remarkable potential to change our methods of production, distribution, and consumption of information in our society owing to its unique characteristics towards 2020, 2025, and beyond. As an independent researcher, I scientifically investigate the nature of human conversations by designing the conversational AI media that has actual impacts on the societies of this century. For further mission statement, see the post “Conversation as Media“.

Experiences

  • Post Doctoral Research Fellow, ArticuLab, Language Technologies Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States, 2014 – 2018 (Advisor: Justine Cassell)
  • Visiting Research Fellow, iCub Facility, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy, 2013 (Advisor: Giorgio Metta)
  • Director, WIZDOM (Waseda University Integrated Space of Wizards, Digital Oriented Manufacturers), 2012 – 2014
  • Research Associate, Waseda University, 2010 – 2013
  • Research Assistant, International Research and Education Center for Ambient Soc, Waseda University Global COE Program, 2008 – 2010
  • Program Committee (Student Volunteer Program Chair), ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, 2008 – 2009
  • Virtual Reality Content Designer, CAD CENTER Inc., Tokyo, 2004 – 2005

Educations

  • Ph.D, Computer Science, 2015 (Advisor: Tetsunori Kobayashi, Perceptual Computing Group)
  • M.E., Computer Science, 2008 (Advisor: Tetsunori Kobayashi, Perceptual Computing Group)
  • B.A., Human and Social Sciences, 2005 (Advisor: Machiko Kusahara)

* All degrees from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Awards

  • Reimagine Education Award 2021, Learning Assessment Category Bronze, Quarrelli Simmons (QS) and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (MBA), USA · Dec 2021
  • Best Paper Award, Human-Agent Interaction 2019, October 2019
    (Florian Pecune, Shruti Murali, Vivian Tsai, Yoichi Matsuyama, and Justine Cassell, A Model of Social Explanations for a Conversational Movie Recommendation System, In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, pp. 135-143. ACM, 2019.)
  • Outstanding Research Award, Human-Agent Interaction 2012, December 2012
    (Yoichi Matsuyama, Akihiro Saito, Iwao Akiba, Moemi Watanabe and Tetsunori Kobayashi, Facilitation Robot Promoting the Greatest Participation of the Greatest Number in Multiparty Conversation, Human-Agent Interaction Symposium 2012, 2B-3, December 2012.)
  • Annual SIG Excellence Award, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence SIG-SLUD (Special Interest Group of Speech, Language Understanding and Discourse Processing), June 2022
    (Mao Saeki, Ryuki Matsuura, Shungo Suzuki, Kotoka Miyagi, Tetsunori Kobayashi, Yoichi Matsuyama, InteLLA: A Speaking Proficiency Assessment Conversational Agent with Adaptive Interview Strategy, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI), SIG-SLUD, October 2021.)
  • Annual SIG Excellence Award, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence SIG-SLUD (Special Interest Group of Speech, Language Understanding and Discourse Processing), February 2012
    (Yoichi Matsuyama, Akihiro Saito, Atsushi Ito, Iwao Akiba, Moemi Watanabe and Tetsunori Kobayashi, Active Timing Detection and Strategies for Multiparty Conversation Facilitation Systems, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI), SIG-SLUD-B203-05, pp.17-24, February 2013.)
  • Annual SIG Excellence Award, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence SIG-SLUD (Special Interest Group of Speech, Language Understanding and Discourse Processing), July 2008
    (Yoichi Matsuyama, Shinya Fujie, Hikaru Taniyama and Tetsunori Kobayashi, Communication Activation System in Group Communication, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI), SIG-SLUD-A801, pp.15-22, July 2008.)
  • Microsoft Scholarship, April 2009

Grants

  • Beyond 5G Seed Program, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications … approx. $3,000,000
  • New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Seed-stage Technology-based Startups (STS) … approx. $1,000,000
  • New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), “Next generation AI evolving with humans” … approx. $3,500,000
  • Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), SBIR Phase 1 … approx. $70,000
  • Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Program for Creating STart-ups from Advanced Research and Technology (START) … approx. $1,000,000
  • Yahoo!-CMU InMind Project, 2015-2017 … $300,000
  • IT R&D program of MSIP/IITP 2017-0-00255, Autonomous Digital Companion Development, Korean Government, 2017 – 2018 … approx. $600,000
  • Google Faculty Award Grant, Grounding Task Behavior in the Social World: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Social Dialogue to Improve Task Performance, 2017 … $76,109
  • Google Cloud Research Credits, Socially Aware Robot Assistant, 2015 – 2017 … $50,000
  • AWS Cloud Credits for Research (2018Q1): PI … $30,000
  • Microsoft Grant, Socially Aware Robot Assistant, 2017 … $75,000 + Surface Hub
  • CMU President Donation for SARA (2017): co-PI … $100,000
  • CMU ProSEED Crosswalk Seed Grant (2018) “Holographic Archive of Research Projects (HARP) : PI … $2500
  • CMU The Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier, Ghost Box – Holographic Display Prototype (2018) … $500
  • JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Eesearch WAKATE-B (23700239), “Development and Evaluations of Multiparty Conversation Activation Systems”, 2010 – 2012 … 3,900,000 JPY (approx. $40,000)
  • JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Eesearch WAKATE-B (25870824), “Facilitation Strategy for Multiparty Conversation Robots”, 2013-2015 … 3,770,000 JPY (approx. $39,000)
  • JSPS Takuetsu Graduate School Program Grant, 2014 … 9,128,641 JPY (approx. $100,000)
  • Yoichi Muraoka Grant, 2012 … 1,000,000 JPY (approx. $10,000)

Professional Services

Program Committee

  • Group Interaction Frontiers in Technology Workshop (GIFT), International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2018 (ICMI 2018), Program Committee
  • NAACL-HLT 2018 (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies), Program Committee
  • ACL 2018 (Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics), Program Committee
  • IWSDS 2018 (International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technologies), Program Committee
  • Journal of Human Interface Society Japan “Human Collaboration” 2018, Associate Editor
  • RO-MAN 2016 (IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication ), Associate Editor
  • ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Commitee Member (2008-2009)

Conference/Session Organizer

Editor

 Reviewer

  • Journals
    • IEEE Pervasive Computing, Special Issue – Conversational User Interfaces and Interactions, 2018
    • Journal of Behavioral Research Methods, 2015
    • International Journal of Affective Engineering, 2015
    • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Acoustic, Speech and Language (TASLP), 2014
  • Conferences
    • International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technologies (IWSDS) 2017, 2018
    • Advanced Robotics, 2015
    • IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), 2014
    • International Conference on Virtual Agents (IVA), 2014
    • Journal of Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI), 2012, 2013
    • International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), 2011

Patents / Inventions

  • Speaking Assessment (Japan 2022-049257)
  • Dialog Personalization (Japan 2022-38389)
  • Video Conferencing (Japan 2021-013329)
  • Dialog Scenario Interpreter (Japan 2020-176641)
  • Dialog Advertisement (Japan 2019-78195)
  • Conversational Robot (Japan 2010-221556)
  • Conversational Facilitation System and Robot (Japan 2008-304140)
  • Deep Neural Network Based Conversational Strategy Classifier (CMU Disclosure of Invention, August 2017)
  • Rapport-Building Animated Virtual Agent for Dyadic Conversation (CMU Disclosure of Invention, April 2016)
  • Social Reasoner (CMU Disclosure of Invention, April 2017)

Demos and Exhibitions

SARA Project (Carnegie Mellon University): Project Lead

SCHEMA Project (Waseda University): Project Lead

Media Coverage

Tutorial English AI Project (Waseda University): Project Lead

SARA Project (Carnegie Mellon University): Project Lead

“Speaking with SARA certainly felt less jarring than talking to a regular chatbot. The system studies the words a person says during a conversation as well as the tone of his or her voice, also using several cameras to study the speaker’s facial expressions and head movements.”

– MIT Technology Review

SCHEMA Project (Waseda University)