Japanese

Toru Ishida (Professor)

Laboratory for Global Information Network
Department of Social Informatics
Kyoto University
606-8501 Kyoto, Japan

TEL: +81-75-753-4821
FAX: +81 75-753-4820

Email: ishida@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
URL: http://www.ai.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~ishida/.
Access: Engineering Building 10, Room 431 (detail)

I have been a professor of Kyoto University from 1993, IEEE fellow from 2002, IPSJ fellow from 2005, and IEICE fellow from 2008. I received the B.Eng., M.Eng. and PhD degrees from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1976, 1978 and 1989, respectively. From 1978 to 1993, I was a research scientist of NTT Laboratories. I was a visiting research scientist at the Department of Computer Science, Columbia University from 1983 to 1984, a guest professor at Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen in 1996, an invited professor at Le Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, Pierre et Marie Curie in 2000 and 2003, a visiting professor at Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland in 2002, a visiting professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2002 to 2008, a visiting professor at Computer Science and Technology Department, Tsinghua University in 2006, a research professor of NTT Communication Science Laboratories from 1998 to 2004, and a project leader of NICT Language Grid Project from 2006.

 

I have been working on autonomous agents and multiagent systems for more than twenty years. My research contribution can be classified into the three categories:

 

In production systems, I first proposed parallel rule firing with Sal Stolfo, when researchers mainly worked on parallel rule matching. I viewed production systems as a collection of individual concurrent activities, invented compile/run time algorithms to guarantee serializablility of rule firings, and actually developed parallel firing systems. I then extended parallel firing systems to distributed rule firing and introduced organizational self-design for adapting to environmental changes with Les Gasser. I was a member of the NTT Knowledge Base Management System Project, and developed an intelligent CAL using production systems, which becomes a key product of a NTT group company. The series of papers have been published at various conferences including IEEE CAIA, IEEE TAI, AAAI, IJCAI and appeared as four IEEE TKDE transaction papers. I was invited to give a talk at the first International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS95).

 

In multiagent search, since production systems are reactive, I tried to introduce deliberation in multiagent problem solving. I initiated an agent research group in NTT, and start creating computational algorithms for multiagent systems, when researchers mainly focused on conceptual works. I worked on path finding problems and constraint satisfaction problems, the two major search problems in AI. For path finding problems, I extended realtime search to be capable to utilize and improve previous experiments, to adapt to the dynamically changing goals with Richard Korf, and to cooperatively solve problems with other problem solvers. For constraint satisfaction, I worked with Makoto Yokoo and created a new problem called distributed constraint satisfaction, which has been widely accepted in this field. Papers have been published at conferences including IEEE ICDCS, AAAI, IJCAI, and appeared as two IEEE TKED/TPAMI transaction papers. I am a co-author of a multiagent search chapter for the first textbook of multiagent systems, which was published from the MIT press.

 

In community computing, I created a new application field for autonomous agents and multiagent systems. I realized a paradigm shift in computing metaphors: from team to community. Given that the team metaphor has created research fields like groupware and cooperative agents, the community metaphor will generate new research field. I proposed a concept of communityware to support the process of organizing diverse and amorphous groups of people, while groupware mainly addressed the collaborative work of already-organized people. In other words, compared to groupware studies, he focused on an earlier stage of collaboration: group formation from a wide variety of people. My team developed mobile assistants and tried out them at international conference ICMAS96 with 100 PDAs with wireless phones. This work was done with Yoshiyasu Nishibe. I also worked on a 3D interaction space called FreeWalk/Q with Hideyuki Nakanishi, and applied it to Digital City Kyoto. I published three LNCS proceedings and created a network among digital cities in Amsterdam, Helsinki, Seattle, Shanghai and Kyoto. In 2002, I initiated an intercultural collaboration experiments (ICE) with Chinese, Korean, Malaysian colleagues.

 

In 2006, I started the Language Grid project. The Language Grid is an infrastructure that is built on the top of the Internet. It allows a better understanding of Internet contents written in different languages and by people from different countries. In addition, the Language Grid allows users to easily develop new language services by combining existing ones to satisfy their needs. Basic software for the Language Grid has been studied and developed at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). For trial operation, however, Department of Social Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University takes on the role as the Language Grid Operator. During this trial, the usage of the Language Grid is limited to non-profit activities. To accumulate use cases and best practices, user groups including NPOs, NGOs and universities form the Language Grid Association. Papers related to the Language Grid have been published at conferences on human computer interactions including IUI, CSCW and CHI, on services computing including ICSOC and ICWS, and on artificial intelligence including ICSW and IJCAI.

 

I have been working for conferences on autonomous agents and multiagent systems including MACC/JAWS (Japanese Workshop), PRIMA (Asia/Pacific Workshop), ICMAS / AAMAS (International Conference). I was a program co-chair of the second ICMAS, a chair of the first PRIMA, and a general co-chair of the first AAMAS. I also started workshops on Digital Cities and Intercultural Collaboration. I experienced an editor-in-chief of Journal on Web Semantics (Elsevier), an associate editor of IEEE PAMI, an associate editor of Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Springer), a board member of the International Foundation on Autonomous Agent and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS), and a board member of Web Science Research Initiative.

Last Update: April 2009

Previous Research Activities

1.      Production Systems

2.      Multiagent Search

3.      Community Computing

4.      JST CREST Digital City Project

Current Projects

1.      Participatory Simulation

2.      Intercultural Collaboration

3.      The Language Grid

Books (detail)

1.      Toru Ishida, Susan R. Fussell and Piek TJM Vossen Eds. Intercultural Collaboration, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4568, Springer-Verlag, 2007.

2.      Toru Ishida, Les Gasser and Hideyuki Nakashima Eds. Massively Multi-Agent Systems I. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 3446, Springer-Verlag, 2005.

3.      Toru Ishida. Activities and Technologies in Digital City Kyoto. Peter van den Besselaar and Satoshi Koizumi Eds. Digital Cities III, Information Technologies for Social Capital: a Cross-Cultural Perspective, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, State-of-the-Art Survey, 3081, pp. 166-187, 2005. (pdf)

Journals (detail)

1.      Makoto Nakatsuji, Makoto Yoshida and Toru Ishida. Detecting Innovative Topics based on User-Interest Ontology. Journal of Web Semantics. Journal of Web Semantics, 2009.

2.      Yue Suo, Naoki Miyata, Hiroki Morikawa, Toru Ishida and Yuanchun Shi. Open Smart Classroom: Extensible and Scalable Learning System in Smart Space using Web Service Technology. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2009.

3.      Toru Ishida and Hiromitsu Hattori. Participatory Technologies for Designing Ambient Intelligence Systems. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, IOS Press, Vol. 1, pp. 39-45, 2009.

Conference Papers (detail)

1.         Masahiro Tanaka, Toru Ishida, Yohei Murakami, and Satoshi Morimoto. Service Supervision: Coordinating Web Services in Open Environment. IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS-09), 2009.

2.         Rie Tanaka, Yohei Murakami and Toru Ishida. Context-Based Approach for Pivot Translation Services. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), 2009.

3.         Naomi Yamashita, Reiko Inaba, Hideaki Kuzuoka and Toru Ishida. Difficulties in Establishing Common Ground in Multiparty Groups using Machine Translation. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI-09), pp. 679-688, 2009.

4.         Arif Bramantoro, Masahiro Tanaka, Yohei Murakami, Ulrich Schäfer and Toru Ishida. A Hybrid Integrated Architecture for Language Service Composition. IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS-08), pp. 345-352, 2008.

5.         Heeryon Cho, Toru Ishida, Toshiyuki Takasaki and Satoshi Oyama. Assisting Pictogram Selection with Semantic Interpretation. European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-08), LNCS 5021, pp. 65–79, 2008. (pdf)

6.         Toru Ishida, Yuu Nakajima, Yohei Murakami and Hideyuki Nakanishi. Augmented Experiment: Participatory Design with Multiagent Simulation. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07), 2007. (pdf)

7.         Yichuan Jiang and Toru Ishida. A Model for Collective Strategy Diffusion in Agent Social Law Evolution. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07), pp. 1353-1358, 2007. (pdf)

8.         Naomi Yamashita and Toru Ishida. Effects of Machine Translation on Collaborative Work. International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW-06), pp. 515-523, 2006. (pdf)

9.         Ahlem Ben Hassine, Matsubara Shigeo and Toru Ishida. Constraint-based Approach for Web Service Composition. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-06), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4273, Springer-Verlag, pp. 130-143, 2006. (pdf)

10.     Daisuke Torii, Toru Ishida and Francois Bousquet. Modeling Agents and Interactions in Agricultural Economics. International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-06), pp. 81-88, 2006. (pdf)

11.     Toru Ishida. Language Grid: An Infrastructure for Intercultural Collaboration. IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT-06), pp. 96-100, keynote address, 2006. (pdf)

12.     Yohei Murakami, Yuki Sugimoto and Toru Ishida. Modeling Human Behavior for Virtual Training Systems. National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), pp. 127-132, 2005. (pdf)

13.     Takeru Miki, Saeko Nomura, Toru Ishida. Semantic Web Link Analysis to Discover Social Relationships in Academic Communities, IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT-05), pp. 38-45, 2005. (pdf)

Links (detail)

 

For more information, CV is available.