Updated: 9/23/2017

Jun Kato

Jun Kato is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher at AIST, where he works on designing tools for programming interactive media content. He received a Ph.D in Computer Science from The University of Tokyo in March, 2014. Prior to graduation, he worked as research intern at Microsoft Research Asia, Redmond, and Adobe Research Seattle.

He has regularly gained academic recognition such as Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship 2012, ACM CHI 2013/2015 Best Paper Honorable Mention, and HAI 2014 Best Paper Nominee.

E-mail
i@junkato.jp
URL
http://junkato.jp

Research Interest

Human-Computer Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction (Prototyping toolkits and integrated development environments for programming interactive media content)

Work Experience

Researcher, Media Interaction Group, Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (April 2014 - present)

Leading research projects to be published as academic papers and collaborating with companies to impact the society.

Research Intern, Adobe Research CTL (August 2013 - November 2013)

Worked with Jovan Popovic and Joel Brandt. Led a research project to be integrated into a new product.

Research Intern, Microsoft Research Redmond RiSE Group (June 2012 - September 2012)

Worked with Sebastian Burckhardt and Michał Moskal. Led a research project to be published as a paper at PLDI'13. Outcome integrated into a public WIDE, TouchDevelop.

Research Intern, Microsoft Research Asia HCI Group (January 2012 - April 2012)

Worked with Xiang Cao and Sean McDirmid. Led a research project to be published as a paper at UIST'12.

Intern, The University of Tokyo Edge Capital (July 2010 - August 2010)

Led a team of 3 students. Surveyed previous effort of the industry on home automation and proposed a new business plan with simple prototype implementation.

Software Development Engineer Intern, Microsoft (August 2009 - September 2009)

Implemented an online code reviewing tool to improve the team's productivity.

Assistant Researcher, JST ERATO IGARASHI Design UI Project (April 2008 - March 2013)

Implemented a GUI simulator for mobile robots. Made a FTIR multi-touch display, etc.

Website design and system contractor (2005 - present)

Designed and made websites from scratch such as UT-Life, SCI and digitalmuseum.

Professional Experience

JSPS Research Fellowships for Young Scientists (DC1) (April 2011 - March 2014)

Funded $18,000 for three years ($6,000 for each year) as a research fellow.

Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship (2012)

Awarded among around one hundred Ph.D candidates and funded $10,000 for a year.

Principal Investigator, Microsoft IJARC CORE Program (April 2011 - March 2012)

Funded $15,000 for a year as a principal investigator of a research project.

Project Leader, IPA MITOH Program (December 2008 - August 2009)

Funded $70,000 for half a year as a project leader of an exploratory software project. Developed a software toolkit for prototyping robot applications.

Education

PhD Computer Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo Japan (April 2011 - March 2014)

Concentration: Integrated development environment with graphical representations for development of programs with real-world input and output,
Igarashi Lab.

MS Computer Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo Japan (April 2009 - March 2011)

Concentration: Prototyping toolkit for robotic things,
Igarashi Lab.

BS Information Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo Japan (April 2005 - March 2009)

Concentration: User interface for mobile robots,
Igarashi Lab.

Skills

Language Skills

Japanese
Native
English
Full professional procifiency; TOEFL iBT score 94/120 (2008); TOEIC 970/990 (2015)

Computer Skills

Languages
TypeScript, C#, Java, JavaScript, C, PHP, MySQL, (X)HTML, Processing, Scheme, ...
Platforms
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Honors

Best Paper Award at SMC 2015

Co-authored a research paper about CrossSong, an interactive music-based puzzle game where puzzles are automatically generated by the system.

Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2015

Presented TextAlive, an integrated design environment for kinetic typography.

Best Paper Award at WISS 2014

Presented TextAlive, a web-based system for creating and editing Kinetic Typography movies with help of automatic lyric-song synchronization and live programming. WISS is the most premier venue for publishing research on interactive systems in Japan.

Best Paper Nominee at HAI 2014

Presented Sharedo, a web-based interface for sharing tasks between humans and agents.

Best Presentation Award at IPSJ 104th SIGMUS

Presented TextAlive. English information is not publicly available at this moment regarding an ongoing anonymous submission.

JDP Good Design Award 2013

For the collaborative project OpenPool for which I worked as one of the main programmers.

Finalist in ACM Student Research Competition at PLDI 2013

Presented VisionSketch, a live programming environment for image processing.

Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2013

Presented Picode, a text-based development environment integrated with inline photos.

Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship 2012 Award

Won the fellowship (10 recipients out of 94 candidates) for outstanding contributions of the DejaVu project.

Best Research and Development Award at 4th Rakuten R&D Symposium

Presented a web service for sharing tasks between humans and robots described in Publications. Rakuten, Inc. is a famous Japan-based company of internet services.

Best of Emerging Technology Award in ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Emerging Technologies

Presented a multi-touch interface for controlling home appliances described in Publications.

1st Place in ACM Student Research Competition at CHI 2009

Presented a multi-touch interface for controlling multiple mobile robots described in Publications.

Publications

Journal paper

The CrossSong Puzzle: Developing a Logic Puzzle for Musical Thinking

Journal of New Music Research

Jordan Smith, Jun Kato, Satoru Fukayama, Graham Percival and Masataka Goto, The CrossSong Puzzle: Developing a Logic Puzzle for Musical Thinking. In Journal of New Music Research (2017). Taylor & Francis, 1-16.

Programming with Examples to Develop Data-Intensive User Interfaces

IEEE Computer (Special Issue on 21st Century User Interfaces)

Jun Kato, Masataka Goto and Takeo Igarashi, Programming with Examples to Develop Data-Intensive User Interfaces. In IEEE Computer (2016). IEEE, Vol. 49, Issue 7, 34-42.

Andy: A Toolkit for Developing Mobile Robot Applications with a Ceiling-mounted Camera and Visual Markers

Jun Kato, Daisuke Sakamoto, Masahiko Inami and Takeo Igarashi, Andy: A Toolkit for Developing Mobile Robot Applications with a Ceiling-mounted Camera and Visual Markers. In Transactions of Information Processing Society of Japan (2011). IPSJ, Vol. 52, No. 4, 1425-1437.

Refereed international conference and workshop papers

f3.js: A Parametric Design Tool of Physical Computing Devices for Both Interaction Designers and End-users

ACM DIS '17 (acceptance rate: 22%)

Jun Kato and Masataka Goto. In DIS '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (Edinburgh, UK, June, 2017). 1099-1110.

User-Generated Variables: Streamlined Interaction Design for Feature Requests and Implementations

Programming PX '17

Jun Kato and Masataka Goto. In Proceedings of the Programming Experience 2017 (PX/17) Workshop (Brussels, Belgium, April 4, 2017). 28:1-28:7

Live Tuning: Expanding Live Programming Benefits to Non-Programmers

ECOOP LIVE '16

Jun Kato and Masataka Goto. In Proceedings of LIVE '16: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Live Programming Systems (Rome, Italy, July 17, 2016).

PlaylistPlayer: An Interface Using Multiple Criteria to Change the Playback Order of a Music Playlist

ACM IUI '16

Tomoyasu Nakano, Jun Kato, Masahiro Hamasaki and Masataka Goto. In Proceedings of IUI '16: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Sonoma, CA, USA, March 7 - 10, 2016). 186-190.

CrossSong Puzzle: Generating and Unscrambling Music Mash-ups with Real-time Interactivity

SMC '15 (Best Paper Award)

Jordan B. L. Smith, Graham Percival, Jun Kato, Masataka Goto and Satoru Fukayama. In Proceedings of SMC '15: Proceedings of the 12nd Sound and Music Computing Conference (Maynooth, Ireland, July 26 - August 1, 2015). 61-67.

TextAlive Online: Live Programming of Kinetic Typography Videos with Online Music

ICLC '15

Jun Kato, Tomoyasu Nakano and Masataka Goto. In Proceedings of ICLC '15: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Live Coding (Leeds, UK, July 13 - 15, 2015). Zenodo of CERN, Genève, 199-205.

TextAlive: Integrated Design Environment for Kinetic Typography

ACM CHI '15 (Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, acceptance rate: 25%)

Jun Kato, Tomoyasu Nakano and Masataka Goto. In Proceedings of CHI '15: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seoul, Korea, April 18 - 23, 2015). ACM, New York, NY, 3403-3412.

Sharedo: To-do List Interface for Human-agent Task Sharing

HAI '14 (Best Paper Nominee)

Jun Kato, Daisuke Sakamoto, Takeo Igarashi and Masataka Goto. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (Tsukuba, Japan, October 7 - 9, 2014). ACM, New York, NY, 345-351.

VisionSketch: Integrated Support for Example-Centric Programming of Image Processing Applications

GI '14

Jun Kato and Takeo Igarashi. In Proceedings of the 2014 Graphics Interface Conference (Montreal, QC, Canada, May 7 - 9, 2014). Canadian Information Processing Society, Toronto, ON, Canada, 115-122.

OpenPool: Community-based Prototyping of Digitally-augmented Billiard Table

IEEE GCCE '13

Jun Kato, Takashi Nakashima, Hideki Takeoka, Kazunori Ogasawara, Kazuma Murao, Toshinari Shimokawa and Masaaki Sugimoto. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (Tokyo, Japan, October 1 - 4, 2013). IEEE, 175-176.

It's Alive! Continuous Feedback in UI Programming

ACM PLDI '13 (acceptance rate: 17%)

Sebastian Burckhardt, Manuel Fahndrich, Peli de Halleux, Jun Kato, Sean McDirmid, Michal Moskal and Nikolai Tillmann.In Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (Seattle, WA, USA, June 16 - 19, 2013). ACM, New York, NY, 95-104.

Picode: Inline Photos Representing Posture Data in Source Code

ACM CHI '13 (Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, acceptance rate: 20%)

Jun Kato, Daisuke Sakamoto and Takeo Igarashi. In Proceedings of CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Paris, France, April 27 - May 2, 2013). ACM, New York, NY, 3097-3100.

DejaVu: Integrated Support for Developing Interactive Camera-Based Programs

ACM UIST '12 (acceptance rate: 22%)

Jun Kato, Sean McDirmid and Xiang Cao. In Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (Boston, NY, USA, October 7 - 10, 2012). ACM, New York, NY, 189-196.

Phybots: A Toolkit for Prototyping Robotic Things

ACM DIS '12 (acceptance rate: 20%)

Jun Kato, Daisuke Sakamoto and Takeo Igarashi. In Proceedings of the 9th conference on Designing Interactive Systems (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, June 11 - 15, 2012). ACM, New York, NY, 248-257.

Refereed international conference posters and demonstrations

A Robotic Framework for Video Recording and Authoring

ACM/IEEE HRI '17 demonstration

Jun Kato and Masataka Goto. In HRI '17 Companion: Proceedings of the Companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Vienna, Austria, March 6 - 9, 2017). ACM, New York, NY, 41-41.

Form Follows Function(): An IDE to Create Laser-cut Interfaces and Microcontroller Programs from Single Code Base

ACM UIST '15 demonstration

Jun Kato and Masataka Goto. In UIST '15 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Charlotte, NC, USA, November 8 - 11, 2015). ACM, New York, NY, 43-44.

CapStudio: An Interactive Screencast for Visual Application Development

ACM CHI '14 extended abstracts

Koumei Fukahori, Daisuke Sakamoto, Jun Kato and Takeo Igarashi. In CHI '09 EA: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Toronto, ON, Canada, April 26 - May 1, 2014). ACM, New York, NY, 1435-1458.

Integrated Visual Representations for Programming with Real-world Input and Output

ACM UIST '13 doctoral symposium

Jun Kato. In Adjunct proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (New York, NY, USA, October 1 - 3, 2010). ACM, New York, NY, 57-60.

Surfboard: Keyboard with Microphone as a Low-cost Interactive Surface

ACM UIST '10 demonstration

Jun Kato, Daisuke Sakamoto and Takeo Igarashi. In Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (New York, NY, USA, October 1 - 3, 2010). ACM, New York, NY, 387-388.

A Toolkit for Easy Development of Mobile Robot Applications with Visual Markers and a Ceiling Camera

ACM UIST '09 poster

Daisuke Sakamoto, Jun Kato, Masahiko Inami and Takeo Igarashi. 22nd Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Victoria, BC, Canada, October 4 - 7, 2009).

CRISTAL: Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems Using Touch-Based Actions in Living Spaces

ACM SIGGRAPH '09 demonstration (Best of Emerging Technology Award)

Thomas Seifried, Christian Rendl, Florian Perteneder, Jakob Leitner, Michael Haller, Daisuke Sakamoto, Jun Kato, Masahiko Inami and Stacey Scott. SIGGRAPH 2009 Emerging Technologies (New Orleans, USA, August 3 - 7, 2009).

Multi-touch Interface for Controlling Multiple Mobile Robots

ACM CHI '09 student reseach competition (1st Place)

Jun Kato, Daisuke Sakamoto, Masahiko Inami and Takeo Igarashi. In CHI '09 EA: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 4 - 9, 2009). ACM, New York, NY, 3443-3448.

Academic Services

Information on domestic academic services is omitted. Send an inquiry to me for the details.

Conference Organizer

Reviewer

Miscellaneous

References

Prof. Takeo Igarashi

Dept. of Computer Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Dr. Masataka Goto

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Ibaraki, Japan

Dr. Xiang Cao

Lenovo Research & Technology, Beijing, China

Dr. Sebastian Burckhardt

Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

Dr. Jovan Popovic

Adobe Research, Seattle, WA, USA

Dr. Sean McDirmid

Y Combinator Research HARC, USA

Dr. Michał Moskal

Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

Dr. Joel Brandt

Adobe Research, San Francisco, CA, USA


Other details can be found on Jun Kato's portfolio website.