Congratulations to graduate student Yosuke Ujigawa in Prof. Takashio lab for winning the Most Outstanding Research Award at the Human-Agent-Interaction (HAI) Symposium 2026!
About the HAI Symposium and the Award
The symposium explores interactions between humans and “agents” such as AI and robotics that feel like they have a mind or intelligence of their own. Bridging engineering, cognitive science, and psychology, the event focuses more on human cognition and psychology than AI conferences, and more on real-world system development and implementation than psychology conferences. Ujigawa won the highest honor at the symposium out of 118 submissions across the student and general categories.
Ujigawa’s comment
I’ve been interested in how people grow closer through conversations, particularly in how the quality of an interaction changes based on how things are said, even when the content is identical. This paper, co-authored by Prof. Takashio, focuses on “ma” (gaps and pauses) in dialogue. While rapid responses have been the priority in conversational AI, we developed a system that strategically introduces pauses that align with the user’s speech and pause timing to see how this alignment influences the overall quality of the interaction. I hope this research serves as a catalyst for advancing our interactions with AI and the ways in which humans connect with one another.
To learn more about this award, please visit here.
Released by: Office of General Affairs at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC)