Research and Development at AIRC of AIST 20/10/16 11:00 KB 1.5

Research and Development at the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC) of AIST

Speaker:   Prof  Junichi Tsujii  (University of Manchester)

Host:   Robert Stevens

Thursday 20th October 2016 at 11:00 in Kilburn L.T. 1.5

The AIRC is a research centre, established in May, 2015 with aid from the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), whose objective is to become the leading group carrying out translational research of AI in Japan. It comprises 250 staff, including 75 full-time researchers and 50 part-time visiting researchers. The AIRC carries out research into a broad range of topics, such as machine learning, big data analytics, multi-agent simulation, robotics, innovative retailing, AI for Biomedical sciences and AI for elderly care. AI is now the core of convergence of diverse scientific and technological fields, such as Robotics, Biomedical sciences, internet of things (IoT) and factory automation, etc. The AIRC has been developing close links with Japanese industries. It also seeks to establish cooperation with domestic and international research institutes. In my talk, I will introduce the research activities of the AIRC and talk about possible collaboration with teams at University of Manchester.

Professor Tsujii was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) (05.2011-04.2015), Professor of Natural Language Processing in the Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo (07.1995-04.2011) and Professor of Text Mining in School of Computer Science, University of Manchester (06.2005-04.2011), before taking up the directorship of the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC) at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (05.2015). He has recently been appointed as a part-time Professor of School of Computer Science, University of Manchester. Professor Tsujii has worked in the areas of natural language processing (NLP), question answering, text mining and machine translation. Recently, his main focus has been on linguistics-based parsing, information extraction and NLP-based text mining technology, which he has applied to literature mining in the biomedical domain. He was the president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2006, and is now the chairman of ICCL (International Committee of Computational Linguistics). He is also Fellow of the ACL and a Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ).)