Daisuke Tajima

born 1990, Ibaraki pref., Japan.

Email: d30tajima@gmail.com

Research interests

My research is focused on the idea of the "self-body sense," which is the awareness that the body is my own and can be moved by my own will. My aim is to introduce the idea of the self-body sense to the field of mechanical engineering in order to improve the usability and design of real-time mechanical systems such as remote-control robots and avatars in virtual reality. When we manipulate mechanical systems the action-feedback loop in our brain responds similarly to when we control our own bodies; we act on the environment through the body or mechanical systems and subsequently receive and interpret feedback though various modalities. 

I hypothesize that our own body is the most well-learned mechanical control system and we could easily and instantly control alternative mechanical systems if we could design a multi-modal feedback loop for that system resembling the feedback of the body. However, due to technical limitations, it is difficult to accurately imitate the feedback of the body in mechanical systems. The brain shows the ability to maintain self-body sensation even when multi-modal feedback does not match (e.g. the mirror illusion illustrated in Figure 1), suggesting a higher number of degrees of freedom for the system design. Therefore, my research focuses on the brain mechanisms of self-body sensation and investigates the sensory discrepancy required to maintain self-body awareness. 

Figure 1: The mirror illusion. The solid line indicates the actual position of the right hand. Synchronous movement of both hands creates the feeling that the participant’s right hand is at the position of the hand in the mirror. In other words, the participant senses the mirrored hand as their right hand. 

Thus, when the apparent and actual hand positions are offset from each other, if that offset is under 10 cm (Tajima et al., 2015), the participant senses the mirrored hand as belonging to their own body.

News @ 2022.12.31

• EMAS: ElectroMagnetic Actuation System for Low-Latency Motion Transfer Project page is out!
  https://www.sonycsl.co.jp/tokyo/14161/

• Participate YCAM workshop 遠隔・身体・共創 as demonstrator of EMAS
  https://www.ycam.jp/events/2022/interlab-camp-vol4/

Current Situation

2018 - now : Engineer at R&D platform in Sony Coop. 

2020- now : Adjunct Researcher at Superception Team in Sony Computer Laboratory Inc.

Education

• 2015-2018: Ph.d Student at applied brain laboratory in the Tokyo Institute of technology. 

• 2013-2015: Mater in engineering; at applied brain science laboratory in Tokyo Institute of Technology.

• 2009-2013: Bachelor of engineering; Tokyo Institute of Technology.

• 4-6, July, 2016: 6th IMPRS NeuroCom Summer School; "What makes us human?"; International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) ; Germany

• 15-22, July, 2014: RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) Summer program; "Disentangling Mental Disorders: from Genes to Circuits"; Japan

• 30 July - 3 Aug., 2012: Training course of experiment technique for physiological science; Introduction of data analysis of fMRI (held in Japanese); National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS); Japan

Grant & Award

• 2016.4- : Reseach Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC2), Japan Society for The Promotion of Science (JSPS).

• 2012.3: Tokyo Institute of Technology Academic Excellence Awards.

Skills

• Good experience in Unity, especially VR and AR applications (including HoloLens 2, Magic Leap One, Oculus Quest Pro, HTC Vive, and Valve index; 2018-).  

• Good experience in experimental design, data collection, and analyses (behavioral studies with healthy adults, 2018-)

• Good knowledge of visual scripting using Touch Designer (2018.4-)

• Good knowledge of programming (C/C++, python, R, matlab, 2012-)

• Good knowledge of statistics (excel, R, SPSS, 2015-)

• Good knowledge of machine learning (R, scikit-learn in python, 2015-)

Languages

• Japanese: native language

• English: fluent

Publications

  Reviewed paper

1. (NEW) Tajima, Daisuke, Jun Nishida, Pedro Lopes, and Shunichi Kasahara. 2022. “Whose Touch Is This?: Understanding the Agency Trade-Off Between User-Driven Touch vs. Computer-Driven Touch.” ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., 24, 29 (3): 1–27. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3489608

2. Tajima, D., Mizuno, T., Kume, Y., & Yoshida, T. (2016). Visualization Method for Proprioceptive Drift on a 2D Plane Using Support Vector Machine. Journal of Visualized Experiments, (116). https://doi.org/10.3791/53970

3. Tajima, D., Mizuno, T., Kume, Y., & Yoshida, T. (2015). The mirror illusion: does proprioceptive drift go hand in hand with sense of agency? Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00200     

  Invited paper

1. Yoshida, T., Kamiya, S., & Tajima, D. (2016), The measurement of the usability of our own body –The psychological and brain scientific method-. Journal of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, The Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, 55, 3, 252-258. 

  Proceeding

1. Tajima, D., Mizuno, T., Kume, Y., & Yoshida, T. (2013)，"Is efferent copy required for the generation of mirror illusion?" (Japanese title:"Mirror Illusionの生起に遠心性コピーは必要か" ), VISION, Vol.24, Number.2, page 86-89

2. Tajima, D., Mizuno, T., Kume, Y., & Yoshida. T. (2013). The contribution of the vibrotactile stimulation to our self-body position perception: The mirror illusion study. The Virtual Reality Society Report, Vol. 18，No. VRpsy01, 11-14.

Conference

  International

1. (NEW) Daisuke Tajima, Taku Tanichi, Mohammad H. Shehata, and Shunichi Kasahara. 2022. Low-Latency Motion Transfer with Electromagnetic Actuation for Joint Action. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Emerging Technologies (SA '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 6, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3550471.3558399

2. Daisuke Tajima, Jun Nishida, Pedro Lopes, and Shunichi Kasahara. “Whose Touch Is This?: Understanding the Agency Trade-Off Between User-Driven Touch vs. Computer-Driven Touch.”, In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22),  https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/content/70538

3. Daisuke Tajima, Jun Nishida, Pedro Lopes, Shunichi Kasahara; Successful Outcomes in a Stroop Test Modulate the Sense of Agency When the Human Response and the Preemptive Response Actuated by Electrical Muscle Stimulation are Aligned. Journal of Vision 2020;20(11):173. doi: https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.11.173.

4. Tajima, D., & Yoshida, T., Limb or arm? A local body movement elicits a sense of agency but not a sense of ownership, European Conference on Visual Perception, Berlin, Germany. (August, 2017)

5. Tajima, D., & Yoshida, T., Visual search for self-controlled biological hand motion stimuli, 24th Annual Workshop on Object Perception, Attention, and Memory, Boston, US. (November, 2016)

6. Tajima, D., Mizuno, T., Kume, Y., and Yoshida, T., Does the sense of agency occur when tactile feedback is substituted for proprioceptive feedback? European Conference on Visual Perception, Liverpool, UK. (August, 2015)

7. Tajima D, Mizuno T, Kume Y, Yoshida T, “The Mirror Illusion: Does Proprioceptive Drift Go Hand in Hand with the Sense of Agency?”, Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision, Kagawa, Japan, (July, 2014).

8. Tajima D, Mizuno T, Kume Y, Yoshida T, “The contribution of the vibrotactile stimulation to our Self-body Position Perception: The Mirror Illusion Study”, The 22nd Virtual Reality Psychology International Conference，Fukuoka，Japan, (October,2013).

9. Tajima D, Mizuno T, Kume Y, Yoshida T, "The Contribution of Efferent Copy to a Mirror Illusion.” Psychonomic Society, 2002, Toronto, Canada, (November, 2013)

10. Tajima D, Mizuno T, Kume Y, Yoshida T, "The contribution of the vibrotactile stimulation to the mirror illusion", European Conference on Visual Perception, P17-23, Bremen, Germany, (August, 2013)

   Domestic

1. (New, Award) Shinya Nakamura, Taro Takane, Daisuke Tajima, Hiroki Uchida, Ken-Ichiro Tsutsui, Shunichi Kasahara, Monkeys recognize the body image on the Virtual Reality as their own body through training., The 87th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, 2023, Kobe, Japan 

2. Tajima, D. & Yoshida, T. , Is the motion related to the appearance of the self-controlled object for generation of sense of ownership and agency?, Summer Annual Meeting 2017 of The Vision Society of Japan, Shimane, Japan.

3. Tajima, D. & Yoshida, T. , Which visual element generates the sense of ownership and agency?, Winter Annual Meeting 2017 of The Vision Society of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

4. Tajima, D. & Yoshida, T. , Visual search for self-controlled biological motion stimuli., Summer Annual Meeting 2016 of The Vision Society of Japan, Nigata, Japan.

5. Tajima, D. & Yoshida, T. , Does the sense of agency occur when tactile feedback is substituted for proprioceptive feedback?, Sunner Annual Meeting 2015 of The Vision Society of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

6. Tajima, D., Mizuno, T., Kume, Y., & Yoshida, T. , Is the efferent copy necessary for mirror illusion? Summer Annual Meeting 2013 of The Vision Society of Japan, Hokkaido, Japan.