RCAST CROSS-DISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP

ISEAS AGEING SOCIETY IN ITALY AND JAPAN MULTIDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP

distanceS

Alphabetic order

Roberta Albiero, architect and a professor of Architecture Design at the University IUAV of Venice and Phd in Urban and Architecture Design (Politecnico of Milan, 2000) discussing a thesis on the relationship between architecture and measure. She currently teaches in the Master degree of Architecture. She has given lectures and workshops in italian and foreign universities. She is the author of studies on 20th century italian architecture and has curated conferences, exhibitions and installations on these themes, and on portugues architecture. She has been studying the Mediterranean architecture and urban regeneration of historical villages. These researches have been accompanied by design activities and participation in competitions, recognized with prizes, reports and publications, aim to verify the relationship between theory and practice of architecture. At present she is working on the relationship between architecture, archaeology, art and landscape.

Stefania Bandini is a full professor of computer science at the University of Milano-Bicocca and Fellow at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo. She is Director of the Complex Systems & Artificial Intelligence Research Center and of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication. She is also Director of the Milano-Bicocca Cini Node “Artificial Intelligence & Intelligent Systems”. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence and complex discrete dynamical systems. Since 2004 her research has focused on the field of crowds and pedestrians, in particular modeling and simulation to support crowd management. From 2009 she extended her research in the field of mobility in an ageing society. She co-chairs the working group “Ageing Society” for the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Paola Cavaliere is an associate professor of Japanese studies at the School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, and the Associate Director of the Human Sciences International Undergraduate Program. Her research interests are in the areas of gender in the context of disasters, religion, and civil society in Japan. She is currently investigating gender and religious dimensions of vulnerability and resilience through an analysis of women’ s roles in faith-based volunteer groups contributing to post-disaster activities. She holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Sheffield, and a PhD in Law from Tohoku University. She has published several works on a gendered approach to Japanese faith-based volunteering and is currently editing the Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan (forthcoming 2022).

Florian Coulmas is senior professor of Japanese society and sociolinguistics in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Duisburg-Essen University. As Director of the German Institute of Japanese Studies in Tokyo (2004–2014), he conducted research on the aging population and happiness/life satisfaction. He is currently heading a research project about migration, language, and happiness. His recent publications include Identity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019); An Introduction to Multilingualism: Language in a Changing World (Oxford University Press, 2017); Guardians of Language: Twenty Voices Through History (Oxford University Press, 2016); Tokio. Vom Glück urbanen Lebens (C. H. Beck, 2014); and Writing and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2013; Chinese translation: 文字与社 会导论 外语教学与研究出版, 2019).

Andrea De Antoni is program-specific associate professor of socio-cultural anthropology at Kyoto University. He specializes in the anthropology of Japan and, more recently, has carried out ethnographic research also in Italy. His fields of research include the anthropology of space and place, death, outcaste discrimination, experiences with spirits, spirit possession, and spiritual healing in relation to biomedical practice, with a focus on perception and affect. He has published extensively on these topics both in English and Japanese. He is the author of Going to Hell in Contemporary Japan: Feeling Landscapes of the Afterlife, Othering, Memory, and Materiality (Routledge, forthcoming 2021), and has co-edited several books and special issues of academic journals. He is also the coordinator of the international research network “Skills of Feeling with the World: Anthropological Research on the Senses, Affect and Materiality,” based at Kyoto University.

Francesca Gasparini is Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication University of Milano-Bicocca. Since 2017, she is head of the Multimedia Signal Processing Laboratory (www.mmsp.unimib.it), MMSP. Her research activity is focused on multimedia signal processing, analysis and understanding, with a strong experience in the field of image enhancement, image quality and image complexity assessment. She conduces research to integrate information from heterogeneous multimodal data with the aim of understanding user behaviors and emotional states through detecting and modeling emotions in human-computer interaction, aiming to bridge the gap between human emotions and computational technology, and the automatic detection of online offensive content in particular towards women. This research is mainly devoted to study the emotions, the stress and relaxation states induced by visual and acoustic stimuli, or related to the interaction with the environment, through the analysis of both physiological and psycho-physical data. From 2017 she enriched her research activity including affective computing, and brain computer interface, opening new fields of investigation in the Artificial Intelligence domain, and in 2019 she extended her research activity on affective computing on the field of the Ageing Society. She is currently coordinating several research activities in electroencephalogram data processing and classification, and physiological data analysis.

Director and Professor at the Research Center of Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo. His research interests regards neurobiology of insects and their adaptive behavior. The brains of animals switch their processing mode in order to exhibit behaviors that adapt them to a diverse range of environments by dynamically modifying the neural system in response to internal and external conditions. The aim of our research is to clarify the basic neural mechanisms for generating adaptive behaviors (or intelligence) using the interdisciplinary approaches of informatics, engineering and biology. As a model for the brain system we use insect brains that consist of 10^5 neurons. We have taken a combined approach at various levels, from genes over single neurons to neural networks, behavior, modeling, and robotics, owing to their seamless accessibility to a wide variety of methodological approaches. To examine the neural basis of behavior, we implemented a model of the neural circuit and integrated it with a mobile robot. Moreover, in order to understand the dynamics of the neural circuitry, we have developed an "insectrobot hybrid system" in which the insect or an isolated insect brain controls a robot. By comparing the hybrid system and model of the neural circuit of the insect, we can continuously improve the insect-brain model until we obtain a full emulation and complete understanding of the mechanisms of adaptability in the insect brain. Our research will lead to investigating the bio-robot hybrid system, and also to establishing basic technologies for operating these behaviors by artificially controlling the brain functions.

Laura Liverani is a documentary photographer and lecturer based in Japan and Italy. Her work focuses on socio-anthropological issues and has been published and exhibited internationally. She has published in the Guardian, the Washington Post, and New Scientist. She has held exhibitions at the Singapore International Photo Festival, the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, and the Japan Foundation in Sydney. She has been commissioned by Benetton, the Whitechapel Gallery, and Iperborea; for an Italian publisher she was assigned the photography for The Passenger: Japan, a monograph on Japanese culture and society. She has also lectured on photography at several universities, both in Italy and abroad. She is part of the photojournalism agency Prospekt Photographers.

Tomoo Matsuda is Research Director at the Mitsubishi Research Institute (MRI) in Tokyo and specializes in the revitalization of communities and an active, aging society. He is also a visiting professor at Kochi University. He founded MRI’s new policy project "Platinum Society Association” in 2010 and almost five hundred people from industry, government, and academia across Japan have joined this association. He has conducted many research projects with public and private clients. He has served as a committee member and advisor of the Aging Society Forum Committee of the Cabinet Office; on the Advisory Council of Community Planning for All Generations Cabinet Secretariat; as lead speaker of the roundtable on resilient cities in aging societies in 2014 at the OECD; on the local vitalization promotion council in Kochi Prefecture; and on the niche and top company evaluation committee in Ishikawa Prefecture. He is the author (in Japanese) of Market Trends in Japan From Interviews With Thirty Thousand People (2014); Japan-Style CCRC (2017); and Bright Reverse Shift: From Tokyo to Rural Areas (2020).

Katsuhiro Nishinari is a professor at the Research Center of Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), the University of Tokyo. His research elucidates the emergent behavior of complex systems in terms of mathematical physics, and considers real applications of emergent systems. He is especially interested in the interdisciplinary study of the collective dynamics of self-driven particles and its jamming phenomena, which we call “jamology,” including vehicles, pedestrians, ants, packets in logistics and the Internet, and proteins in organisms. The jamming phenomenon in this study is considered as a kind of dynamical phase transition from a free to a congested state due to instability of flow. Our research is based on mathematical and physical analysis, followed by computer simulations and experiments in order to create better models that show emergent properties. The research includes the reduction of traffic jams on highways, the smooth evacuation of pedestrians, social animals and their emergent behaviors, and supply chain networks and granular flow.

Giovanni Occhipinti, aka Ninto, graduates at the Università di Bologna, Italy; than he received his PhD at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and the Office National d’Etudes et Recherches Aérospatiales. After post-doctorate studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA) and Seismological Laboratory (Caltech), he returned to France as faculty at the Université de Paris. He currently mains his research at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and strongly collaborate with several institutes worldwide (USA, Swizerland, Japan, Italy, Singapore, etc..). Ninto consecrated his research to the detection and modeling of Earthquakes, Tsunamis -and recently Volcanic Explosions- by ionospheric sounding as well as studies about ionospheric background based on tomographic methods. In 2016 he became junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. In 2018 he introduced the Ionospheric Magnitude M_i. Ninto also plays a role in science divulgation as a weekly reporter on the radio (France Inter, NOVA, Radio Aligre). Ninto also contributes to public events connected to science and he develops many art-projects at the frontier between Art & Science. More info and publications @ www.ipgp.fr/~ninto

Yukio Ohsawa is a professor and the department chair of Systems Innovation in the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. He received BE, ME, and Ph.D. from the The University of Tokyo (1995). Then worked for the School of Engineering Science at Osaka University (research associate, 1995-1999), Graduate School of Business Sciences at University of Tsukuba (research associate, 1999-2005), and moved back to The University of Tokyo in 2005. In the year 2000, he created a new domain, chance discovery, meaning to discover events that have a significant impact on decision making. He has given keynote talks at conferences and published books on the extensions of chance discovery, including the innovator’s marketplace on data jackets.

Silvio Vita is a professor at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, teaching courses on comparative cultural history, Japanese history, and Italianstudies. Prior to 2012 he taught East Asian Religions and Intellectual History at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” and the Sapienza Università di Roma. He was appointed Director of the Italian School of East Asian Studies in Kyoto for two terms (2001–2005; 2008–2012). He has worked on Chinesea nd Japanese Buddhism, and edited volumes I and II ofB uddhist Asia, before turning to the cultural history of modern and early modern Japan. He has recently been researching the Marega collection in the Vatican Library within the frame of a project by the National Institutes for the Humanities of Japan.

Francesco Zurlo, PhD, is Full Professor at Design Department of Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He’s Deputy Dean of the Design School and Head of the Course in Product Design (BA+MAs). He is Director of the Master in Design Strategy and System Innovation and Co-director of the Master in Strategic Design. Founder and Director of CI.Lab (a Politecnico’s research lab focused in Creative Industries), he is in the board of ADI Index, the most important Italian Design Award.