February 11, 2022
Since FY 2020, Japan ACM SIGCHI Chapter Awards identify and honor leaders of the field of human-computer interaction. We present awards in two categories:
The awards committee selected following recipients from the submitted award nominations after strict review. The award ceremony was taken place on February 11, 2022 in the International Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction 2022.
Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory. Professor Ishii led the CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories Japan from 1988-1994. After joining the Media Lab in October 1995, he founded the Tangible Media Group to make digital tangible by giving physical form to digital information and computation. Here, he pursues his visions of Tangible Bits (1997) and Radical Atoms (2012) that will transcend the Painted Bits of GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), the current dominant paradigm of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). There are many researchers in Japan who have been influenced by the concepts pioneered by Professor Ishii, and there are also many Japanese researchers who have decided to leave Japan to work overseas through Professor Ishii's encouragement. His accomplishments, which have included a lot of outstanding research achievements over a couple of decades while working at the top research institutions, have earned him a worldwide reputation not only as a pioneer among Japanese researchers in this field, but also as a leading researcher in the world. In 2019, he won SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award for his fundamental and influential research contributions to the field of human-computer interaction in the past quarter century. Professor Ishii’s research and community contributions to HCI are significant, and it is Japan ACM SIGCHI Chapter’s privilege to honor his with this award.
Professor Takuji Narumi has pioneered an original research field that combines virtual reality with psychology and cognitive science, and is highly regarded as a leading researcher who has opened up a new field, especially in cross-modal interfaces that utilize multisensory interactions. He has presented many papers at conferences mainly in the field of virtual reality, and eight papers have been accepted for CHI, the top conference of ACM SIGCHI. His research contribution to SIGCHI is outstanding among researchers of his generation in Japan. He has also been serving as the Paper Associate Chair at CHI and Emerging Technologies Chair at SIGGRAPH Asia, another top conference of ACM.
As described above, Professor Narumi's research achievements and contributions to the development of this field have been outstanding. Thereby, he was recognized as a worthy recipient of the Distinguished Young Researcher Award. We hope that Professor Narumi will continue making further contributions to the management of international conferences and the growth of the research community. We also expect that he will continue playing an active role in a wide range of activities commensurate with his reputation as a distinguished researcher.