About Lab. Themes

Ido-Robo : A robot chatting at the well side

Ido-bata kaigi ('congregation at the well side') is a Japanese concept that represents how Japan women in a village used to chat, circulate gossips, and exchange community information while they gather at the well side as they wash clothes and pump water up from the well. Now the term stands for spontaneous congregations that serve as the hub of communicative, intellectual, and political life for Japanese people.

Can a robot join gossiping at the well side? It's not possible. At least for now. In this Ido-Robo project (a shorten word for "the well side" and "robot"), we aim to build an infrastructure for a robot to congregate and engage in emerging small talks. This project also offers an interdisciplinary research framework involving scholars in linguistics, cognitive science, information science, sociology, and robotics.

Related Projects

NII, Grand Challenge, “A proposal for Coherent Data Collection of Ordinary Interactions”(2009-2012)
This research project creates a platform for collecting naturally occurring interaction data with special consideration to how we protect research participants’ personal information. It is our mission to maintain the richness and the divergence of interaction data while shieling participants’ privacy. We aim to provide strategies to reconcile researchers’ motivations with ethical issues that may arise. The dissemination of our strategies will contribute to creating a guideline that is useful to collect, store, and study various kinds of naturally occurring interactions.
PI:
Mayumi Bono(NII)
Co-PIs
Nobuhiro Furuyama (NII), Shuichi Itabashi (NII), Tomoko Osuga (NII), Kimiko Yamakawa (NII), Akira Ichikawa(Waseda University), Masashi Inoue (Yamagata University), Mika Enomoto (Tokyo University of Technology), Hanae Koiso (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics), Hideaki Kikuchi (Waseda University), Yasuyuki Sumi(Future University-Hakodate), Katsuya Takanashi (University of Kyoto), Yasuharu Den (Chiba University), Ryoko Hanada(Kyoto University of Education), Hiromichi Hosoma(The University of Shiga Prefecture), Kikuo Maekawa (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics),
Research

collaborators:
Kohei Kikuchi (NII), Eiji Toyama (Chiba University)
About the research: http://research.nii.ac.jp/bonogrand/index.html
About the data sharing:http://www.nii.ac.jp/cscenter/idr/interaction/interaction.html
NII, Grand Challenge, “Interaction Science Project: Can a robot join an idobata kaigi (gossiping at the well side)?”(2012-)