Aran's Japan adventures continue...

Hi!

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I'm Aran Lunzer, a member of the Tanaka Laboratory in Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. This is my second spell in the lab: starting in 1997 I was here for nearly five years as a post-doctoral researcher (and enthusiastic student of Japanese), then I spent a while in London and Copenhagen, then in May 2004 I was invited back here as an Associate Professor. My recently updated CV tells the whole story.

I come from Britain. More specifically, I was born and brought up in England (one of the countries within Britain), but I say Britain these days partly to help clear up the popular world-wide misconception that England is the name of the whole place. It was about the time that I started my PhD studies at the Department of Computing Science of the University of Glasgow, Scotland (another country within Britain), that I properly realised just how offensive that misconception is [page by Paul Dourish].

In an altogether earlier life (before discovering, for example, the joys of not shaving), I worked in an interesting and unusual outpost - now gone - of IBM United Kingdom Laboratories, Hursley.

Motivations

Research

The bread-and-butter part of my life is based on research in the field of HCI: human-computer interaction. Although in computing it's often Artificial Intelligence that grabs the headlines, I belong to an opposing camp whose goal is to promote computers as really useful but entirely stupid machines. Researchers in this camp dislike the idea of making computers appear to understand human concepts; there is no real understanding, and this gives great scope for unexpected failures - which in some cases will just be frustrating, but might sometimes be expensive or even disastrous. My goal, instead, is to put humans in charge of powerful, complex tools whose facilities are rich and unambiguous. This theme is described in more detail here.

Japan

I greatly enjoy living in Japan, and getting to know the place. A lot of my time in the early days went into learning to read Japanese, to give me access to the local research work and - more challengingly - to some of the local literature. Along the way I passed the 1st kyu (i.e., the highest) level of the national Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which seems a worthwhile qualification to have.

ShorinjiKempo

I'm also keen on the Japanese philosophy and martial art called Shorinji Kempo, which I started learning at the Glasgow University Dojo, and have continued at other clubs within the British Shorinji Kempo Federation and in Japan. Although I suspect that I'm not destined for heroic levels of fighting proficiency, having made it as far as 2nd dan I feel at least that I have some knowledge to pass on to beginners. And it's a lot of fun. One thing that I particularly enjoy about Shorinji Kempo is that the senior instructors are so friendly and entertaining (as well as being good at what they teach), and that they seem to get kinder and more humorous the higher their rank - one great example being my former teacher at Hokkaido University, the 7th-dan NOSAKA Masashi sensei. This isn't just happy coincidence; the spirit of helping others while having fun yourself is a fundamental part of Shorinji Kempo's brand of Buddhism.

The IntelligentPad project

Don't be alarmed by the name: IntelligentPad is not a project rooted in AI thinking. It is an architecture and medium that supports communication and evolution of human ideas among human communities, based on multimedia building-blocks called `pads'. The idea is that non-programmers can easily join pads together to express new ideas or tools, pull apart other people's compositions to extract interesting pads that were acting as sub-components, and reuse such extracted pads in different contexts.

Now about twenty years old, IntelligentPad is well known in academia and industry within Japan, but hasn't had much exposure overseas. To help widen the audience we worked with the IntelligentPad Consortium in 1999 to produce English translations of some of their Web pages. In addition I've assembled a few pieces of English description on my IntelligentPad information page, including a couple of technical papers describing the architecture.

If you'd like to get in touch...

Mail me at:

aranlunzer at gmail dot com

[Tanaka Lab home]

Last updated: March 2009 (fixed broken link, updated email address)