On August 1st, 2018, Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN, HQ: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Toru Nishikawa) hired Takeo Igarashi (Professor at The University of Tokyo) as a technical advisor.

Professor Igarashi is a pioneer in human-computer interaction (HCI), user interface and computer graphics research. He has published many research papers at international conferences, notably Teddy, a ground-breaking technique to create 3D models from 2D sketches. Currently, he is the project leader of the JST CREST research project “HCI for Machine Learning”, which aims to make machine learning techniques more accessible and easier to use.

In this role as a technical advisor, Professor Igarashi will provide technical advice and guidance on HCI and HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) research at PFN, with a view to accelerating the development and adoption of PFN’s technology.

For more information, please refer to the research blog.

Prof. Takeo Igarashi

• Biography

Takeo Igarashi is a Professor at the Computer Science Department of The University of Tokyo. He received a Ph.D from the Department of Information Engineering at The University of Tokyo in 2000. He then worked as a post doctoral research associate at Brown University (2000 – 2002). He joined the University of Tokyo as an Assistant Professor in 2002, and became a Full Professor in 2011. He also served as a director for the JST ERATO Igarashi Design Interface project (2007 – 2013). His research interest is in user interfaces and interactive computer graphics. He is known for the development of a sketch-based 3D modeling system (Teddy) and a performance-driven animation authoring system (MovingSketch). He has received several awards including the IBM Science Prize, the JSPS Prize, the ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Significant New Researcher Award, and the Katayanagi Prize in Computer Science. He served as conference co-chair for ACM UIST 2016, program co-chair for ACM UIST 2013, program chair for ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018 technical papers, associate editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics and program committee member for various international conferences including ACM CHI, UIST, and SIGGRAPH.