Papers
41
Total Citations
690
H-Index
13
About
Tatsuya Kawahara is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction, spoken dialogue systems, and conversational AI, best known for his foundational work on ERICA, a remarkably lifelike conversational android developed through the ERATO Intelligent Conversational Android project. His research has systematically tackled the challenge of making robots genuinely convincing social partners by integrating natural language processing, emotion recognition, and sophisticated turn-taking mechanisms into cohesive, autonomous systems. Kawahara's most influential contribution, the ERICA platform, has attracted over 174 citations and serves as a testbed for exploring how androids can engage humans in fluid, socially intelligent dialogue. His work on attentive listening systems — designed to support communication among elderly users — demonstrates a strong commitment to socially beneficial applications of AI. Further research into smooth turn-taking, backchannel generation, and multimodal emotion recognition reflects his holistic approach to natural conversation, addressing both the verbal and nonverbal dimensions of human interaction. Beyond robotics, Kawahara has contributed to multichannel speech enhancement using Bayesian decomposition techniques. With a body of work spanning foundational system architecture to nuanced behavioral modeling, his research represents a significant force in advancing humanoid robots as credible conversational companions.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1ERICA: The ERATO Intelligent Conversational Android174 citations · 2016
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- 3Talking with ERICA, an autonomous android48 citations · 2016
- 4Spoken Dialogue System for a Human-like Conversational Robot ERICA47 citations · 2019
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- 8A Conversational Dialogue Manager for the Humanoid Robot ERICA27 citations · 2018
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- 10Multi-party human-robot interaction with distant-talking speech recognition17 citations · 2012