Nagaoka University of Technology -> Muneo Kitajima

Last updated: 19-April-2024

Muneo Kitajima, Ph. D.

Affiliation

Emeritus Professor
Nagaoka University of Technology

Address

1603-1, Kamitomioka, Nagaoka, Niigata 940-2188, Japan

TEL: +81-258-47-9361

E-mail: mkitajima@kjs.nagaokaut.ac.jp

Publications

• Journal Articles
• Technical Reports
• Conference Papers
• Book Chapters
• Others

Biosketch

Muneo Kitajima is a cognitive scientist that covers cognitive modeling, information science and artificial intelligence. He is a professor at the Nagaoka University of Technology, Japan. His current research interests include cognitive architecture that is capable of simulating human beings' daily decision-making and action selection, ecology of networked society, and understanding synchronization between conscious and unconscious behavior under real time constraints. His work is summarized in the lecture note entitled O-PDP System: Structure and Process O-PDP System: Structure and Process - In Quest of a Unified Theory of Mind - presented at the Psychology and Neuroscience Lab, Lorraine University, France in March, 2018.

Dr. Kitajima has been a researcher with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology since 1980. He was a research associate at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1991. He received his Doctorate in Engineering from the University of Waseda in 1986, and a BS and MS in Physics from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively. He moved to Nagaoka University of Technology in 2011 as a professor.

He started his research career at AIST (it was then called Industrial Products Research Institute) with the goal of developing a reading machine for the blind (1980 - 1985). He developed a novel method for recognizing printed Japanese characters. He then implemented the method with a prototype micro-computer-based reading machine that was capable of converting printed characters, captured by scanning a hand-held CCD camera, into synthesized voices at a speed of up to four phonemes per second. He earned his doctorate in 1986 from the University of Waseda as a result of this project.

His research interests then shifted to cognitive processes in human-computer interaction (HCI). He developed a formal representation system for human-computer interaction processes, that is used to make quantitative predictions about human performance, such as working memory load, ease of knowledge transfer, and so on. He published his first journal article in English from International Journal of Man-Machine Systems in 1989*.

In 1991, he visited the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, as a research associate, to extend his research on cognitive modeling in HCI. He worked with a psychology professor Peter Polson, known as a developer of Cognitive Complexity Theory, and a psychology professor Walter Kintsch, who was the world's leading authority on text comprehension.

The meeting with Prof. Polson and Prof. Kintsch was the decisive event for Dr. Kitajima to shape his research career in the future. Especially, Kintsch's construction-integration theory of text comprehension has remained to be one of the theoretical foundations of his modeling work thereafter.

In collaboration with Prof. Polson, he has developed a computational model of skilled use of an application with a graphical user interface that explains errors made by experienced users in 1995*. The model is based on Hutchins, Holland, and Norman's (1986) analysis of direct manipulation and is implemented using Kintsch's construction-integration theory of action planning.

The action planning model has been expanded to include processes for comprehending instructions in 1997*. The expanded model is called the LICAI Model. LICAI is an acronym for the LInked model of Comprehension-based Action planning and Instruction taking. When LICAI is pronounced [li kai], the pronunciation is the same as the Japanese two-kanji word,

which means comprehension.

His research focus has shifted from passive target search, which the LICAI model was for, to active target search such as navigation in the Web or way-finding in the real environment. Collaboration with Prof. Polson, a model that simulates users' navigation through the Web, CoLiDeS - Comprehension-based Linked model of Deliberate Search - was developed in 2000. An important extension to the LICAI model was the inclusion of attention mechanism that enables the model to focus on a part of information abundant display for successful navigation (demo of the CoLiDeS model). The model provided a theoretical basis for the web usability evaluation method, Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web, or CWW in short, which was proposed in 2002*, 2003* and 2005* at the CHI conferences and has been constantly cited as one of the standard Web usability methods.

The outcome of his research has been published at several CHI conferences. At the CHI2001 conference in Seattle, he made another decisive encounter with Makoto Toyota, who is a system architect and has made a significant contribution in deploying mainframe computers in Japan in 1970's by adapting Operating Systems to Japan's environment. Toyota was interested in constructing a unified theory of mind, stimulated by the work by the geniuses Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, with the basis of the concept of autopoiesis, i.e., a theory of a human being's behavior that never halts as long as one is alive in the particular circumstances of the Gaia.

Toyota and Kitajima started their productive collaboration since then, and published its outcome of component theories, including Maximum Satisfaction Architecture (MSA), Structured Meme Theory (SMT), and Brain Information Hydrodynamics (BIH) at the Cognitive Science annual conferences, and then moved the place of their main activity to Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, where they published Model-Human Processor with Realtime Constraints (MHP/RT) in 2011* and 2013* as a model that can simulate human beings' action selection in the everyday environments, consisting of the conscious and unconscious processes of Two Minds coined by Daniel Kahneman and the autonomous memory system. Along with the theoretical development, a theoretically motivated user study methodology, called Cognitive Chrono-Ethnography (CCE), was developed, which has been successfully applied to gain understanding of a variety of aspects of human behavior*. The outcome of collaboration is publicized at the site Organic Self-Consistent-Field Theory.

In 2016, the entire work was published as a book entitled "Memory and Action Selection in Human-Machine Interaction" from Wiley*. Recently, Toyota and Kitajima's work has been integrated as an "O-PDP System: Structure and Process O-PDP System: Structure and Process - In Quest of a Unified Theory of Mind -"*.

The theory has significant implications for considering human beings' behavior: it provides a basis for considering how the perception-cognition-motor processes and the memory process interact each other to shape coherent behaviors and develop from one's birth. This perspective has contributed to define the aspects to survey in the second cycle of PIAAC (Programme of International Assessment of Adults Competencies) of OECD, where Kitajima was invited as a leading researcher in the field of cognitive modeling of human-computer interaction for discussing the core concept of the 2nd cycle of PIAAC in the working group*.

Recently, he started a project of understanding immersive-ness in VR with Prof. Jérôme Dinet at the Psychology and Neuroscience Lab, Lorraine University, France, based on the theory, especially focusing on unconscious and conscious processes before and after the events of immersive-ness experience. They published a preliminary paper at Laval Virtual 2018 - VRIC, an ACM SIGGRAPH sponsored conferences.

Recent Publication

Muneo Kitajima. (2016) Memory and Action Selection in Human-Machine Interaction (Human-Machine Interaction Set: Information Systems, Web and Pervasive Computing). Wiley-ISTE.

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Recent Activities

Nagaoka University of Technology -> Muneo Kitajima

mkitajima@kjs.nagaokaut.ac.jp