Ecotique workshop 2020

Monday March 9th 2020 @ French Embassy in Tokyo

For the second edition of this unique workshop we have invited again a unique panel of speakers to discuss the topics of ecotic.

	Estuko ICHIHARA is a Japanese award-winning new media artist and fantasy inventor. Born 1988 in Aichi. Graduated in Studies of Media, Body and Image from the School of Culture, Media and Society, Waseda University. She has been creating artworks that interpret Japanese culture, customs and beliefs from a unique point of view, and present new, technology-based approaches. Thanks to their strong impact, these works have been introduced across a wide range of media all over the world, such as newspapers and TV programs, radio programs, and magazines. Ichihara’s works were included in the Excellence Award at the 20th Japan Media Arts Festival, Entertainment Division in 2017, and in 2016, chosen for the INNOvation program from The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. She won Honorary Mention (Interactive Art＋) in PRIX Ars Electronica 2018 and received a STARTS Prize Nomination in the same year recently. She has recently presented her works in exhibitions such as ‘Digital Shamanism: Japanese Funeral and Festivity’ at NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], ‘Cyber Arts Exhibition 2018’ at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Japan Media Arts Festival. Photo credit: Tom Mesic
	Dominique LESTELis a French philosopher with in the Department of Philosophy of the Ecole normale supérieure of Paris (ENS) where he teaches contemporary philosophy and works mainly on the philosophy of human/non-human shared life. He has been a research engineer in Bull Artificial Intelligence Lab (1984-1986) and got a Ph.D. of the EHESS in 1986. He introduced cognitive sciences at ENS in 1994, with logician Giuseppe Longo and physicist Jean-Pierre Nadal and he has been a founding member of the Department of Cognitive Sciences of ENS until 2012. He has got research positions at University of California, MIT, Boston University, Université de Montréal, Macquarie University and has been a Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at Tokyo University of Foreign Language and at Keio University. In 2013-2014, he was a visiting scientist at the University of Tokyo, in the Japanese-French Laboratory of Informatics with a grant by the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) to work on the philosophy of existential robotics. He has published many books including “Eat that Book. A Carnivore’s Manifesto”, 2016, Columbia University Press. In 2014, the Oxford journal “Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities” has published a special issue on his work. In 2017 in was awarded long-term JSPS Fellowship to work with GEntiane Venture at TUAT, Japan. In 2018 he was a Berggruen Fellow writing about “existential machines” and the interaction of humans and machines on an emotional level at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, USA.
	Sonoe AZUMA is the CEO of Unagi travel, a travel agency for stuffed animals. Starting in Tokyo, she expanded her business to other regions. She also collaborates with other businesses and local governments to offer a variety of tour services such as internships and sports activities. Her vision is to provide adventures to everyone around the globe; kids, students, moms, dads, entrepreneurs, teachers, artists, physically-challenged, etc. and inspire them to trigger positive actions.
	Serge TISSERON is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. He holds a PhD in Psychology. He is a senior research fellow at University Paris VII Denis Diderot. He is a member of Centre of Psychoanalysis Research, Medicine and Society at Université Paris VII (CRPMS). He studies the relationships between youth, the media and images and the effect of information and communication technology on young people.
	Krisztina ROSNER is a Hungarian researcher and practitioner of contemporary performing arts. Her PhD was on the actor’s presence and the performative aspects of silence (2011), and was an assistant, then associate professor of theatre studies at the University of Pecs, Hungary between 2005-2018. In her activity, theory and practice are intertwined: besides teaching, she is a theatre director and actor, and has given workshops in the United States, Japan, and Europe. As a recipient of UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary for Performing Artists, she worked with the renowned theatre director Robert Wilson at his Watermill Center (2006, 2007, 2008). In New York she participated in the SITI Company Suzuki/Viewpoints workshop (2008), and took part in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab (2010). Since 2014 she has been focusing on contemporary Japanese performing arts, first as a Japan Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Hosei University. Between 2015 and 2017, she was a Visiting Scholar at Waseda University Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow. Her JSPS research project focused on reconsidering the performer’s presence, the non-human and neo-human aspects of contemporary Japanese theatre. Since 2017 she teaches comparative cultural studies and contemporary performing art at the School of Global Japanese Studies at Meiji University, where she is a founding member of the Contemporary Japanese Performing Arts Research Group. She is based in Tokyo. Website: www.tinarosner.com
	Naoki OHSHIMA develops several communication robots that can involve in conversation with people using verbal and non-verbal means of communication. Through his research at Toyohashi University of Technology, he intends to construct a suitable robot architecture for achieving human-like multi-party conversation among more than two robots. He is constructing and evaluating the social interactions of robots that can participate in human communications. His research findings will help to understand the daily communication mechanisms of humans.
	Naoko ABE is a sociologist, specialising in social interaction and human movement, with a research focus in Robotics and Urbanism. She obtained a PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2012. Her PhD research was carried out in collaboration with RATP (Parisian Public Transportation Authority) from 2008 to 2012. In 2011, she obtained a teaching certificate of Kinetography Laban from Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP). In 2015, Dr Abe was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems - French National Centre for Scientific Research (LAAS-CNRS) in Toulouse. In 2016-2017, she was a Renault-Junior International Research Fellow at the Centre for French-Japanese Advanced Studies of Paris (CEAFJP) coordinated by the EHESS France-Japan Foundation (FFJ). She participated in the research funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as a research associate from November 2017 to June 2018. Dr Abe joined the University of Sydney in July 2018.
	Junya HAYASHI is developing the partner robot "LOVOT" at GROOVE X. He obtained a PhD in Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He has been working in the IT industry for 15 years and he is familiar with software engineering, machine learning and development processes. He also has interests in philosophy and epistemology and has been learning for himself since university days, thanks to his karate master. He has a 7-year-old daughter and has fun with playing with her experimenting epistemology there.
	Liz RINCON-ARDILA conducts with the GVLab research in deep optimal and adaptive cognitive control systems for personalized Human Robot Interaction with interests in advanced adaptive optimal control, AI, deep learning, cognitive sciences and innovative technologies for evolutive intelligent systems. She implements her work on robots to work outside of the lab environment such as public spaces and events, schools and industries.


contact us: gvinfo@cc.tuat.ac.jp
a workshop organized with the support of the French Embassy in Tokyo & Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology