You’re utilizing the Japanese cultural aspect of characters/Anime for your research endeavors?

Dr. Nose: Yes, I wished to increase interest levels among students in addition to heightening commercial motivations for local enterprises, since Anime and visual processing offer much added-value business openings. Rather than melding human depictions with illustrations and renderings, we went all two-dimensional.

And you blended in your voice synthesis expertise with Anime. What else?

N: In addition to communicating with my students conventionally, I am conducting research on "Photo-realistic Virtual Clones" (created using Machine Learning based on real movie samplings of target speakers) to replicate facial features that for example entail "lip synch." Upon realizing such "AI communications" work, intense R&D efforts in the area of Deep Learning are required, since the emotion exhibiting intelligent responses contained in the speech and accompanying mouth movement must be convincingly replicated.

Why did you begin this line of research?

N: My chosen field was Intelligent Communication Network Engineering. Actually, I was fascinated by voice changer devices when a student, whether it be used by Anime characters or Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible.” My research interests now lie in perception information processing as well as intelligent robotics.