Seiya Kawano | Kyoto Institute of Technology

News & Topics

2026Journal papers accepted in the Journal of Natural Language Processing, Transactions of the JSAI, APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, and Machine Learning with Applications.
2025/08Four papers accepted at Interspeech 2025.
2025/07Team MK2 received the top ranking award (most first-place rankings across all categories and criteria) at the AgentScen PBIG Shared Task 2025, an international competition held at IJCAI 2025.
2025/04Joined the Kyoto Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor (also Visiting Researcher at RIKEN GRP since May 2025).

2025/04 − Present Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Faculty of Information and Human Sciences, Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT Computer Vision Lab)
2025/05 − Present Visiting Researcher, Knowledge Acquisition and Dialogue Research Team, Guardian Robot Project (GRP), RIKEN

2018/04 − 2021/09 Doctor of Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
2016/04 − 2018/03 Master of Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
2014/04 − 2016/03 Advanced Course of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Oita College
2009/04 − 2014/03 Department of Computer and Control Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Oita College

2025/04 − Present Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Kyoto Institute of Technology
2025/05 − Present Visiting Researcher, RIKEN Guardian Robot Project (GRP)
2024/04 − 2025/03 Research Scientist, RIKEN Guardian Robot Project (GRP)
2023/04 − 2025/03 Affiliate Assistant Professor, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
2021/10 − 2024/03 Postdoctoral Researcher, RIKEN Guardian Robot Project (GRP)
2022 − 2025 Adjunct Lecturer, Doshisha University
2021/04 − 2021/09 Research Associate, RIKEN Guardian Robot Project (GRP)
2020/11 − 2021/03 Part-time Researcher, RIKEN Robotics Project
2020/04 − 2021/03 JSPS Research Fellow (DC2), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
2019/12 − 2020/02 Visiting Researcher, University of Southern California (USC-ICT) Theme: Dialogue structure parsing on multi-floor dialogue (Supervisor: Dr. David Traum)
2019/11 − 2020/03 Research Intern, NTT Communication Science Laboratories Theme: Entrainable neural conversation model based on reinforcement learning (Supervisor: Dr. Masahiro Mizukami)
2018/04 − 2021/03 Research Assistant, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
2017/04 − 2020/03 Researcher, Nara Institute of Science and Technology

2025/09 − Present Editorial Board Member, Journal of Natural Language Processing, Association for Natural Language Processing (ANLP)
2025/04 − Present Committee Member, AAMT/Japio Special Interest Group on Patent Translation
2025/04 − Present Committee Member, Magazine Editorial Committee MWG (Member Services), Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)
2024/10 − 2025/05 Guest Editor, Special Issue of the Journal of Human Interface Society (Vol.27, No.2) Special issue on user interfaces leveraging natural-language dialogue
2023/04 − 2025/03 Program Committee Member, Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing (NLP2024, NLP2025)

Most first-place rankings across all categories and criteria, AgentScen PBIG Shared Task 2025 (international competition at IJCAI 2025), 2025/07.
Committee Special Award, NLP2025, 2025/03.
Committee Special Award, NLP2025, 2025/03.
Best Demo Honorable Mention, The 31st International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2025), 2025/01.
Best Paper Award, IWSDS2024, 2024/03.
Committee Special Award, NLP2023, 2023/03.
Excellence Award (3rd place), The 5th Dialogue System Live Competition, 2022/12.
Excellent Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, 2022/09.
Young Researcher Encouragement Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, 2022/06.
Excellent Research Award, IPSJ SIG-NL, 2022/06.
Incentive Award, JSAI SIG, 2021/06.
Best Student Paper Award (Yahoo!-Japan Award), IPSJ SIG-SLP, 2019/02.
NAIST Top Scholarship Program, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 2018/06.
Exemption from scholarship refund for excellent students, JASSO Type I scholarship, 2018/05.
Best Paper Award Runner-Up, IWSDS2018, 2018/05.
Best Paper Award, Journal of the Intellectual Property Association of Japan, 2017/12.
Student Incentive Award, IEICE Kyushu Section, 2015/09.

JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists, "User-adaptive spoken dialogue robot based on integrated understanding of style-shifting," FY2025−2027.
NEDO Support Program for Young Researchers (8th round), "Integrated intellectual-property work support framework based on modeling the cognition and preferences of IP practitioners," FY2025−2027.
Okawa Foundation Research Grant, "Cross-modal design information processing based on large vision-language models," FY2025.
JST ACT-X (accelerated phase), "Discourse structure analysis infrastructure for supporting patent document reading," FY2022−2025.
JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists, "User-adaptive spoken dialogue robot based on accommodation theory," FY2022−2025.
JSPS Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (DC2), "Modeling dialogue functions of information intermediaries in information-seeking dialogue," FY2020−2022.

JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), "Sustainability requirements of local English speaking tests using AI and digital technologies" (PI: Katsunori Kanzawa), FY2026−2028.
JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), FY2021−2023.

"Development of an application for evaluating the competitive advantage of technologies," Bunken Labo Inc., FY2026.