Hiroshi Shimodaira

Hiroshi Shimodaira is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh, where he has been a faculty member since September 2004. He is affiliated with the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) and the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, contributing to interdisciplinary research in speech and language technologies.

His research focuses on lifelike conversational agents with personalities, speech recognition (particularly acoustic models), character recognition, machine learning, and medical-image processing. He is particularly known for his work on anthropomorphic spoken dialogue agents and the development of the Galatea toolkit, an open-source software framework for lifelike conversational agents. His interests also extend to support vector machines and optimization techniques in pattern recognition.

The recent publications and projects indicate a strong emphasis on machine learning applied to speech and character recognition, with a trend toward developing intelligent, interactive systems that emulate human conversational behavior. His work bridges theoretical machine learning with practical human-centered applications.

• Acoustics Society of Japan
• IEEE Signal Processing Society
• Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI)
• IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan)

Dr. Shimodaira has advised PhD students and led several research initiatives, including the Galatea Project for anthropomorphic dialogue agents and work on handwriting-based communication for the visually impaired. He was previously a co-director of the Intelligent Information Processing Laboratory at JAIST, indicating a sustained record of research leadership. While no specific grants are listed, his project pages suggest involvement in funded research efforts.

He leads and contributes to research groups such as CSTR and HCRC, and his lab work focuses on spoken dialogue systems, lifelike agents, and machine learning applications in speech and vision. The Galatea project represents a major software and research output from his team.