Dr. Takahiro Kawamura

Research & Development Center, Toshiba Corp

Service Discovery in Ubiquitous Computing

Metadata have been already given to most of the data and objects in the real world, such as books, foods, digital contents like movie, electric devices, and so forth. Further, they can be accumulated electronically by bar-codes and RFIDs, which is expected to spread explosively. On the other hand, web services are getting popular in the internet, and DLNA services and ECHONET are penetrating into the home network. In our project, we propose a new handheld application called Ubiquitous Service Finder, in which user can intuitively browse as icons the metadata around him/her in a cellular phone, then invoke the services semantically related to the metadata by simple drag and drop operation.

Takahiro Kawamura received a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Waseda University in 1994 and 2001, respectively. He joined Toshiba Corporation in 1994. From 2001 to 2002 he was a visiting scholar in Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently a research scientist at the Knowledge Media Laboratory, Corporate R&D Center, Toshiba Corporation. He is also a visiting associate professor in the Graduate School of Information Systems, the University of Electro-Communications. His research interests include agent technologies, semantic web, and ubiquitous computing. He is a member of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), and Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI).