GIVE
Member of Executive Meeting

KAWAHARA Yoshihiro

prof.kawahara02
・Special Advisors to the Dean, School of Engineering
・Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems

Research Summary

Engaged in research integrating digital information and the physical world. His achievements include the commercialization of conductive ink-based printed electronics (startup creation), 4D printing, and autonomous IoT sensors enabled by wireless power transfer and energy harvesting. He is currently expanding these hardware technologies into the AI domain. By utilizing physical reservoir computing and world-model-based robot control, he leads the development of "Physical AI," aiming for a seamless fusion of hardware embodiment and computational intelligence.

Laboratory Website

https://www.akg.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

Biography

Apr. 1996 – Mar. 2000: B.E., Department of Information and Communication Engineering,, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2000 – Mar. 2002: M.E., Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2002 – Mar. 2005: Ph.D. in Engineering, Department of Information & Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2005 – Mar. 2007: Research Associate, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2007 – Mar. 2010: Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2010 – Aug. 2013: Lecturer, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
Sep. 2013 – Mar. 2019: Associate Professor, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
Mar. 2019 – Present: Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo
Oct. 2019 – Present: Director, Research Institute for an Inclusive Society through Engineering (RIISE), The University of Tokyo

Major Awards

  • Best Paper Award, ACM UbiComp 2013 (2013)
  • New Faculty Award, Microsoft Research (2014)
  • Innovative Technologies 2014, Digital Content Association of Japan (2014)
  • Honorable Mention Award, ACM UbiComp 2015 (2015)
  • 3rd Yamato Scientific Award (2016)
  • SICE Measurement Division Paper Award (2018)
  • 15th JSPS Prize (2019)
  • Distinguished Paper Award, ACM (2020)
  • 19th Docomo Mobile Science Award (Advanced Technology Division, Excellence Award) (2020)
  • Best Paper Award, ACM IDC'21 (2021)
  • KDDI Foundation Award (2021)
  • Innovative Technologies 2021 Special Prize – Future Mobility – / SIGGRAPH Award / DCAJ President Award, Digital Content EXPO (2021)
  • Best Paper Award, ACM CHI (2022)
  • CHI Honorable Mention Award, ACM (2023)
  • Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award, University Venture Awards (2023)
  • 10-year impact award, ACM UbiComp (2023)
  • The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Research Category (2024)

Selected Publications

  1. Y. Kawahara, S. Hodges, B. S. Cook, C. Zhang, and G. D. Abowd, "Instant inkjet circuits: Lab-based inkjet printing to support rapid prototyping of ubicomp devices," Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), pp. 363-372, 2013.
  2. K. Nakahara, K. Narumi, R. Niiyama, and Y. Kawahara, "Electric Phase-change Actuator with Inkjet Printed Flexible Circuit for Printable and Integrated Robot Prototyping," IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA 2017), pp. 1856-1863, Singapore, May 2017.
  3. R. Niiyama, H. Sato, K. Tsujimura, K. Narumi, Y. Ah Seong, R. Yamamura, Y. Kakehi, and Y. Kawahara, "poimo: Portable and Inflatable Mobility Devices Customizable for Personal Physical Characteristics," Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), pp. 912-923, 2020.
  4. T. Sasatani, A. P. Sample, and Y. Kawahara, "Room-scale magnetoquasistatic wireless power transfer using a cavity-based multimode resonator," Nature Electronics, vol. 4, no. 9, pp. 689-697, 2021.
  5. K. Narumi, K. Koyama, K. Suto, Y. Noma, H. Sato, T. Tachi, M. Sugimoto, T. Igarashi, and Y. Kawahara, "Inkjet 4D Print: Self-folding Tessellated Origami Objects by Inkjet UV Printing," ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 1-13, 2023.
  6. M. Ishige, T. Taniguchi, and Y. Kawahara, "Dream to posture: visual posturing of a tendon-driven hand using world model and muscle synergies," Advanced Robotics, vol. 37, no. 19, pp. 1237-1252, Oct. 2023.
  7. H. Enomoto, M. Ishige, T. Umedachi, M. Kamezaki, and Y. Kawahara, "Delicate Jamming Grasp: Detecting Deformation of Fragile Objects Using Permanent Magnet Elastomer Membrane," IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 979-986, 2024.
  8. H. Murakami, T. Sasatani, M. Sugimoto, I. Sukeda, Y. Mita, and Y. Kawahara, "SyncEcho: Echo-Based Single Speaker Time Offset Estimation for Time-of-Flight Localization," Proc. of ACM SenSys 2024, pp. 718-729, Hangzhou, China, Nov. 2024.
  9. C. Caremel, Y. Kawahara, and K. Nakajima, "Hysteretic reservoir," Physical Review Applied, vol. 22, 064045, Dec. 2024.
  10. Y. Li, M. Fukumoto, M. Kari, S. Ishida, A. Noda, T. Yokota, T. Someya, Y. Kawahara, and R. Takahashi, "Ultra-low-power ring-based wireless tinymouse," Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), pp. 1-12, 2025.