Kiminori Ito (D3), Department of Systems Innovation, received the Best Poster Award at RHINO2026

On 30th August 2026, Kiminori Ito (D3), SHIMADA LAB., Department of Systems Innovation, received the Best Poster Award at RHINO2026.

The Best Poster Award at RHINO2026
The Best Poster Award is presented to outstanding poster presentations at RHINO2026, an international workshop supported by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP). The workshop brings together researchers to discuss the roles of heterogeneity in nonequilibrium collective phenomena.

About awarded research  

In the presentation entitled “Microscopic Viewing Dynamics in Power-Law Relaxation on Niconico,” we analyzed large-scale, high-resolution viewing-history data from the video-sharing platform Niconico, focusing on the “waiting time” between successive views of the same video by an individual user. It has been reported that the number of views of online videos does not simply decay exponentially over time, but instead exhibits a much slower, long-term decay known as power-law relaxation. Previous studies have also found that, unlike on platforms such as YouTube, videos on Niconico show remarkably similar exponents of decay regardless of their level of popularity. However, the characteristics of individual users’ viewing behavior underlying this macroscopic pattern have remained largely unclear. In this study, we analyzed, for each user, the waiting times between viewing a particular video and returning to watch it again. We found that these individual revisiting dynamics exhibit burstiness: periods of intense viewing activity concentrated within short intervals alternate with periods of relatively little activity. We also found a negative correlation between successive waiting times. These results reveal that microscopic viewing dynamics at the individual-user level have a distinctive revisiting structure that had not previously been identified. As a next step, we plan to develop mathematical models incorporating these individual revisiting dynamics and use them to clarify how microscopic viewing behavior gives rise to the macroscopic relaxation patterns observed at the level of entire videos.

Your impression & future plan 

I am delighted to receive the Best Poster Award at RHINO2026. Presenting this work gave me the opportunity to receive valuable feedback from researchers with a wide range of backgrounds, and their comments have been very encouraging for the further development of this research. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Shimada for his continued guidance, as well as to all the members of our research group for their discussions and support. I would also like to extend my deepest thanks to everyone at DWANGO Co., Ltd. for providing the valuable data that made this research possible.

RHINO2026 Best Poster Award：

https://sites.google.com/view/rhino2026/home