Takashi Nicholas Maeda, Department of Systems Innovation, wins a JSAI SIG Research Award

On 24th June 2016, Mr. Takashi Nicholas Maeda, Department of Systems Innovation, wins a JSAI SIG Research Award.This award is given to excellent research that was presented in specialinterest groups of Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence in 2015.

<About awarded research>

This research develops a framework to extract locations of tourist attractions using geodagged data from Twitter. The framework creates two indicators about each place: One is the indicator of popularity,  and the other is the indicator of originality. Using thoses indicators, the framework successfully extracts the locations of tourist attractions not only in Japan, but also in the UK and in the US. The major feature of this research is in combining a method for analyzing human mobility and a method for analyzing text data of Twitter. Previous research does not utilize those methods together. When using human mobility to extract locations of tourist attractions, huge shopping centers are included in the results. On the other hand, when using text data of Twitter, tourist attractions that are not originally tourist attoractions (famous universities, famous bridges, etc) are not included in the results. This research successfully combined the two methods to extract tourist attractions. This research is expected to contribute to development of tourismindustry by suggesting important tourist attractions.

<Comments>

I am really greatful to my supervisors, Prof. Toriumi and Prof. Ohashi, and the coauthor, Prof. Yoshida, for their support and encouragment. I will pursue further research to develop techniques that can contribute to society.