Tangible heritage, such as temples and statues, is disappearing day-by-day due to human and natural disaster. Intangible heritage, such as folk dances, local songs, and dialects, has the same story due to lack of inheritors and mixing cultures. People have been developing methods to preserve such tangible and intangible heritage in digital form. The e-Heritage project aims not only to record heritage, but also analyze those recorded data for better understanding as well as display those data in new forms for promotion and education.
In this lecture, the speaker will cover his efforts for handling tangible heritage in Italy, Cambodia and Japan. He will explain what hardware and software issues have arisen, and how to overcome them by designing new sensors using recent computer vision technologies, as well as the method to process the data using computer graphics technologies. He will also explain how to use such data for archeological analysis, and review new findings. Finally, he will discuss a new way to display such digital data by using the mixed reality systems, i.e. head-mount displays on site connected from cloud computers. The lecture will also cover how to preserve intangible heritage, in particular, preservation of Japanese and Taiwanese folk dances. He will introduce the way to display a Japanese folk dance on a humanoid robot. The speaker will talk about how to apply similar technics to Taiwanese folk dances. The analysis of the key poses and how such key poses relate to their social institutions would be focused.
About the speaker
Prof Katsushi Ikeuchi received his PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1978. After working at the A.I. Lab in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years, he moved to the Electrotechnical Lab in Japan in 1980 and then the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. In 1996, he was appointed as a Professor in the University of Tokyo and eventually joined the Microsoft Research Asia as a Principal Researcher in 2015.
Prof Ikeuchi’s research interest spans computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. He received numerous awards, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Marr Award, the IEEE RAS “most active distinguished lecturer” award, the IEEE-PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award and the Okawa Prize as well as Shiju Houshou (the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon) from the Emperor of Japan. He is also a fellow of IEEE, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, the Information Processing Society of Japan and the Robotics Society of Japan.
For attendees’ attention
The lecture is free and open to all. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
