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About

Yasunari Yoshitomi is a pioneering researcher in affective computing and human-robot interaction, dedicated to bridging the emotional gap between humans and machines. His work centers on developing robots that can perceive, understand, and respond to human feelings, with a particular focus on facial expression recognition and vocal emotion analysis. Yoshitomi’s most impactful contribution is his 2013 study on recognizing a baby’s emotional cry—distinguishing between discomfort, hunger, and sleepiness—using 32-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform analysis, which has garnered 21 citations and laid groundwork for robotic baby caregivers. He has advanced thermal image processing for facial expression recognition (2015, 7 citations), extracting intensity characteristics from mouth and jaw regions via discrete cosine transforms. His research also explores vowel judgment for speaker expression (2011, 5 citations) and comprehensive human-computer communication systems that both recognize and synthesize facial expressions (2021). Yoshitomi’s interdisciplinary approach, combining signal processing, computer vision, and psychology, has positioned him as a key figure in creating socially intelligent robots capable of empathetic interaction, with applications ranging from childcare to eldercare.