午夜剧场

The "God's Eye" featured in the popular movie series "Fast & Furious" is the world's most powerful hacking system, capable of infiltrating any system, including mobile phones, surveillance cameras, and communication networks. In the film, tracking investigations that would traditionally take a long time are completed instantaneously.

Now, I define my field of specialization as "Socio-Economic Systems." Specifically, I conduct research to decipher social movements from data. I would like to introduce an example of that here.

For instance, there is technology that measures the Earth's surface using reflection information from microwaves emitted by satellites. This allows us to understand diverse activities across the globe, such as the usage status of parking lots at commercial facilities, the distribution of ships at sea, and even the behavior of cattle herds on ranches.

Similarly, we utilize vast amounts of data from the internet. Analyzing social media reveals where people's interests lie, and web traffic data allows for the analysis of behavioral characteristics of visitors to any given site. Furthermore, using credit card transaction information, we can estimate the place of residence of travelers staying at hotels. However, noise and sample bias are unavoidable. Therefore, in our laboratory, we aim to improve analysis accuracy by combining multiple data sources. For example, by also using smartphone log information, we can estimate the proportion of visitors to a hotel in Tateshina who came from Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama.

While these may seem like science fiction at first glance, they are actually things that can be grasped immediately in my laboratory. Furthermore, we are advancing research that combines such big data with psychological characteristics and biological data. In addition to analyzing facial images, blinking patterns, and heart rate variability data, we also conduct virtual society simulations using multi-agents based on personality data.

A world close to the "God's Eye" depicted as fiction in movies has already become a reality. Of course, simply tracking data only captures superficial trends. That is precisely why we emphasize fundamentals and conduct research across academic fields such as economics, information science, physics, medical sciences, and psychology. There is much to learn, but being able to utilize the knowledge of our predecessors and conduct research with many colleagues in the highly flexible environment of a university is a great blessing. I would like to express my gratitude for that good fortune.