Taro Narahara Receives National Institute of Informatics Excellence Award

Written by: Vesna Veljasevic Dimitrijevic
Published: Thursday, March 24, 2022
Graphing Neural Networks
Graph Neural Networks

Taro Narahara, associate professor at the Hillier College of Architecture and Design, has received the Excellence Award at the Informatics Research Data Repository (IDR) User Forum 2021 from the National Institute of Informatics (NII) Japan.

The awarded work ‘Prediction and analysis of living comfort of real estate properties using Graph Neural Networks,’ Narahara co-authored with Ryodai Kitabayashi, Satoshi Kasanishi, Toshihiko Yamasaki at the University of Tokyo.

“The team created the new dataset about subjective comfort and functionality of the real estate floor plans using the data available through NII and developed prediction models using Graph Neural Networks,” says Narahara.

The National Institute of Informatics event is held annually during which the award is presented. November 2021 event was held online. The excellence award goes to the most outstanding submission and presentation for the work using datasets provided through the NII. The National Institute of Informatics is an internationally recognized prestigious institution where several Computer Science professors from NJIT have worked as visiting scholars.

This work extends on his previous project “What is the Key to Attract People in Apartments?: Construction and Analysis of Attractiveness Dataset for Real Estate Floor Plans,” for which Narahara received the Human Communication (HC) award from IEICE (the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers) Japan in 2020. Narahara is the first author and presenter at one of the IEICE conferences.

Narahara’ work with collaborators at the University of Tokyo started while he was on his sabbatical at Toshihiko Yamasaki's laboratory as a visiting scholar. The team has continued the collaboration since then.

Narahara’s research interest span across multiple interdisciplinary areas including architectural design and computational technology, the robotics, digital design, virtual reality and gaming. He has published extensively and presented his research in international journals and conferences.