Hirokazu Shirado

Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Hirokazu Shirado takes great pleasure in entertaining people using technology involving the human sensing process and social interaction. His current research focuses on the experimental analysis of the emergence of cooperative action in social networks. His goal is to engineer social systems with more affordable participation.

His specialty is the design of “touch”. He holds a master’s in mechanical engineering, specifically in human tactile studies, and has been working as a researcher at Sony Corporation studying human-robot interaction. Through this work, he realized what ultimately makes people happy is not solely interaction with efficient tools but relationships with friends, and this changed his focus from technological to social studies. He believes his unique career can help to retouch the world and make it better.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University in May 2019, Hiro became a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Selected Publications

• “Pay-it-forward gonorrhoea and chlamydia testing among men who have sex with men in China: a randomised controlled trial,” The Lancet: Infectious Diseases, Aug 2020