Curriculum Vitaes

Hiroto Shimizu

  (志水 洋人)

Profile Information

Affiliation
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences Department of Sociology, Sophia University
Visiting Researcher, The Kinugasa Research Organization Institute of Ars Vivendi, Ritsumeikan University
Degree
Human Sciences(Mar, 2018, Osaka University)

ORCID ID
 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2470-0776
J-GLOBAL ID
202301001647884690
researchmap Member ID
R000055119

Papers

 13
  • Hiroto Shimizu
    Sociology of Health & Illness, 48(7) e70259, Sep 10, 2026  Peer-reviewedLead authorCorresponding author
    ABSTRACT This article examines how emerging infrastructural AI and robotics for health and everyday life are proposed and negotiated, drawing on ethnographic research within the Japanese Awareness AI Project. The project envisages distributed assistance relying on continuous measurement of bodily states, aiming to make technological systems recede into the background. The analysis reveals how the project envisions bodies and machines as tightly coupled, yet encounters profound sociotechnical frictions around data integration, consent and bodily safety. It also traces perceived side effects, including the commercial circulation of bodily data and the risk of reproducing social inequalities. The article argues that such attempts at infrastructuring, although recently curtailed by shifting policy priorities, remain sociologically significant. They highlight the unstable nature of infrastructure in the making and provide a critical reference point for understanding emerging reorganisations of dependence and responsibility and forms of assisted selfhood, around continuous bodily datafication.
  • The 33rd Symposium on Fuzzy, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence (FAN 2025), Sep, 2025  Lead authorCorresponding author
  • Hiroto Shimizu
    The 39th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, May, 2025  Lead author
    This ethnographic study examines AI robotics research through infrastructure studies, focusing on Japan’s Moonshot R&D Programme Goal 3, which aims for human-AI-robot “symbiosis” by 2050. The study analyses the Awareness AI project, where researchers envision robots as pervasive, invisible resources supporting daily life through biometric monitoring and behavioural intervention. It identifies three infrastructural dilemmas: visibility tradeoffs between bodily information and technological integration, conflicts between consent models and monitoring requirements, and concerns about normalised behavioural control. Using interviews and observations, the study employs “infrastructural inversion” to reveal hidden sociotechnical challenges. It contrasts anthropomorphic AI narratives with an infrastructure-oriented approach, exploring how the project reimagines human-machine relations through networked resource integration and mutual constitution between bodies and technological environments. The study contributes to technology studies by reframing AI ethics debates through infrastructure’s sociopolitical dimensions.
  • Hiroto Shimizu, Hitoshi Hirata, Shingo Shimoda
    CONVERGING CLINICAL AND ENGINEERING RESEARCH ON NEUROREHABILITATION II, VOLS 1 AND 2, 609-612, Dec, 2024  Peer-reviewedLead authorCorresponding author
  • Hiroto Shimizu
    Social Science & Medicine, 345 116703-116703, Mar, 2024  Peer-reviewed

Misc.

 2

Books and Other Publications

 2

Presentations

 40

Teaching Experience

 19

Professional Memberships

 9

Research Projects

 7

Academic Activities

 17

Social Activities

 4

Other

 6