Request
Please follow the directions below to contact us.
Collaboration Requests
Please contact koichiro [at] c.titech.ac.jp with your name, institution, and topics.
Application
We are looking for highly motivated, energetic, and independent graduate students and undergraduate students, who are interested in human and robot intelligence.
Our laboratory does not accept a research student or an individual internship request. We may not reply to an email that inquires the possibility of a research student or internship student.
IGP-C and MEXT
- International Graduate Program (C) for master/doctoral program
- MEXT Embassy Recommendation for master/doctoral program
Our lab accepts students in the above programs.
These programs do not require Japanese skills for the entrance examination.
Each prospective student must obtain a letter of consent from the supervisor at Tokyo Tech before the application.
Please follow the instructions if you want to apply to these programs.
In our laboratory, we will only issue a letter of consent to outstanding students; our PI is confident that the candidate must pass the regular entrance exam.
Examples of this standard follow.
- The candidate has a bachelor's degree in computer science and has achieved all A's or similar grades during undergraduate studies.
- The PI is convinced that the candidate's research plan is very good and that if the experiments described in it are carried out, they are likely to be accepted by a top conference in natural language processing.
- The candidate has experience being accepted to a top conference in natural language processing, speech and language processing, or robotics (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, AACL, IJCNLP, COLING, CoNLL, SIGDIAL, ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, ASRU, SLT, ICRA, IROS, HRI, or other conferences in the same rank).
- The candidate has outstanding achievements related to computer science, such as representing your country in the International Mathematical Olympiad or winning awards in famous programming contests such as the ICPC.
How to apply (IGP-C and MEXT)
We may not reply to your contact if you do not follow the instruction.
Please contact koichiro [at] c.titech.ac.jp with putting [IGP-C/MEXT] on the title, with following information.
- Program and course (master/doctor)
- Admission month and year
- Summary of undergraduate research (if you did)
- Summary of graduate research and publication list (if you are applying to the doctoral course)
- Research plan in this laboratory
- Result of English proficiency test
- Transcript(s) of the past school(s)
Please use PDF format when attaching a document in an email. Do not use a Microsoft Word file (*.doc or *.docx) or an external link (e.g., a URL to a cloud storage); we may not open these documents for security reason.
Please send your application documents to us no later than one month before the official due.
It is highly recommended to set the sender field of your email account to your full name.
We often exchange emails with multiple prospective students at the same time.
We sometimes search for your emails by using your name as a query to an email client, but miss your emails if you did not set the sender field properly.
General Entrance Examination
Please follow Admission Guideline.
You are required to pass the exam given in Japanese with the severe competition with Japanese students; however, you can apply without a letter of consent from the supervisor.
General Contact
Please contact koichiro [at] c.titech.ac.jp with putting [admission] on the title.
Requests for laboratory tours will be handled on an individual basis, but please take the chance of open campus or admissions information session opportunities as much as possible.
We do not need your contact or greeting when you take the general entrance examination.
Please refer to the Japanese page for information on general entrance examinations.
What You Will Learn
After being assigned to a research laboratory, students' lives will be centered on research activities, unlike their previous university life, which was centered on classroom lectures and exercises.
Through the research activities, we expect you to learn skills in various ways of looking at things and thinking logically, especially in how to identify problems, formulate hypotheses, and demonstrate them, as well as how to discuss and verbalize them.
The ability to face things logically, to verbalize them, and to confront different logic through argumentation are important skills no matter what field you go into in your life.
Many of you will probably move into different fields in the future from the research field you worked in as a student.
However, the above ability to organize things logically and to think and demonstrate things will be useful no matter what field you go into.
In addition, since our research field is very interdisciplinary, you will acquire the skill to integrate various fields and examine them from a bird' s-eye view.
I hope that you will continually renew your sense of values and hone your sensitivity through the experience of research life in our research field so that you can tackle diverse issues with curiosity.
IRD lab aims for graduates to acquire the following skills:
- Bachelor's degree: Given a problem and an approach, to make independent trial-and-error attempts in response to that problem/approach.
- Master's degree: The ability to set up a problem and approach through discussions with faculty members, and to independently carry out trial-and-error. Also, the ability to summarize the results and explain them appropriately.
- Doctoral students: Ability to think independently about problems needed in the world, including approaches, and to set goals for their research. Also, the ability to formulate and explain the results of multiple research studies from a certain perspective.
Diploma Policy of Laboratory
In principle, the university's degree policy will be followed in granting degree examinations (bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees).
Specifically, we will look at the extent to which you have acquired the skills and abilities to be acquired in each of the above courses and whether you can demonstrate them quantitatively and qualitatively.
For a bachelor's degree, we will focus on whether the applicant was able to independently conduct trial-and-error and report on the given theme.
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For a master's degree, we evaluate on whether the candidate was able to conduct independent trial-and-error on the problem, whether the candidate was able to clearly explain the contents of their trial-and-error to other researchers in the same field. For this reason, at least one external presentation with a paper will be required to proceed to the review process.
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For a Ph.D. degree, candidates must be able to think independently about the problem they are addressing and summarize its value in a way that is recognized by their community. The applicant is also expected to be able to take a bird's-eye view of the problem and provide some explanation of where the problem fits into the larger research stream, how it is connected to past research, and how research in the field will flow in the future. For this reason, it is a requirement that two peer-reviewed papers/top-tier conference papers are required to proceed to the reviewing process.
For each program, the requirements to proceed to the review are only requirements to proceed to the review, and meeting these requirements does not guarantee success in the review. Even if there are two accepted papers, if the supervisor believes that they should be interpreted together as one work, they will not be accepted as a requirement to proceed to the review process.
The type of student we are looking for
Since this laboratory's content is multidisciplinary, we welcome candidates from outside the field.
What you need most is interest and curiosity in human intelligence, enthusiasm to clarify your interests, and determination to accomplish it at all costs.
Studying mathematics (linear algebra, calculus, probability statistics), basic informatics (algorithms, data structures, information theory, etc.), and computer programming (especially Python) will broaden your choice of topics after admission.
Career Opportunities for Graduates
Students we have supervised in the past, who have completed the doctoral program, are active in research institutes of major companies, goverment research institute, and universities in Japan/abroad. For specific career paths, please refer to List of Graduates.
Master's degree graduates have also been employed by Docomo, Panasonic, SHARP, Yahoo! JAPAN, CyberAgent, Nomura Research Institute, Accenture, Konami, and IT departments of other major companies.
About 30% of our students go on to doctoral course. We recommend the doctoral course especially to those who wish to work in research position in the future.
Ph.D. degree is essential, especially if you want to work internationally in this field.