Our Team

Yasuhiro Watanabe

Co-founder, CEO

Yasuhiro is a successful venture capitalist in the Japanese tech space. After working for JAFCO, Japan's largest venture capital firm, he founded a venture capital firm called Incubate Capital Partners. His investment includes F@N Communications, Inc. (IPO in 2005), AIP Corporation (acquired in 2005), and Commerce21 Corporation (acquired in 2004). In 2007, he co-founded Studio Ousia. His dream is to become a samurai one day.

Ikuya Yamada

Co-founder, Chief Scientist / Ph.D.

Ikuya is a software engineer and a researcher working on natural language processing and machine learning. Previously he served as a director of Fractalist, which was a public mobile software company located in Tokyo. While he was in college, he founded Newrong, a software company acquired by Fractalist. He won several competitions held with top international conferences including WWW, ACL, NAACL, and NIPS. He received his Ph.D. from Keio University. He is also a visiting scientist at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project.

Tomotaka Ito

Chief Engineer

As a teenager, Tomotaka got interested in how interactive web pages should be constructed. He has been programming since junior high school. While at university and graduate school, he did research projects in middleware for intuitive controls and service integration in the field of ubiquitous computing. His hobbies include visiting hot springs, driving, and watching movies.

Ayae Hirata

Marketing Director

While attending university, Ayae focused on public relations work for non-profit organizations and social ventures. She joined Studio Ousia wanting to help innovate the world through her novel ideas and vision. One of her hobbies is reading -- Her favorite authors are Gabriel García Márquez, Victor Hugo, J. M. G. Le Clézio and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Masatoshi Suzuki

Software Engineer / Ph.D.

Masatoshi joined Studio Ousia in 2021 after he received his Ph.D degree in Information Science from Tohoku University. In the last 6 years at the university, Masatoshi researched natural language processing, with a focus on techniques to develop and evaluate question-answering systems using trivia questions. Masatoshi is also a quiz player and has appeared on several TV quiz shows.

Sonse Shimaoka

Software Engineer

Sonse majored in NLP during college and graduate school from the curiosity for artificial intelligence. His research included named entity classification using Wikipedia. He received awards from academic conferences both in Japan and outside the country during graduate school. After working for a recruiting service congramarate, he joined Studio Ousia in 2019. He likes gaming, reading and watching films in spare time and also is a big fan of Elon Musk.

Satoshi Taniguchi

Sales Director

MS in Health Informatics from University of Illinois at Chicago. Started 3 companies in Ed-tech field. Joined Studio Ousia to accelerate use of AI for better knowledge/information utilization. Does research and development of clinical apps for diabetes patients.

Daisuke Oba

Research Intern

Daisuke is a master course student at Toyoda-Yoshinaga-Kitsuregawa Lab. at The University of Tokyo, Japan. He is currently doing researches on natural language processing, especially personalized NLP systems and meaning representations. He enjoys skiing, playing golf, watching sports, and drinking craft beer.

Ryokan Ri

Research Intern

Ph.D candidate at Tsuruoka laboratory in the University of Tokyo. His primary research interest lies in multilingual NLP. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking and playing music.

Kosuke Yamada

Research Intern

Kosuke is a Ph.D. candidate at Takeda-Sasano group in Nagoya University, Japan. He is working on building semantic frames automatically. He enjoys traveling, watching TV dramas and movies.

Keisuke Ueda

Research Intern

Keisuke is a senior undergraduate student at The University of Tokyo. He has been/is doing research on NLP at National Institute of AIST, Japan and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His primary research interest lies in multimodal NLG. His main hobbies are wine and travel.

Contact

Studio Ousia Inc.
Tokyo Studio

4F Otemachi Building, 1-6-1 Otemachi
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, JAPAN
100-0004

Founded

2007

General Contact

info@ousia.jp