I am currently an assistant professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), affiliated with the Augmented Human Communication Laboratory.
Research
My research focuses on handling human languages (like English or Japanese) with computers, so called natural language processing. In particular, recently I am interested in unsupervised learning from natural input (such as speech audio or unannotated text) for applications such as machine translation and speech recognition. You can find more details, and publications on my research page, which doubles as my CV.
I like developing, and have created open-source software which I have summarized here: software page. I also have had a chance to give tutorials and TA on subjects Bayesian non-parametrics and language modeling, which are posted on my teaching page in the hope that people will find them useful.
What's New?
- 2012-4-2: I joined the Nara Institute of Science and Technology as an assistant professor.
- 2012-3-26: I recieved my doctoral degree from Kyoto University.
- 2012-1-7: I am a co-organizer for the theme session on "Language information processing in times of crisis" at NLP2012.
- 2011-7-12: I am doing a summer internship at Google!
Hobbies
I also do stuff outside of research, and occasionally make pages about those as well. Most of the information here is pretty old, so use it at your own risk, but some people seem to like it (more than my research?!) so take a look if you'd like.
- Translation: I worked as a Coordinator for International Relations under the JET Programme for a couple years, and one of my main duties was translation. I made a page about translation and learning Japanese or English.
- Sake: Again during my previous job, I made a page about Japanese Sake of the Nada District.
- Ultimate Frisbee: I love playing Ultimate, and have been pretty active in organizing tournaments since I moved to Japan. I made a page about Ultimate in the Kansai Area that contains information about upcoming tournaments, teams that are recruiting, etc.