To join our laboratory as a student, you must take the entrance examination of the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. We accept students for the master’s course. We welcome students who have completed their master's course in our laboratory to enter the doctoral course in our laboratory, but we do not currently accept unaffiliated students who wish to start their doctoral studies. Also, we do not accept research students.
While it is not absolutely necessary, we welcome students who are willing to proceed to a PhD course. Supervising PhD course students will not enhance our reputation in the university and we will not receive bonus renumeration for the supervision. We supervise students only because we like fostering researchers. So, it is totally fine if students want to go to a different laboratory for their PhD research. It is also fine if students change their mind and go to a company instead of proceeding to a PhD.
Of course, we think universities are open to students who possess different purposes for enrollment and, for example, it is acceptable for them to use a master's course to enter a good company. In such a case, it might be better to choose a laboratory that specializes in such guidance.
In addition, we are looking for students who like having conversations with other people and who are not a coward. We do not require that a student likes doing research. If you believe in self-fulfillment through research, even if you are uncertain about your abilities, we welcome you. It does not matter if you have doubts about becoming a competent researcher. We accept students from any field of study so far, be it medicine, pharmacy, philosophy, economics, education, archaeology, or anything else.
Master's course students are expected to introduce a paper and present their research progress about once every two months. We do not assign anything to PhD course students. The students are expected to come to the school to listen to other students' presentations but are otherwise free to make their own schedule, whether that be coming to the laboratory for only a second, or staying at the laboratory all the time. We are always available for consultation for research.
Students are taught only the basics, such as how to program, how to find papers, how to use the cluster machine, how to make artificial intelligences, etc. After that, as a fellow researcher, let's work together to do good research.
We have been struggling with the decision regarding what language to use for instruction, but for now, we are teaching only in Japanese, because we think it is difficult to achieve a satisfactory education without using Japanese considering our limited time available for teaching.
In order to complete the master's course, students must write a master's thesis and have it accepted by the review board. PhD students must publish two papers co-authored with your supervisor in reputable refereed journals or conferences, write a doctoral dissertation, and have it accepted by the review board.
There exists an atmosphere in which many researchers refer to conferences in which their research results are published as top conferences. However, since there are no clear criteria for what constitutes a "reputable" publication, it is difficult to say which are the reputable conferences. Therefore, it is necessary to check the conference each time, discuss it, and make a decision. Meanwhile, academic journals have a metric called impact factor to measure their relevance.
The reason it says "co-authored" is not because we want to increase the number of our own papers. We do not need the gifted authorship at all. There are a lot of researchers who tend to increase their paper count using this method, but we think the ones who want the gifted authorship do so because they are evaluated by someone else and require the extra authorships. However, we are not in a position to be forced to do anything by anyone, and we can do whatever we want no matter who evaluates us, so there is absolutely no need to increase the number of papers via this method. The reason for asking for “co-authored” papers is because we believe from our education experience that writing papers together is necessary for us to judge if a student possesses sufficient ability to be granted a PhD degree.
If you are interested in our laboratory, please contact us by e-mail. Please mention at the beginning of the e-mail that you have read this page. Due to the overwhelming number of bulk emails we receive, we cannot respond to all of them. Therefore, we will only read e-mails that indicate you have read this page.
If you include that information in your e-mail, we will definitely respond. The content of the e-mail you send will be carefully reviewed by the three faculties of the laboratory. After discussing and making a decision, we will inform you if we can accept you. Unfortunately, if we cannot accept you, we will also let you know. The criteria of screening depend on the capacity of the faculties. Specifically, we consider what and how much we need to teach.