To join our laboratory as a student, you must take the entrance examination of the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. While students who complete the master's course in our laboratory are welcome to continue into the doctoral course, we generally do not accept students directly into the doctoral course except in certain cases. If you can obtain a recommendation from someone with at least as much professional experience as Yamada, and who has previously collaborated with Yamada on a joint project, please feel free to consult. Self-recommendation is also acceptable if you meet these conditions. Additionally, students who are expected to graduate and for whom Yamada served as an examiner during the master's thesis review may be considered for acceptance, so please consult if interested. Completing a doctoral course is not easy. When advancing from the master's course to the doctoral course, students must pass specific checkpoints to be eligible for progression. Unless it is confirmed that you have successfully passed these, acceptance cannot be granted. This measure is in place to avoid wasting the enrolled student's time, so we ask for your understanding. Research students are not accepted without exception.
The general entrance examinations are held twice a year: the first examination is in late August, and the second one is in late February. Successful candidates from the August examination can enroll either in October of that year or in April of the following year. Successful candidates from the February examination can enroll in April of the following year. Both the master's and doctoral entrance examinations include general student admissions, international student admissions and mature student admissions.
If you wish to join our laboratory, you should apply for the "Applied Information Sciences" department. The laboratory name is "Advanced Applied Data Science." The examination subject group is "Information and Biosystems Group (Group 2)," and the laboratory identifier is "D13-2."
First, we welcome individuals who, at the time of admission, are willing to consider pursuing a doctoral course (starting from the 2025 October). Supervising doctoral students does not enhance our reputation within the university or provide additional remuneration. We see education as a mission entrusted to us by the nation, and we have always aimed to send graduates into professional settings. However, observing students who are not particularly interested in research completing their master's thesis within just one year and graduating has led us to reconsider. Graduate school is fundamentally a place to train researchers, not a preparatory school for employment. As researchers, we want to engage in meaningful discussions with students to advance our own research. Those who do not enjoy research may find it difficult to contribute to this environment. For this reason, we have decided to accept only those who are willing to pursue a doctoral course.
For those who choose to advance to a doctoral course, we are happy to support their decision, even if they decide to join a different laboratory. At the very least, we hope to welcome individuals who consider research as one of their options when they start. If you later realize that research is not the right fit for you and choose to pursue a completely different career, such as entering the workforce directly, that is completely fine. Universities should accommodate students with various goals. For instance, it would be great if someone from our laboratory ends up becoming an entertainer, a government official, or even a traveler.
Additionally, we are looking for students who enjoy interacting with others and approach their work with honesty and integrity. Research is a collaborative process that thrives on active discussion and the ability to consider perspectives beyond their own. You do not need to love research from the beginning. Even if you feel uncertain about your abilities or your potential as a researcher, we welcome those who are willing to pursue self-fulfillment through research. We also value students who are curious about areas outside their own fields of study and who are eager to engage in meaningful discussions. We accept students from any field of study, be it medicine, pharmacy, philosophy, economics, education, archaeology, or anything else. Passing the entrance examination is all that is required to begin research here.
Master's course students are expected to present their research progress once a month. We hold a general seminar on the second Thursday of every month. 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.
In addition, our laboratory has several faculty members, and they will serve as the primary supervisors. Depending on the policy of each group, some groups hold meetings once a week, while others meet every other week.
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, the principal investigator of the laboratory is teaching mainly in Japanese because we think it is difficult to achieve satisfactory education without using Japanese considering our limited time available for teaching. However, everyday research activities can be conducted in English. In our laboratory, each student belongs to a small group led by a faculty member who acts as the actual supervisor. Other faculty members, aside from the principal investigator, can guide students in English, so we also accept students who only speak English.
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.
In academia, there are occasions where one is asked to submit recommendation letters. Several faculty members belong to this lab, but Yamada does not want to write recommendation letters. Although many students are part of the lab, if every one of them asks for a recommendation letter, it would take an enormous amount of time.
Therefore, if Yamada is asked to write a recommendation letter without receiving any information, he will only write: "As this is required by the system, I am writing this recommendation." I do not know in detail what the student has done, what they are thinking, or how they are spending their school life. Thus, if you want to submit a recommendation letter with meaningful content, please provide us with a draft.
Also, if it is someone we genuinely want to recommend, we would have already done so. If we encourage you to apply for something that requires a recommendation letter, we will write and give it to you before you even ask. In other words, we do not originally intend to recommend you for anything. Writing recommendation letters is not part of our job. However, if you still want us to write one, please feel free to draft it yourself and send it to us. We will sign it.
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.