Osaka University
Machine Learning & Systems Laboratory

Short biography

Yoshinobu Kawahara received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from The University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2003, 2005 and 2008, respectively.
He is currently a full professor at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University (Osaka, Japan). Additionally, he serves as the team leader of Structured Learning Team at RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (RIKEN AIP). He was a Visiting Research Scientist at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Inference (Tübingen), and a Visiting Professor at MELODI Lab. (lead by Prof. J.A. Bilmes) at University of Washington (Seattle). He received the Best Paper Awards from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence in 2011 and 2020, and from the Japanese Neural Network Society in 2020, and also awarded The Young Scientists' Prize, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan in 2020.
His research interests include statistical machine learning and its applications to scientific and engineering fields. In particular, he is interested in the intermediate field between machine learning and dynamical systems. Prof. Kawahara currently serves as an Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) and for Neural Networks (Elsevier), and has been a member of Program Committees / Senior Program Committees / Area Chairs at several top-tier conferences in the related fields of computer science, including ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, AISTATS, KDD, ICLR and NeurIPS.

Academic Degrees

• 2003/03 — Bachelor in Engineering, The University of Tokyo
• 2005/03 — Master in Engineering, The University of Tokyo
• 2008/03 — Ph.D. in Engineering, The University of Tokyo

Employment & Education History

• 2008/04 — Postdoctoral Researcher, Global COE Project, Tokyo Institute of Technology (–2009/09)
• 2009/10 — Assistant Professor, The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University (–2013/03)
• 2010/10 — PRESTO Researcher, Japan Science and Technology Agency (Concurrent post, –2014/03)
• 2013/04 — Associate Professor, The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University (–2019/03)
• 2016/09 — Team Leader, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (Concurrent post, –present)
• 2018/04 — Visiting Associate Professor, Graduate School of System Informatics, Kobe University (Visiting Professor since 2019/04, –present)
• 2019/04 — Professor, Institute of Mathematics for Industry, Kyushu University (–2023/03)
• 2022/10 — Professor, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University (–present)

Awards (Selected)

• 2010/12 — 2011 Best Paper Award, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence
• 2014/12 — NIPS 2014 Outstanding Reviewer Award
• 2019/07 — IJCNN 2019 Best Student Paper Award
• 2020/04 — The Young Scientists’ Prize, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan
• 2020/07 — 35th (2020) Best Paper Award, The Japanese Society of Microscopy
• 2020/09 — 2020 Best Paper Award, Japanese Neural Network Society
• 2022/06 — ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2022 Best Poster Award