Ryota Kanai
2025
Anticipation Committee member
Pulse of Science
After graduating from the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University in 2000, he received his PhD (Cum Laude) in 2005 from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he studied human visual information processing mechanisms. After working as a researcher at California Institute of Technology in the U.S. and University College London in the U.K., and as a JST PRESTO researcher and Associate Professor (Reader) of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the U.K., he founded Araya, Inc. and worked full time since 2015. He is engaged in research on the principles of consciousness in the brain and machines through the fusion of neuroscience and AI technologies. He has been also working on the translation of AI and neuroscience into industrial applications as the primary business of Araya. He has received many awards, including the Young Scientist Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the JEITA Venture Award (2020), the ET (Embedded technology)/IoT Technology Award (2019) among others. Since 2020, he has been working on the development of next-generation AI-assisted brain-machine interfaces (BMI) as a Project Manager of the Moonshot Project in the Cabinet Office. Since 2023, he has been contributing to the field by serving as a speaker at UNESCO's international conferences.
