NEWS

2024/03/07

alt Inc. appoints Tohoku University professor Kentaro Inui as R&D Head of AI
Accepts challenge to develop LLM that understands human emotions

alt Inc. (https://dev-corporate-web.poc-dev.com/en/), the Japan-based developer and distributor of Personal Artificial Intelligence (P.A.I.®️) and AI clone technology (head office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Kazutaka Yonekura), is pleased to announce the appointment of Kentaro Inui, Visiting Professor at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Professor at Tohoku University's Center for Language AI Research, as R&D Head of AI, Technology Division.

Mr. Inui specializes in natural language processing (NLP), an AI technology for analyzing large quantities of textual data. NLP determines the meaning of words used by humans in everyday communication (natural language).

A leading expert in the field of natural language processing with a wide range of research achievements, Mr. Inui has received international acclaim for his work on the world's fastest hypothetical inference system and the elucidation of the mechanism of large-scale language models (LLMs). He is one of Japan's leading researchers in the automatic compilation of linguistic information and knowledge, and the language processing technology that supports it.

At alt, Mr. Inui will focus on research and development of LLMs for understanding human emotions, provide advice on internal team composition and the development of alt's proprietary LLMs, and support the creation of instructional data and the development of matching systems using our LLMs (LHTM-2 and LHTM-OPT). We also look forward to collaborating with the NLP Group at Tohoku University on the development of this system.

Both alt and Inui will utilize their extensive expertise and experience to further innovate LLM and AI technologies, and to accelerate R&D for social implementation.

■About Kentaro Inui, Technology Division R&D New Head of AI

Mr. Inui is a visiting professor at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI, UAE) and professor at Tohoku University’s Language AI Research Center, specializing in natural language processing. He earned his Ph.D. at Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1995, then served as a research assistant at the same university, an associate professor at Kyushu Institute of Technology, and an associate professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology before becoming a professor at Tohoku University in 2010. Since 2016, he has also led the natural language understanding team at the RIKEN (AIP) Center for Advanced Intelligence Projects. In 2023, he transferred his main affiliation to MBZUAI and has since been active in both Abu Dhabi, UAE and Sendai, Japan. Mr. Inui served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Information Processing Society, chair of the Natural Language Processing Study Group of the same society, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Natural Language Processing, and general chair of the international conference EMNLP-2019. Since 2022, he has also been the president of the Association for Natural Language Processing. He has received various awards from international conferences and societies, including the DoCoMo Mobile Science Award, Google Focused Research Award, and the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Award in Science and Technology.

■About the Tohoku University Natural Language Processing (Tohoku NLP) Group

The Tohoku NLP Group is one of the largest research teams in Japan specializing in natural language processing. The group conducts a wide range of research in natural language processing and computational linguistics, from engineering research to build software to support intelligent information transfer and analysis, to theoretical research to elucidate and model the mechanisms of language communication.

URL：https://www.nlp.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp/

■About alt Inc.

Established in November 2014, alt Inc. is a venture firm with the mission of freeing humankind from non-creative/unproductive labor through the creation of P.A.I.®️ (Personal Artificial Intelligence) and AI clones. We also develop and provide SaaS products such as AI GIJIROKU, which utilizes speech recognition technology born from the development of AI dialogue engines. As of September 2023, our cumulative funding has reached over 8 billion yen.

https://dev-corporate-web.poc-dev.com/en/

<Media Inquiries to:>

Misako Nishizawa (Media Relations)

e-mail: press@alt.ai