Yasuo Matsuyama

Timeline

1. 1969–1978

   Degrees from Waseda and Stanford

   He earns bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at Waseda University in 1969, 1971 and 1974; his Doctor of Engineering dissertation is 'Studies on Stochastic Modeling of Neurons.' Sent to the United States as a Japan-U.S. exchange fellow, he completes a PhD at Stanford University in 1978 under Robert M. Gray, with the dissertation 'Process Distortion Measures and Signal Processing.'

2. 1979–1996

   Professor at Ibaraki University

   He is on the faculty of Ibaraki University from 1979 to 1996, and his final position there is professor and chairperson of the Information and System Sciences Major. Building on his Stanford studies of speech compression, he develops generalized competitive learning algorithms, and in 1996 he publishes 'Harmonic competition: a self-organizing multiple criteria optimization' in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

3. 1996–2017

   Professor at Waseda University

   He becomes a professor in Waseda University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 1996 and holds the post until 2017. From 2011, he also directs the university's Media Network Center.

4. 1998

   IEEE Fellow for competitive learning

   He becomes an IEEE Fellow in 1998 for contributions to learning algorithms with competition. In January 1998, he also publishes 'Multiple descent cost competition: restorable self-organization and multimedia information processing' in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, an algorithm that admits deformable centroids and generalizes vector quantization.

5. 2003–2017

   The alpha-EM algorithm

   In March 2003, he publishes the alpha-EM algorithm in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory; built on the alpha-logarithmic likelihood ratio, it contains the log-EM algorithm and speeds up learning by using information from past iterations. In July 2017, he publishes the alpha-HMM estimation algorithm, a generalized and faster version of hidden Markov model estimation, in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. A 2010–2012 grant project that he leads applies the generalized logarithm to fast likelihood ratio optimization.

6. 2003–2010

   Brain signals and humanoids

   From 2003 to 2004, he is the principal investigator of the Waseda University grant project 'Analysis of Brain Information Components and Its Transmission to Humanoids,' whose group unifies human body motion, cartoon characters and humanoids over a network. The 2004 Best Paper Award for Application Oriented Research from the Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly goes to a paper on this method. In 2010, he coauthors 'Multimodal human-humanoid interaction using motions, brain NIRS and spike trains' for the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction.

7. 2013–2016

   Fellowships and Waseda prizes

   He becomes an IEEE Life Fellow in 2013 and a Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan in 2014. That society gives him its Outstanding Educational Material Award in 2015, and Waseda University gives him its e-Teaching Award and the Okuma Academic Commemorative Prize, Memorial Award in 2016.

8. Since 2017

   Professor Emeritus at Waseda

   Since 2017, he is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Researcher in the Research Center of Waseda University's Faculty of Science and Engineering. His research interests include computational intelligence, machine learning, statistical data processing, biological signal processing and blockchain applications; in 2021, he publishes 'Divergence family contribution to data evaluation in blockchain via alpha-EM and log-EM algorithms' in IEEE Access.