Biography of Dr. Hiroshi Yamakawa

Hiroshi Yamakawa has pursued research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience for over thirty years and, during the past decade, has broadened his focus to include AI safety. He earned a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1992 and, in the same year, joined Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. From 1994 to 2000 he worked on the national “Real World Computing (RWC)” project, a large-scale research program led by Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (now METI) that aimed to enable computers to understand and process the rich information of the real world. Between 2014 and March 2019, he served as Director of the Dwango AI Laboratory. Dr. Yamakawa is currently Chairperson of the non-profit Whole Brain Architecture Initiative (WBAI), Principal Researcher at the Graduate School of Engineering of the University of Tokyo, and a Director of the AI Alignment Network (ALIGN). He also holds concurrent positions as Director of the Intelligent Systems Division (visiting professor) at the Institute of Informatics, Kinki University, Chief Visiting Researcher at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, and Visiting Researcher at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project. Within academic societies, he has served as Chief Editor of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence and as Chair of its Special Interest Group on Artificial General Intelligence, as well as Chair of the Neural Computing Technical Committee of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. His specialties include brain-inspired artificial general intelligence, whole-brain architecture, concept formation, AI safety, and opinion-aggregation technology.
The contents of this manifesto represent personal opinions.
Please check the full version of the biography at
Biography of Dr. Hiroshi Yamakawa.