January 31, 2023
【Press release】Yoshitaka Ushiku appointed as Technical Advisor
January 31, 2023 - LeapMind Inc. (Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Soichi Matsuda), a creator of the standard in edge AI, has celebrated its 10th anniversary of founding last December, and is pleased to announce that Mr. Takayoshi USHIKU has been appointed as a Technical Advisor since January, with the aim of further penetrating deep learning technology into the market.
Background
Since founded in 2012, LeapMind has been developing both software and hardware by using deep learning quantization technology for aiming machine learning into practical use. After 10 years since its founding, we’re seeing that LeapMind’s technology is steadily approaching the end-products that benefit people's lives; however, at the same time, feel that there are still more rooms to expand the understanding of deep learning technology usage, and needs more research and development and activities to raise awareness. Mr.Ushiku is a computer vision and natural language processing researcher and has been dedicated to development of machine learning and related areas; written numerous papers and has been cited in international papers more than 5,000 times*1, currently teaching at multiple universities, serves as a member of many expert committees, including The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. Also, since 2018, he has been active as a Principal Investigator at OMRON SINIC X Corporation since its establishment, to connect social issues to next-generation innovative technologies. As a technical advisor, Mr. Ushiku will provide advice on the company's technology strategy for the next 10 years, and will also be involved in supporting the strengthening of our R&D organization. Combining Mr. Ushiku's research with our technology related to image processing AI, we will strengthen technology research and development, accelerate commercialization, and promote the realization of social implementation of edge AI.
*1 : Google Scholar search result
(Board member of LeapMind Inc. From right CEO Matsuda, Mr. Ushiku, CTO Tokunaga)
Career of Takayoshi USHIKU
- 2013 Research Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Microsoft Research Redmond Intern
- 2014 PhD, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo Research Scientist, NTT Communication Science Laboratories
- Research Scientist, NTT Communication Science Laboratories
- 2016 Associate Professor, Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo
- 2018 Principal Investigator, OMRON SINIC X Corporation
- 2019 Chief Research Officer, Ridge-i Co., Ltd.
- 2022 Chief Executive Officer, Nine Bulls, LLC
The research interests lie in cross-media understanding through machine learning, mainly for computer vision and natural language processing. His research results have received various awards; ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge Special Prize in 2011, ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition Honorable Mention in 2017, and NVIDIA Pioneering Research Awards in 2017 and 2018.
Comment from Technical Advisor Mr. Yopshitaka Ushiku
I have thought for a long time that LeapMind is a standard-bearer in efforts to popularize neural networks on embedded devices in Japan. When it comes to enriching people's lives, simply making PCs and smartphones smarter is not enough, and it is a very difficult task to make even smarter those embedded devices which are already useful. On the other hand, because it is difficult, the meaning of performing neural network processing on embedded devices is extremely high, and the idea of ”using embedded technology to spread it widely and enrich people's lives” is quite important and meaningful. It may sound grandiose but I want to support technological innovation with the big ambition of “run by the embedding on a large-scale base model, putting a huge network on the SoC which was thought to be “absolutely unworkable with embedding.”
Comment from CTO Hiroyuki Tokunaga
LeapMind is currently developing an accelerator for neural networks, but the future of the highly intelligent computers would not be a simple extension of today's technology, and at some point it will require some kind of technological leap. In order to respond to such technological evolution, I am very pleased to have Mr. Ushiku as an advisor who has been involved in leading-edge research and development. His participation is definitely a great reassurance to draw our future picture.
About LeapMind
LeapMind Inc. was founded in 2012 with the corporate philosophy of "bringing new devices that use machine learning to the world". Total investment in LeapMind to date has reached 4.99 billion yen (as of May 2021). The company's strength is in extremely low bit quantization for compact deep learning solutions. It has a proven track record of achievement with over 150 companies, centered in manufacturing including the automobile industry. It is also developing its Efficiera semiconductor IP, based on its experience in the development of both software and hardware.
Head office: Shibuya Dogenzaka Sky Building 3F, 28-1 Maruyama-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0044 Representative: Soichi Matsuda, CEO Established: December 2012 URL：https://leapmind.io/en/
*LeapMind, Efficiera and logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of LeapMind Inc.