あなたの研究テーマについて教えてください。What is your research theme?

My research focuses on culture-aware and personalized emotional speech AI. I study how AI can better understand and express emotions through speech while adapting to differences between individuals and cultures.

My current goal is to develop a spoken dialogue system for mental support that integrates emotion recognition, dialogue generation, and emotional speech synthesis. Instead of relying on an average model for everyone, the system learns how different users perceive and express emotions and adapts its responses accordingly. I hope this research can make human–AI communication more natural and empathetic, especially in situations where emotional understanding and trust are important.

なぜ博士課程へ進学しましたか？Why did you decide to pursue a doctoral program?

My decision to pursue a PhD developed gradually through my master’s research. I started by studying non-verbal expressions in speech, then worked on fast and natural speech generation, and later moved toward personalized emotional speech synthesis. Through these projects, my interest gradually expanded from “how to generate better speech” to “how AI can better understand and adapt to people.” I realized that questions involving emotion, personalization, culture, and human–AI interaction require longer-term and more interdisciplinary research than a single master’s project. Therefore, I decided to pursue a PhD so that I could connect my previous work and develop it into a more complete human-centered spoken dialogue system.

Graniteの支援で役立っている・助かっていることを教えてください。Please share what has been helpful or beneficial through the support provided by Granite.

The financial support from Granite allows me to focus more fully on my research without being overly concerned about financial pressure. More importantly, Granite provides opportunities to conduct interdisciplinary and team-based research.

Through the program, I can collaborate with researchers from different backgrounds, including speech processing, natural language processing, and human–AI interaction. This is especially valuable for my research because developing culture-aware and personalized AI requires perspectives from multiple disciplines and cultures. Granite also supports activities such as international conference participation, dataset construction, and human evaluation, which help me develop my research from an idea into a practical system.

将来の目標、もしくはあなたが胸に秘めた野望があればぜひ教えてください。Please share your future goals or any ambitions you hold close to your heart.

My long-term goal is to become a researcher who develops AI that can truly understand and adapt to people, rather than simply generating technically correct responses.

In particular, I want to combine speech technology, emotional intelligence, personalization, and cross-cultural understanding. My current goal is to develop a spoken dialogue system that can recognize how people from different cultural backgrounds express emotions differently and adapt its responses to each individual.

In the future, I hope such technologies can contribute to areas such as mental health support, where empathy, trust, and cultural understanding are especially important. I also hope to continue international and interdisciplinary collaboration, share research through publications and open-source tools, and eventually develop AI systems that are both technically advanced and genuinely useful to society.

博士課程進学を考えている人へのメッセージをください。Please share a message for those considering pursuing a doctoral program.

I think the most important thing is to ask yourself whether there is a big research theme or question that you are willing to pursue for several years. A PhD is a long-term commitment, so this decision should be considered carefully rather than made simply because continuing to study seems like the natural next step. Before deciding, I recommend experiencing research as much as possible and thinking seriously about whether you can stay interested in one broad direction over a long period of time. If there is a theme that you genuinely want to keep exploring, then pursuing a PhD can be a meaningful choice.