Founded in 2009, our laboratory combines insights from economics and society with AI and data science to pioneer new ground in technology management and become one of the world's leading teams. We focus on data science methods such as machine learning, deep learning, network analysis, and natural language processing, while also emphasizing foundational research on these methodologies.

We analyze diverse datasets including large-scale scholarly corpora, social media, corporate information covering transactions and M&A, passenger trip data, and review texts. We are also pioneers in analyzing large language models through inverse reinforcement learning.

To advance our research, we lead initiatives such as the Technology Informatics Social Collaboration Program and the NEDO/AIST project on science and technology trend forecasting through the fusion of pretrained language models and network science, while collaborating with various industry partners.

Beyond research, we emphasize disseminating our findings and contributing to society. We deliver invited talks at international conferences on research intelligence, participate in UTOKYO COMPASS initiatives (Global Commons, vision formation, SDGs International Symposium), and contribute to regional revitalization and national planning policies. We also provide our Academic Landscape and Future Prediction System (Science Planet+) to institutions within and outside the University of Tokyo, and manage the Entrepreneurship Education Design Endowed Course.

We emphasize giving students hands-on experience driving the entire research process—from selecting a topic, designing the study, conducting analysis, to writing papers. Rather than suggesting research themes or plans, faculty focus on supporting the topics and plans students choose themselves. This approach results in remarkably diverse research themes within the lab.

We also value students gaining conference presentation and international experience. Domestically, our students present extensively at data science conferences such as JSAI, IPSJ, and NLP, consistently winning excellence awards. Internationally, we present at major technology management conferences (PICMET, etc.), top NLP venues (ACL, EMNLP), network science conferences (Complex Networks, NetSci), computational social science conferences (IC2S2), and science of science conferences (ICSSI). We actively support exchange programs with partner universities abroad.

We look forward to welcoming motivated students.

Ichiro Sakata, Professor, Department of Technology Management for Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering