Ryota Kanai

Ryota Kanai

After graduating from the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University in 2000, he received his PhD (Cum Laude) in 2005 from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he studied human visual information processing mechanisms. Following roles as a researcher at California Institute of Technology (USA) and University College London (UK), and serving as a JST PRESTO researcher and Associate Professor (Reader) of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex (UK), he founded Araya, Inc. in 2015, where he works full-time. He is engaged in research on the principles of consciousness in the brain and machines through the fusion of neuroscience and AI technologies. He has been also working on the translation of AI and neuroscience into industrial applications as the primary business of Araya.  He has received many awards, including the Young Scientist Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Since 2020, he has served as a Project Manager for the Moonshot Project under Japan’s Cabinet Office, dedicated to developing next-generation AI-assisted brain-machine interfaces (BMI). In 2024, he contributed internationally by serving as Vice Chair and Member of UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Expert Group responsible for drafting the Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology.