Team

CEO

Mick Etoh
(Professor, Ph.D.)

Professor, Ph.D.,at Osaka University, teaching Innovation Management, Ex-SVP of NTT DOCOMO, Ph.D. in Computer Science, studying Pattern Recognition, MPEG Architect who contributed to MPEG-4, H.264, and MP-4. He was President and CEO of NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan) from 2014 to 2016, and President and CEO of DOCOMO Capital, Inc. (Palo Alto, California) from 2012 to 2015. He was also appointed at Managing Director of DoCoMo USA Labs, San Jose, California, in 2002 and Multimedia Labs in 2005 respectively.

COO

Toshiaki Koya

Serial Entrepreneur. He has been running several startups at large companies (Panasonic) for 15 years. product manager who has introduced speech recognition, signal processing and machine translation products. He is one of founders of Fuetrek, Inc. and Mirai Translate, Inc.

CFO

Kazuko Shimada

Joined a startup, in 2000, took part in the IPO as head of accounting, and listed on Mothers (Tokyo Stock Exchange) after 5 years since its founding. After that, she was involved in the company’s growth in charge of group management, business division management, and so on. She was also CEO of Media Research, Inc. from 2017.

CTO

Masaaki Tsuchida
(Ph.D.)

He has been joined at COTOBA DESIGN, Inc. since Apr. 2018. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from Tokyo University of Science in Mar. 2012. He is interested in natural language processing and machine learning, and focuses on developing practical applications of them.
Previously, he was a researcher/data analyst of NEC Corp. and a senior researcher of DeNA Co., Ltd.

CTA

Kazutaka Goto

He met AWS in 2009 and started the cloudpack business of AWS construction/maintenance operation service at iret, Inc. He is leading conversational AI platform design and development at COTOBA DESIGN.

Executive Officer

Masahiro Inami

Graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, Kinki University. After working in the semiconductor industry, he participated in an audio-related company that was started up in April 2000 from its inception.
As the contact point between people and devices in society increases, he is interested in conversational interfaces and feels that the quality and quantity of dialog content is important, so he participated in the establishment of COTOBA DESIGN, Inc.
We want to build a relationship between people and devices that "softly whispers" and "gently considerate of others' feelings".

Executive Officer

Mitsuru Tsutsumi

Joined COTOBA DESIGN, Inc. in 2018 and is in charge of business planning.
Previously, he was a director of Advanced Media Development Department, a pioneer in speech recognition technology, then a director in charge of domestic business.

Principal Solution Architect

Yoshihiro Ono

He joined COTOBA DESIGN, Inc. in December 2018.
Until now, he has been engaged in the development of mission-critical systems in the financial and public sector. He started his career in system development in the account system department of a megabank, worked as an engineer and a project manager, and in 2015 started his own company in Sendai.

His goal is to create solutions that connect the needs of diverse users with the various values delivered by service providers in today's fast-paced world.

Principal Engineer

Toshihiro Kimura

He specializes in development that deals with video and audio, and is in charge of the core development of dialog systems, drawing on his extensive knowledge and experience.
His development is based on the policy of "I can imagine something and then make it real." and he is constantly researching and expanding his imagination as he works on manufacturing.

Principal Solution Architect

Katsuyoshi Yamagami

He joined Panasonic after graduating from the Graduate School of Engineering at Kyoto University. He has been engaged in R&D of intelligent information technologies, especially natural language processing (NLP) and voice user interface (VUI). He has applied VUI technology to information appliances (word processor, car navigation, mobile phone). In 2014, He started a project to develop a dialog system, and after prototyping a dialog system for searching for recipes, he launched an FAQ chatbot service in 2018 as an achievement of the project.

In 2017, he joined the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) as a Specialist for Specific Subject (Research), where he engaged in research of dialog systems aiming for understanding user's intention based on knowledge base. In February 2019, he joined COTOBA DESIGN, Inc. He tries to realize solutions that connect the diverse needs of users with the intentions of service providers, utilizing power of dialog agents.

Principal Researcher

Shigeki Matsuda
(Ph.D.)

Shigeki Matsuda received his Ph.D. degree from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in 2003, and joined ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories as a researcher.
From 2009, he joined Spoken Language Communication Laboratory of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) as a researcher. From 2014, he joined ATR-Trek as a manager of advance technology development depertment. From 2019, He has been joined at COTOBA DESIGN, Inc.

He is engaged in research on speech translation, speech recognition,speech signal processing, and deep learning, and is a member of the Acoustic Society of Japan, Information Processing Society of Japan, and IEICE.

Technical Adviser

Naoaki Okazaki
(Professor, Ph.D.)

Professor, Ph.D.,at Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Ph.D., Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo (2007)He focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Artificial Intelligence.
http://www.chokkan.org/index.en.html