Career Advancement

• Ryuta Kuwamizu A01/A03
  Postdoc, Moriguchi Lab → Assistant Professor, University of Tsukuba (Institute of Health and Sport Sciences), April 2024. Now leads sport qualia structure research as co-PI in A01.
• Ryoichi Watanabe A03
  Postdoc, Kyoto University → Assistant Professor, Ritsumeikan University, 2026.

Fellowships & Awards

• Riku Umekawa — JSPS DC1 A03
• Takafumi Horie — JSPS DC2, ¥1.5M, 2026–2028 C02
• Taiki Sekizawa — Doctoral Dissertation Special Prize (UTokyo); Encouragement Award & Popular Presentation Award, Japanese Neural Network Society C01
• Shunsuke Kamiya — Doctoral Dissertation Special Prize, UTokyo C01
• Naoto Yoshida — Best Paper Runner-Up, ICONIP2025 C02
• Ryuzo Hirota — Best Student Paper Runner-Up, ALIFE2024 A01/A02
• Kentaro Nomura — BabyBot Challenge Finalist, ICDL2025 C01
• Yu Togashi — Best Presentation Award, Vision Society of Japan C01
• Ken Takeda — Ichikou Prize & Encouragement Award, UTokyo C01
• So Takahashi — Ichikou Prize, UTokyo C01
• Qianchen Liang — Open Science grant, $14,888 USD (≈¥2,300,000), Center for Open Science A01
• Ryoichi Watanabe — Registered Report grant, $21,987 USD, Center for Open Science A03

Selected publications & preprints

ECRs have led research published or in submission in Neuroscience of Consciousness, iScience, Scientific Reports, Physical Review X, PNAS, Neural Networks, F1000Research, and Journal of Neuroscience Methods, among others. Topics include color and visual qualia structure, developmental qualia measurement in young children, emergent communication, category-theoretic approaches to affordances and autonomy, and the neural correlates of dream consciousness.

Self-organized activities

• Kyoko Kusano organized seminars on quantum instruments and Kitaro Nishida philosophy, and led a journal club series at ATR/ZEN University.
• Qianchen Liang produced a 27-episode YouTube journal-club series ("Let's discuss a paper soon after reading it!"), reaching researchers worldwide.
• Ryuzo Hirota launched "Enaction in Japan," an online reading group for early-career researchers in embodied cognition, seeding a new interdisciplinary network.
• Naoto Yoshida and Moe Ohkuma co-organized the "Language Emergence and Qualia Structure" session at the February 2026 grant meeting (OIST).

International exchange & outreach

• Presentations at ASSC (Tokyo, Sapporo), ALIFE (Japan, Copenhagen, Kyoto), ICONIP (Okinawa), ICDL (Prague), ASPP and ACNS (Australia), and ICML-affiliated events.
• Takahide Yoshida exhibited humanoid robot Alter3 at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2025 for six months, with data submitted to Royal Society Open Science.
• Ryuzo Hirota's category-theoretic presentation at the Ecological Psychology conference sparked new collaborations and an invitation to a subsequent symposium.
• Nguyen Le Hoang was invited to speak at the Vietnamese Academic Network in Japan Annual Conference on emergent communication in AI.

Broader community impact

Inspired by the area's interdisciplinary ethos, Ryuta Kuwamizu founded the Young Researchers' Committee of the Japanese Society of Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine (February 2025). Its inaugural session at the 79th annual meeting drew over 100 participants from across subfields.