Project Members
Overview
Project Native AI is built by a diverse, global community of researchers, engineers, and organizations. Below is the full directory of project participants — corporate research partners, core staff, contributing scientists, advisors, and community contributors.
Organizations
25
Corporate research partners
Researchers
65
Core staff & contributing scientists
Advisors & Community
30
Advisors and community contributors
Board of Directors
Executive leadership overseeing the strategic direction, governance, and long-term vision of Project Native AI.
| # | Name | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tetsuo Sato | Board Chairman |
| 2 | Caroline Whitfield | Vice Chairman |
| 3 | Takeshi Murase | Chief Executive Officer |
| 4 | Henrik Jørgensen | Chief Technology Officer |
| 5 | Dominique Lefèvre | Chief Research Officer |
| 6 | Mari Nagai | Chief Operating Officer |
| 7 | Rafael Castillo | Chief Financial Officer |
Corporate Research Partners
Organizations collaborating on research, infrastructure, and applied AI initiatives.
| # | Organization | Domain | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sakura Technologies Co., Ltd. | NLP | Tokyo, Japan |
| 2 | NeuralWave Systems Inc. | Vision | San Francisco, USA |
| 3 | Luminos Data Sciences K.K. | Data | Tokyo, Japan |
| 4 | Meridian Computing Group | Infra | London, UK |
| 5 | Optamind Research K.K. | RL | Osaka, Japan |
| 6 | Apex Cognitive Labs | NLP | Toronto, Canada |
| 7 | VistaNova AI Research LLC | Vision | Osaka, Japan |
| 8 | PolarisAI Research Ltd. | Edge | Helsinki, Finland |
| 9 | Cognivault Technologies K.K. | Data | Nagoya, Japan |
| 10 | Quantum Synapse Technologies | RL | Berlin, Germany |
| 11 | Edgepoint Systems K.K. | Edge | Nagoya, Japan |
| 12 | Arclight Intelligence Corp. | NLP | New York, USA |
| 13 | Synthara Vision K.K. | Vision | Fukuoka, Japan |
| 14 | Evergreen Analytics Inc. | Data | Sydney, Australia |
| 15 | Kyōsen Computational Research Institute | RL | Kyoto, Japan |
| 16 | Stellar Minds GmbH | NLP | Munich, Germany |
| 17 | Hakata Nexus Labs K.K. | Edge | Fukuoka, Japan |
| 18 | Cascade AI Solutions Pty Ltd | Infra | Melbourne, Australia |
| 19 | Frostbyte Analytics K.K. | Vision | Sapporo, Japan |
| 20 | Atlas Neural Networks S.A. | RL | Zurich, Switzerland |
| 21 | Aobayama Computing K.K. | Infra | Sendai, Japan |
| 22 | Northstar Robotics AB | Edge | Stockholm, Sweden |
| 23 | Shēnwǎng Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd. | Vision | Shenzhen, China |
| 24 | Orion Deep Learning B.V. | NLP | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| 25 | Akṣara AI Labs Pvt. Ltd. | Data | Bangalore, India |
Core Research Staff
Full-time researchers and engineers driving Native AI's primary research programs.
Dr. Emily Chen
Chief Research Officer
Seiichi Tanaka
Principal Scientist — NLP
Marcus O'Brien
Lead Engineer — Infrastructure
Misaki Sato
Senior Researcher — Vision
Aleksandr Volkov
Research Scientist — RL
Kenta Watanabe
ML Engineer
Priya Sharma
Research Scientist — NLP
Haruka Takahashi
Data Engineer
James Whitfield
Senior Engineer — Edge
Rie Nakamura
Research Scientist — Vision
Sofia Martinez
ML Engineer
Daiki Ito
Research Engineer
Liam Fischer
Senior Researcher — RL
Hana Kobayashi
Research Scientist — NLP
Ananya Patel
Data Scientist
Shota Suzuki
Platform Engineer
Oliver Sandström
Research Scientist — Edge
Yumiko Yamada
Senior ML Engineer
Daniel Kim
Research Engineer
Yuto Kimura
Research Scientist — Vision
Rachel Thornton
ML Ops Engineer
Ayano Matsumoto
Research Scientist — NLP
Henrik Larsen
Senior Engineer — Infra
Takumi Inoue
Research Engineer
Fatima Al-Rashid
Research Scientist — RL
Mai Shimizu
Data Engineer
Thomas Brennan
ML Engineer
Wataru Kato
Research Scientist — Edge
Isabella Rossi
Senior Researcher — NLP
Yudai Fujita
Platform Engineer
Contributing Scientists
External researchers and engineers contributing to specific research tracks and publications.
Dr. William Park
Stanford University
Naoki Maeda
University of Tokyo
Dr. Catherine Dubois
INRIA, France
Shinji Okada
Kyoto University
Dr. Rajesh Kumar
IIT Bombay
Akari Ishida
Osaka University
Dr. Hans Müller
ETH Zurich
Taichi Mori
Tohoku University
Dr. Sarah Thompson
MIT CSAIL
Yuka Yoshida
Nagoya University
Dr. Wei Zhang
Tsinghua University
Ren Kondo
Kyushu University
Dr. Anna Kowalski
Warsaw University
Yui Sakamoto
University of Tsukuba
Dr. Michael Stevens
University of Cambridge
Riku Hasegawa
Hokkaido University
Dr. Yuki Tanaka
RIKEN AIP
Ricardo Almeida
University of São Paulo
Eita Nishimura
Waseda University
Dr. Nadia Petrova
Moscow State University
Sakura Harada
Keio University
Jonathan Wright
Carnegie Mellon University
Daichi Murakami
Tokyo Institute of Technology
Dr. Elif Yılmaz
Boğaziçi University
Rin Takeuchi
NAIST
Dr. Patrick O'Connor
University College Dublin
Aoi Ogawa
Hiroshima University
Ingrid Johansson
KTH Royal Institute
Hayate Miura
Chiba University
Dr. Ahmed Hassan
Cairo University
Nanami Nakajima
Kobe University
Lucas Fernández
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Yuto Ota
Yokohama National University
Dr. Soo-Jin Lee
KAIST
Riko Fujiwara
University of Tokyo
Technical Advisors
Senior experts providing strategic guidance on research direction and technology decisions.
| # | Name | Affiliation | Specialty |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Prof. Robert J. Manning | MIT | NLP |
| 2 | Prof. Luca De Angelis | Politecnico di Milano | Vision |
| 3 | Prof. Elena Vasquez | UC Berkeley | RL |
| 4 | Prof. Anouk van der Berg | Delft University of Technology | Edge |
| 5 | Prof. Klaus Becker | Max Planck Institute | NLP |
| 6 | Prof. Ingrid Halvorsen | University of Oslo | Data |
| 7 | Prof. David Liu | University of Toronto | Vision |
| 8 | Prof. Gabriel Monteiro | University of Lisbon | RL |
| 9 | Prof. Maria Gonzalez | ETH Zurich | Edge |
| 10 | Prof. Katarzyna Nowak | Jagiellonian University | NLP |
| 11 | Prof. Andrew Whitmore | Oxford University | Data |
| 12 | Dr. Min-Jun Choi | Seoul National University | Vision |
| 13 | Prof. Kwame Asante | University of Cape Town | Infra |
| 14 | Prof. Aisha Rahman | NUS Singapore | RL |
| 15 | Prof. Mateo Ríos | Universidad de Chile | Edge |
Community Contributors
Open-source contributors and independent researchers who have made significant contributions to our projects.
Takumi Kawaguchi
linguacore — tokenizer
Nathan Brooks
edge-optim — ARM backend
Ayaka Goto
rl-safe — env wrappers
Tomás Herrera
linguacore — Spanish corpus
Yuki Hamada
edge-optim — quantization
Maria Lindqvist
rl-safe — safety metrics
Koharu Endo
linguacore — Japanese NER
Kevin Oduya
edge-optim — RISC-V port
Haru Sugawara
rl-safe — multi-agent
Chloe Beaumont
linguacore — French models
Hinata Mochizuki
edge-optim — benchmarks
Dmitri Kuznetsov
rl-safe — documentation
Tsumugi Sekiguchi
linguacore — eval suite
Samuel Okafor
edge-optim — mobile SDK
Sota Sakurai
rl-safe — reward shaping
Join the Project — We welcome researchers and engineers who share our commitment to open, ethical AI. Get in touch to learn about collaboration opportunities.