Shuntaro Yada

矢田 竣太郎

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I am an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, working at the intersection of library and information science, natural language processing, and medical informatics, leading the Knowledge and Language Computing Laboratory (KaLC Lab).

日本語

yadaslis.tsukuba.ac.jp

contactshuntaroy.com

News

About

Shuntaro Yada is an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba, where he leads the Knowledge and Language Computing Laboratory (KaLC Lab) within the Institute of Library, Information and Media Science. He also serves as a Vice Director at the Office of International Online Education in the university. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Education in 2020.

His research interests lie at the intersection of library and information science, natural language processing, and medical informatics. To date, he has built BookReach, a system that helps school librarians curate teaching materials, and Serendy, a system that encourages serendipitous encounters with books. In the medical field, he has developed HeaRT, a system that visualises patient information over time from clinical texts such as electronic health records; a tool that extracts structured information from patients' narratives on social media; and Illness Experience Search, a search system for patient-authored illness narratives. In this way, his research places a strong emphasis on real-world implementation.

His latest funded project, selected for the 2024 JST FOREST Program, is titled "Integration of Knowledge Across All Academic Fields through Automatic Construction of Specialised Terminology Dictionaries." This project aims to leverage language processing technology to build comprehensive terminology resources that span diverse knowledge domains, from medicine and science to law, economics, and the arts. This direction represents a natural expansion of his long-standing expertise in domain-specific language processing towards a broader, cross-disciplinary vision.

Education

Graduate School of Education, the University of Tokyo

PhD (Education) | April 2020

Graduate School of Education, the University of Tokyo

Master of Arts (Education) | March 2016

The University of Tokyo

Bachelor of Arts (Education) | March 2014

Employment

National Diet Library Digital Library Division (Kansai-kan)

Part-time Researcher | April 2025–Present

University of Tsukuba Institute of Library, Information and Media Science

Associate Professor | October 2024–Present

University of Tsukuba Office of Online International Education

Vice Director | October 2024–Present

Nara Institute of Science and Technology Social Computing Laboratory

Affiliate Associate Professor | October 2024–Present

Assistant Professor | November 2020–September 2024

Postdoctoral Fellow | May–October 2020

Researcher | September 2019–April 2020

CSIRO (Australia) Data61 Language and Social Computing Team

Visiting Scientist | May–August 2019

Visiting Scientist | March–May 2018

The University of Tokyo Library and Information Science Laboratory

Researcher | April–August 2019

KDDI Research (Japan)

Student Intern | October 2016–June 2017

Skills

Natural Languages

Japanese
Native speaker
English
Academic level (able to guide PhD students and give lectures in English)

Programming Languages

Python 3
My main programming language, constantly using since 2014 with the following experiences:
  • Natural Language Processing (Japanese and English)
  • Machine Learning (sklearn, tensorflow, pytorch, & transformers)
  • Data Analysis (polars, pandas, numpy, & scipy)
  • Data Visualisation (matplotlib, seaborn, & plotly)
  • Web API (Flask & FastAPI)
Elm
Web front-end development such as components and single page applications since 2020 (e.g. BookReach UI)
JavaScript
D3.js and jQuery (e.g. for designing a dashboard UI of user statistics visualisation)
Ruby
Intermittently using until 2015 for building simple web applications (with Ruby and Rails or Sinatra), and pre-processing textual data
R
Statistical hypothesis testing (e.g. t-test and ANOVA) and statistical modelling (including generalised linear mixed models)
Others
I have written small codes with Nim, Rust, Go, Haskell, Purescript

Markup Languages

HTML (and CSS)
Building web sites like this page (which is based only on a CSS framework, without using any fancy CV templates)
LaTeX
Typesetting academic articles

Tools

Dev tools
VS Code, Vim (Neovim), tmux, Git, & Docker
Server ops
Web servers (Apache, Nginx, & Caddy), basic web security (e.g. SSL/TLS), & computing resource management (for HPC) on Debian (Ubuntu) Linux
Databases
MongoDB, SQLite3, MySQL, & PostgreSQL (with Hasura GraphQL)
CMS
WordPress (building and operating the web sites of labs and workshops) & DokuWiki
Cloud
Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, Firebase, & AI Platform)
Video editing
  • Premiere Pro: experience in creating a workshop PV and short independent films
  • iMovie: for home movies
Vector graphics
Illustrator & Affinity Designer: Designing academic posters and business cards for myself and others