After becoming involved in internet technology from his school days, Gaku Ueda had early involvement in the development of web services during the rise of the world wide web. Moving to the United States in 2001, Ueda has been involved in the development of large-scale web and mobile services such as Yahoo! Groups, Google Maps and Twitter as both a software engineer and a member of management.
In 2013 Ueda founded MODE Inc., a cloud platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) in Silicon Valley and is currently the CEO of the company.
Ueda graduated from the Waseda University Graduate School of Science and Engineering in the Department of Information Science.

Born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1977, Erika Ogawa spent her childhood in Germany, France, and the United States. She graduated from Toho Women’s High School and Aoyama Gakuin University, where she acquired a Business Administration degree.
In an effort to become the bridge that conveys the wonders of Japan to the world, she signed a contract with Guiness World Records (UK) in 2008. Not only did she work as an official Guinness World Records certified member, she was also dispatched to Japan alone for the first two years with the responsibility of conducting market research and building the startup.
In 2012, she became the representative of the Japan office and was the youngest member of the UK headquarters leadership team as well as the first Asian executive.
In April 2013, the “Guinness World Records @ Machi Okoshi Nippon” was launched, connecting with town development schemes by challenging world records using local specialty products – spreading to 47 prefectures.
In addition, as a new endeavor, the “Takumi Nippon” project is underway to support the transmission of Japanese technical skills and craftsmanship under the title of “the best in the world”.
She is also a senior accelerator of World in Tohoko, a corporate association that supports the management of social entrepreneurs. Finally, she is the mother of one child.

Testsuya Kawanishi has been active in the fields of electrical engineering and electronics since his school days. He is currently engaged in research on hardware supporting optical communications at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. He is developing technologies related to ultra-high-speed optical fiber communications in cooperation with the rest of the laboratory and other collaborating researchers in Japan and overseas.
As an individual researcher he specializes in the field of optical modulation, or converting electrical signals into optical signals. He has pursued his research with a style that fixates not just on speed but stunning accuracy as well. One area in which this high accuracy has been leveraged is with its application to radio astronomy, utilized as the standard light signal for the world’s largest radio telescope, ALMA.
Recently, this technology has been applied to radar systems for monitoring runway and track safety. From his own experience, he feels it is more important to have an attractive theme that can impress a lot of colleagues, rather than the innovative technology being immediately useful.

Yoichi Sato became the first General Manager of TikTok in Japan in January 2020.
Prior to TikTok, he worked at Quora as a business development consultant.
From 2006-2017 Sato worked at Google Inc., News and Publishing in the Asia Pacific region and led Product Partnerships, including Google News, Google Books/Play Books, and Google Scholar with responsibilities for building relationships with the major content partners.
Prior to this, he worked in business development affairs at Microsoft and Toyo Keizai Inc.

Medical Doctor, born in Aichi Prefecture in 1945.
Katsuya Takasu graduated from Showa University School of Medicine and completed his doctoral course at the Graduate School of Medicine. While studying at graduate school he also studied overseas (Italy & Germany) to learn the latest in cosmetic surgery.
Many of the world’s latest cosmetic surgery technologies, such as liposuction surgery, were introduced to Japan by him.
Takasu also received the Dark Navy Blue Ribbon for Philanthropy and the The Japanese Red Cross Society's Gold Medal for Merit. Has published books through Fushosha Publishing and Takarajimasha publishing.

Born in 1975. In 2003, Tomotaka Takahashi graduated from the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University and founded Robo Garage, becoming the first venture in Kyoto University. His representative works include Weekly Robi, Ropid, and FT.
In 2013, he succeeded in sending the world’s first communication robot, “Kirobo”, into space. He also won the RoboCup World Tournament for five consecutive years.
He was selected as TIME Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2004” and one of Popular Science Magazine’s “33 People Changing the Future”. Guinness World Record holder for achievements demonstrating Evolta, including a climb out of the Grand Canyon and a successful completion of the "24 hours in Le Mans" challenge.
Takashi is currently the CEO of Robo Garage Co., Ltd.; Specially Appointed Associate Professor of the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo; Visiting Professor of Osaka Electro-Communication University; and Advisor of Human Kids Science Robot School.

In 1995, Hiroshi Harada joined the Communications Research Laboratory of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (currently the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, NICT).
Since then, he has engaged in wireless communication systems, systems R&D and standardization for 19 years (including being a postdoctoral fellow at Delft Institute of Technology in the Netherlands, and director of NICT Singapore Wireless Laboratory).
Specifically, he worked on Software-defined Radio (SDR), which converts wireless communication systems through software. He has been engaged in the research and development of cognitive wireless technology that searches for and communicates with available frequencies depending on a given signal's usage situation. He is also involved with the formulation of wireless standards as a member of The United States IEEE1900.4, 802.11, 802.15, and 802.22 committees. He is chairman of the United States IEEE1900 and vice chairman of IEEE802.15.4m, 1900.4, ANSI / TIA-TR51.
Harada is a board member of the WhiteSpace Alliance in the United States, the SDR forum in the United States, and the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance in the United Kingdom, and is promoting widespread use of their technologies.
Recently, R&D on wireless devices for next-generation smart meters and smart sensors was undertaken, the results of which were standardized in IEEE802.15.4g. In addition, he established the Wi-SUN Alliance, an international standard certification body for systems using this standardization technology. The communication specifications of this alliance are adapted into TEPCO's next-generation smart meters.
Since April 2014, he has been a professor of communication information systems at the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, where he has been conducting research and development of fifth-generation mobile communication systems (5G).

Makino became the Representative Director of TripAdvisor LLC in September 2016.
From 2011 he had been responsible for expanding Twitter’s domestic user base and has planned and implemented business strategies to do so.
From 2003 to 2010 he worked at Google Inc. as a business development officer, engaging in domestic development and development of new products for Google and YouTube.
Prior to this, he oversaw service development and business development at AOL Japan.

Yukihiro Matsumoto was born in 1965 and graduated from the University of Tsukuba, Third Cluster of Colleges, College of Information Science.
Matsumoto began with the design of the object-oriented programming language in 1993, “Ruby”, released as free open source software in 1995. Today, it is one of the most used programming languages in the world. He has many titles, such as Fellow at Rakuten Technical Research Institute and at Network Applied Communication Laboratory.
Matsumoto is a global programmer born in Japan, known in the developer community as “Matz”, and is the president of the Ruby Association.
Author of “Matsumoto Yukihiro: The World of Code” (Nikkei BP) and others.

Adam D’Angelo is the founder and CEO of Quora, one of the world’s largest knowledge sharing platforms.
Quora was founded in 2009 with the mission “to share and grow the world's knowledge” and has more than 300 million unique monthly visitors worldwide.
D’Angelo is a board member of “OpenAI,” a non-profit organization researching artificial intelligence, with his in-depth knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Prior to founding Quora, D’Angelo was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Facebook, where he led new product development and managed the engineering team. He was responsible for Facebook’s growth strategy in architecture and infrastructure and contributed significantly to the subsequent rapid expansion of the platform.
He graduated from California Institute of Technology in Computer Science.

Joichi Ito is a board member of The New York Times, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation (developer of Firefox). He has been involved in the establishment of a number of Internet companies such as PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. In addition, he has been an angel investor for companies such as Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Fotonauts, Kickstarter, Path, etc. He’s a huge advocate for supporting promising online venture companies.
Named one of “25 Most Influential People on the Web” in US Business Week Magazine, “FP Top 100 Global Thinkers” in the US Foreign Policy Magazine in 2011, and “100 People to Create the Next Generation” by Nikkei Business Magazine in both 2011 and 2012.
He also received the Special Achievement Award from Oxford University Internet Research Institute in 2011. In 2013, he received an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Literature) from The New School, America.

Nakasuka was born in Osaka Prefecture in 1961 and graduated from the Department of Aeronautics, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo in 1983. He completed the doctoral course at the same graduate school in 1988. Following this, he went on to work at IBM to conduct research on artificial intelligence.
Returning to the University of Tokyo in 1990, he became a lecturer, an assistant professor, and a visiting researcher at a University in the United States. He specializes in advanced space systems and their intelligence and autonomy. In the field of micro-satellites, he has been a world-leader by launching seven aircrafts.

Born in Kumamoto Prefecture and after graduating from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, he engaged in management consulting for foreign-affiliated and Japanese companies at Bain & Company, a strategic consulting company based in Boston.
From 1992, he worked at Apple Computer Inc. as a director of market development and marketing. He left the company in 1997 and traveled overseas to Europe, joining INSEAD in France and then receiving an MBA from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland.In 2000, he co-founded streaming technology venture Generic Media, in Silicon Valley, gaining attention with the world’s first real-time video transcoding technology – from raising $12M to ultimately selling the company. After that, he served as a general partner for the First Compass Group and worked as a start-up advisor. Since 2010, he has been the Chairman of Evernote Japan. He is the first representative of the Silicon Valley Japanese Entrepreneur Network (SVJEN) and has been a mentor since the opening of the Open Network Lab, which supports entrepreneurial engineers.
He has been active in a variety of fields, including publishing the Japanese edition of the 300,000-best-selling “The Presentation secrets of Steve Jobs” trilogy and “Jobs' Cooks”. In recent years, he has been focusing on Promoting future-oriented education for junior and senior high school students and is also a senior advisor to the current Okayama University Entrepreneurship Program. He is currently a Scrum Ventures partner in San Francisco and a special advisor to All Turtles. He was also selected for Nikkei Business’ “100 People to Create the Next Generation 2012” and for Nikkei Computer’s “100 People who Energize the World”.

Takashi Miike was born in 1960 in Yao City, Osaka Prefecture. After being a director of V-Cinema, he made his debut as a feature film director in 1995 with the movie “Shinjuku Triad Society”. Since then, he has produced works of various genres, violent action movies, comedies, historical dramas and westerns. More recently, Thirteen Assassins (’10), featured in the Venice International Film Festival. His films “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai” (’11) and “Shield of Straw” (’13) were both featured in the Cannes International Film Festival Competition. He has been active internationally, highly evaluated overseas as a representative of Japan. Other works include “Ichi the Killer” (’01) and sequel (’09), “Crows Zero” (’07), “Sukiyaki Western Django” (’07), “Yatterman” (’09), “For Love’s Sake” (’12), “Lesson of Evil” (’12). In the future, there are plans for a sequel to “The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji” and “Blade of the Immortal”.