For Prospective Foreign Students

General Information

Our group belongs to Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University. The official page of the graduate school is here and you can find our admission guide in here.

A student must agree on a research plan between their expected supervisor before the application. Please contact me at least one month before the start of the application period of your choice. You will go through an online interview after your research plan is screened. Please check the latest admission guide for the actual application process you need, as it is subject to change.

Research Topics

Our research topics include (but definitely not limited to) the following. Please refer to the list of our publications for concrete research achievements.

  • Computer architecture
  • Memory systems
  • Approximate computing
  • Operating systems
  • Virtualization techniques
  • Security related to topics above

Note that our group is NOT for you if you are interested in the following topics: artificial intelligence, computer vision, human-computer interaction, etc. We might leverage AIs in the context of our research topics, but we definitely do not do research on AIs themselves.

Best Fitting Students with Us

First and foremost, we are a research-oriented university. If you are a type of student who has at least one of the following characteristics, you are potentially a good fit with our group:

  • You want to conduct real research, not just implementation work of a pre-defined project.
  • You want to bring new knowledge to the world, at least a small bit.
  • You want to build a new system that deeply (but possibly gradually) impact the world, not like shiny webpages that everyone else or even AIs can build today.
  • You are strongly interested in some hard-core internals of computers that might not be useful for your daily life, and you want to pursue your interest.

Please also note that Master programs in Japan are like mini-Ph.D. and you need to establish your own research problem to tackle. This is very different from some (not all) Master programs in the US, where you mostly study in classes and occasionally work on small projects.

Merits of Studying in Japan

Here are some possible ones that I could come up with.

  • Cultural exploration: Our campus is just 10 minutes away from a bullet train station. You can definitely go to Akihabara in the evening and come back before the first class starts in the next day. There are also many concerts and events held in Osaka, which is a 15 minutes train ride from our campus.
  • Tuition: Our tuition as of 2025 for Master and Ph.D. programs are 1,267,600 JPY and 500,000 JPY per year, respectively. That’s approximately 8,750 USD and 3,450 USD converted at 145 JPY / USD. Major US universities would cost 5x to 10x of this.
  • Ph.D. students are not hired: As in Tuition, Ph.D. programs in Japan require students to pay tuition. This of course is a financial burden, but it brings you some merits as well. First, you can do research on whatever you like (as long as I can supervise) because you are not tied with a funding source. Second, you don’t owe any teaching duties and can devote all effort to research. Third, there is no concept of “open positions” for Ph.D. students and everyone with enough passion and experience can enter.