Dr. Isao H. Inoue

Dr Isao H. Inoue

Experimental condensed-matter physicist working on strongly correlated oxides, slow electronics, and neuromorphic devices.

I study how complex physical dynamics in materials can be used for information processing.
My current focus is slow electronics: device and circuit technologies that use long-timescale ionic and electronic dynamics for low-power, real-time learning and inference.

I am a Chief Senior Researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), a Professor at the University of Tsukuba, and a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University of Science.

Research

My research has developed from the physics of strongly correlated transition-metal oxides to oxide-based electronic devices and neuromorphic systems.
I have worked on Mott transitions, superconductivity, Kondo physics, quantum oscillations, field-effect control, ReRAM, memristors, and artificial neurons and synapses.

Current research themes include:

Strongly correlated oxides and superconductivity
Electronic phases, phase transitions, ferroelectric superconductivity, and emergent phenomena in transition-metal oxides.
Oxide and ionic neuromorphic devices
Artificial neurons and synapses based on slow physical dynamics, including oxygen-vacancy dift-diffusion.
Slow electronics for edge AI
Long-timescale, low-power information processing for real-world temporal signals such as human behaviour, biosignals, and adaptive control.

Current direction

Modern AI is powerful, but it is still costly when it has to process long, continuous, real-world signals.
My aim is to build physical systems that can naturally handle such slow dynamics by using the intrinsic timescales of materials and devices.

Materials are not only passive components.
They become part of the computation.

Background

I received BSc and MSc degrees in Physics from the University of Tokyo in 1990 and 1992, and a PhD in Science from the University of Tokyo in 1999.
I joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory in 1992, which later became part of AIST.
From 1999 to 2001, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, working at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Superconductivity and the Cavendish Laboratory.