Ryo AIHARA, Ph.D

News

• October 2026: Task-aware Unified Source Separation (TUSS) technology won the MIC Minister's Award (総務大臣賞) at CEATEC AWARD 2026.

• September 2026: TUSS technology was covered by NHK World.

• September 2026: A joint work with my team and MERL will be presented in IWAENC 2026.

  • Y. Mitsui et al., "Downstream-Task-Aware Unified Source Separation".

• August 2026: TUSS technology was featured in a press release by Mitsubishi Electric.

• May 2026: Three joint works at MERL will be presented in IEEE ICASSP 2026 and LRAC workshop.

  • • R. Aihara et al., "Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations".

    • R. Aihara et al., "SUNAC: Source-aware Unified Neural Audio Codec".

    • Y. Masuyama et al., "FlexIO: Flexible Single- and Multi-Channel Speech Separation and Enhancement".

• October 2025: A joint work with Takiguchi-lab, Kobe Univ. will be presented in ASSETS 2025.

  • T. Otani et al., "Speaker-dependent Continuous Speech Recognition for Individuals with Cerebral Palsy Using Weighted Finite-State Transducer and Text-to-Speech Synthesis".

• October 2025: A joint work at MERL will be presented in WASPAA 2025.

  • F. Paissan et. al,  "FasTUSS: Faster Task-Aware Unified Source Separation".  

• September 2025: I'm back to Japan!

Older NEWS

Research Interests

I am a researcher specializing in speech recognition, speech enhancement, and speech separation, with a focus on speech signal processing and machine learning. My work also extends to language models, natural language processing, and multimodal signal processing.

During my Ph.D., I studied voice conversion using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and statistical models, investigating noise robustness and assistive technologies.

As a conductor of a mandolin orchestra, I am also interested in the communicative aspects of conducting and the relationship between sound and bodily movement.

Education & Experience

• January 2026 - Current: Head Researcher at AX Innovation Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

• July 2024 - July 2025: Visiting Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

• September 2022 - December 2025: Head Researcher at Information Technology R&D Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corp. 

• April 2017 - September 2022: Researcher at Information Technology R&D Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

• March 2017: Ph.D. in Engineering, Kobe University, Japan

• April 2014 - March 2017: Recipient of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC1)

• March 2014: Master of Engineering, Kobe University, Japan

• March 2012: Bachelor of Engineering, Kobe University, Japan

Member

• IEEE

• Acoustic Society of Japan (ASJ)

• Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)

Academic Activities

• April 2024 - Current: Technical Committee Member of Speech and Language Processing Research Group, IPSJ.

• April 2024 - Current: Technical Committee Member of Speech Research Group, IEICE.

• June 2023: Organizing Committee Chair of OTOGAKU Symposium, Tokyo, Japan.

• June 2022:  Organizing Committee Vice-Chair of OTOGAKU Symposium (Online).

• April 2022 - March 2024: Secretary of Speech and Language Processing Research Group, IPSJ.

• April 2022 - March 2024: Assistant Secretary of Speech Research Group, IEICE.

• April 2022 - March 2024: Assistant Secretary of Speech Research Group, ASJ.