Koichi Takeda has been leading the natural language processing and text analytics research in IBM Research – Tokyo for the last 30 years since he joined IBM. He has made numerous achievements in the filed, including pattern-based machine translation, textual information visualization, and text mining. He joined the Watson Question-Answering System project in December 2007, and has been working for the Watson solutions and Japanese language enablement since then. He received the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, as the lead scientist in the field of the text mining technology in April, 2012 along with four other IBM researchers and engineer.

Dr. Takeda holds a PhD in Informatics from the Graduate School of Kyoto University. He was appointed to IBM Distinguished Engineer and selected for a fellow at the Information Processing Society of Japan in 2012. He has also been an adjunct professor in the National Institute of Informatics in Japan since 2011.