Tahiti (Dec. 2001)
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more about myself
This is my name, written in chinese characters.
First two characters show the last name "Obuchi".
Some of you may remember that the former Prime Minister of Japan was also "Obuchi". However, important and confusing thing is that his name means "SMALL whirlpool" when written in chinese characters, while my name means "BIG whirlpool".
Third character is "yasu", which I borrowed from my father's name, and the fourth is "nari". The most famous person who has the same first name would be Yasunari Kawabata.
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I was born in 1966, in Fukuoka, Japan.
I grew up in Yokohama, Japan, where the final match of 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan will be held. Speech and Language researchers might have visited there for ICSLP 1994.
I graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1988, where I majored in Condensed Matter Physics. I received the Master of Science from the University of Tokyo in 1990. Since 1992, I've worked as a researcher in Hitachi Central Research Laboratory (CRL). Previously I worked in the field of neural networks, especially the optimization using neural networks. Since 1996, I've been working on speech recognition. My research interest includes robust speech recognition, speech recognition for small devices, speaker adaptation, and ASR application for multilingual communication. I'm staying at CMU as a visiting researcher from Feb. 2002 to Jan. 2003.
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In private, I like skiing, playing baseball, and many other sports. It would be hard to imagine for American people, but playing baseball is very popular in Japan. And finally, I'm a macintosh user.
I got married in Dec. 2001, and the photographs of these pages were taken in the honeymoon to Tahiti. (but my wife is too shy to appear here)