Admission

Information for international students who want to join the Human-computer Interaction lab at Hokkaido University

Research Student or Interns

We have many applications for research students (kenkyu-sei; 研究生) or interns every year. We consider reviewing and accepting your application in case you have a strong recommendation from an expert in the field, with sufficient research/development experience (academic publications are desirable), or a strong research proposal related to our lab. If you are interested in being a research student, we consider accepting your application if you plan to enroll in graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. degree. We request you to show us your career plan after the Ph.D. program.

If you hope to join us as a research student or an intern, please send us a research proposal (see below) together with a resume (CV) and your desired schedule (when to come and how long you stay). Please also clarify whether you are self-funded or not. There is also some funding support that you can apply for a short term stay in Japan (NSF, JSPS)

Enroll in the Graduate School

Our lab is a part of the Course of Computer Science and Information Technology, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. We are accepting graduate students in the master's and doctor's programs. The Master's program takes 2 years and the doctor's program takes 3 years. You must take an entrance exam and pass it to join us. It happens in August and February to start in October and April, respectively. See here for details. If you have questions about procedures, please contact the Office of Graduate School. If you decide to take an exam, please contact us beforehand introducing yourself and describing your research plan (see below).

Note that our university or our lab does not provide any financial support (you need to pay tuition, approx 500,000YEN per year). You must be self-funded or need to find financial support by yourself. International Student Center provides scholarship information. We would recommend you to apply for the Monbukagakusho (MEXT) scholarship. We do NOT give informal acceptance to MEXT scholarship applicants BEFORE passing the exam. The decision will be made at the entrance exam.

In addition, to pass the entrance exam to enroll in graduate school, you need to convince us that you will be productive to join our lab (we choose the best ones among those who passed the exam). So, if you really plan to apply for the graduate program, please prepare a good research proposal (description of what you want to work on) and send it to us (in PDF with figures) BEFORE sending the application document to the university. Note that it is prohibited to communicate with an applicant AFTER receiving an application document. We will decide based on the content of the proposal. A good starting point is to see our past research (Prof. Ono and Prof. Sakamoto), and students' work. You should also familiarize yourself with publications at related conferences (e.g ACM CHI/UIST, HRI/HAI, MobileHCI/Ubicomp, etc.). A good research proposal should start with previous work, identify limitations/problems to solve, and then propose how to solve the problem.