August 6, 2025

We are pleased to report that special lecture event “KAIWA”, inviting external experts to our Wako office, was held for the purpose of acquiring diverse perspectives and knowledge on new fields.

Guest Speaker:  

Hideaki Yamamoto, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Research Institute of Electrical Communication Tohoku University

Hideaki Yamamoto received his Ph.D. in Engineering from Waseda University in 2009. After working as a JSPS Research Fellow at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology and as an Assistant Professor at Waseda University, he joined Tohoku University in 2014 as an Assistant Professor at the Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences. Since 2020, he is an Associate Professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University. His primary research interest is in exploring novel applications of engineering technologies to gain constructive understanding of biological systems.

Title of the talk:

Opportunities and Challenges towards “Biological Supremacy”

Abstract:

The human brain, despite being composed of inherently unstable biological elements, exhibits an extraordinary ability to perform autonomous, adaptive, and energy-efficient information processing. To uncover the principles and physical substrates that enable such computation and translate them into engineering applications, it is essential to integrate “top-down” approaches, which involve direct in-vivo recordings of neural activity in animal brains, with “bottom-up” approaches, which involve the analysis of neuronal networks reconstituted in vitro. This integrative framework allows us to systematically explore how the collective dynamics of neurons give rise to functional properties at the systems level. In this talk, I will introduce a new research consortium, launched in April 2024, aimed at accelerating interdisciplinary collaboration in this emerging field. I will also present novel cell engineering technologies developed to facilitate bottom-up analyses of neuronal network functions in vitro. Through these efforts, we aim to bridge biological understanding and technological innovation, paving the way toward the development technologies that support next-generation super-smart societies and may ultimately lead to Biological Supremacy, analogous to quantum supremacy in quantum computing.

This talk introduced a research framework that integrates top-down in-vivo neural recordings with bottom-up in-vitro network analyses to elucidate the principles underlying the brain’s efficient information processing.