He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in information systems from Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 1996 and 1998, respectively. He was a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1998, and worked for Communications Research Laboratory (current National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)) from 1999 to 2002. He was a visiting researcher at Human Interface Technology Laboratory of University of Washington from 2001 to 2002.