Ryohei Nakatsu received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from Kyoto University in 1969, 1971, and 1982, respectively. After joining NTT in 1971, he mainly worked on speech recognition technology. In 1994, he joined Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) as the President of ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories. From the spring of 2002, he has been a Professor at School of Science and Technology, Kwansei Gakuin University. At the same time, he established a venture company, Nirvana Technology Inc., and became a President of the company. Between 2008 and 2014 he was Professor at the National University of Singapore and director of  the Interactive & Digital Media Institute (IDMI) till 2011. [Read about his vision]

His research interests include emotion extraction from speech and facial images, emotion recognition, nonverbal communications, and integration of multimodalities in communications. He received the Best Paper Award from the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (1996); Telecom System Award from Telecommunication System Foundation (1999 and 2000); the Best Paper Award from Virtual Reality Society of Japan (1999, 2000, and 2001); and the Best Paper Award from Artificial Intelligence Society of Japan (2000). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J).