Shutaro Aoyama

Shutaro Aoyama is an international student from Kumagaya, Japan, who intends to study Computer Science and Philosophy at Columbia. He attended Gunma Kokusai Academy for high school while conducting developments and research in Human-Computer Interaction.

During his junior year in high school, he developed “Kineto” - an online lecture software that achieves the benefits of both real-time and on-demand classes. This was conducted with the funding of the “Mitou” incubator program by the Japanese Government (MEXT) and was supervised by Professor Inami from the University of Tokyo. His research related to this project was selected for the Student Research Excellence Award at the 83rd IPSJ National Convention.

He also participated in the “CS Master” Cultivation Program by the National Institute of Informatics, which was created to boost top CS students in Japan. In the program, he learned graduate-level Computer Science and worked on research on Computer Vision mentored by Dr. Kataoka from AIST. He was chosen for an excellence award on his completion of the program.

In high school, he founded a student group to design and develop software that improves the quality of school life. Through this activity, he also intended to pay it forward by creating pre-professional software development opportunities for coding beginners in the community.

He was also certified as a Masason Foundation scholar by SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son, and Yanai Tadashi Foundation scholar by UNIQLO founder Yanai Tadashi.

Outside of engineering, Shutaro has an interest in sociology, ethics, and philosophy. In his thesis in the International Baccalaureate program, he studied the socially constructed development of cybernetics in the Soviet Union and the US. Attending the University of Tokyo during his gap term, he explored his interest in the ethics of artificially created “reality” and enjoyed the discussion with his peers at the institution.

He aims to continue his interdisciplinary exploration in philosophy and engineering, to understand and implement a “better” interaction between humans and reality.