Hiroyuki Akiyama

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Hiroyuki Akiyama is from Tokyo, Japan. At Columbia, he plans to study Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

His interest in programming ignited during the pandemic, publishing an online game on the App Store so that he could play it with his friends remotely. Later, he became fascinated by website and mobile app development. In 12th grade, he collaborated with his friend to create a meal ticket app for his high school cafeteria, aiming to alleviate waiting time. In this project, he was responsible not only for development but also for negotiations with the cafeteria company and PayPay Corporation, Japan’s largest e-payment company. He learned how to facilitate communication between engineers, clients, and all other stakeholders, bridging the gap between what programmers want to make and what is truly needed. He also holds a patent for his social media algorithm, which utilizes machine learning to analyze sentiment in postings. This platform allows users to filter the posts shown in their feed by “positivity” and support maintaining mental health. He invented this system based on his own experience of “doom-scrolling” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he aims to encourage people in his generation to have more meaningful and joyful interactions on social media.

While most of his background is software-oriented, he is passionate about exploring hardware and its applications at Columbia. He is seeking research opportunities in Human-Computer Interface, particularly in the AR/VR fields. He believes in the potential of AR/VR to become the next game changer in our lives, as smartphones were. To achieve this, he dreams of creating a lightweight, fashionable AR/VR device that can be used on a daily basis. He keeps small ideas on his note-taking app, such as a VR recipe app that allows users to avoid scrolling down recipes on their phones when their hands are covered in flour. In addition to these external interfaces, he is also drawn to the Brain-Computer Interface and hopes to research vision and perception from inside. He is curious about how these senses and memories operate, and aspires to investigate them at Columbia through computational simulations.

On weekends, he enjoys table tennis, basketball, frisbee, chess, and Shogi (Japanese chess). He also loves to try out different restaurants and is currently a big fan of the Prosciutto sandwich at Milano Market.