We welcome undergraduate students, graduate students, and staff. This page covers how we work, lab life, and what we look for. If anything interests you, get in touch.
About the Lab
Our vision is a world where compound interest in problem-solving works: the way of thinking you gain from solving one problem carries over and pays off on the next, different problem.
Individual facts go out of date quickly, and talent alone plateaus early. A way of learning and thinking, once acquired, keeps working even when the field or the problem changes. So over the long run, this kind of accumulating way of learning and thinking makes a bigger difference than the sheer amount of knowledge or innate talent. We study it, design it, and implement it as systems.
For details, see About the Lab
Our style is “understanding by building.” We work at the intersection of the scientific view (cognitive science, educational psychology) and engineering methods (AI, knowledge engineering, learning analytics). Even when you think you understand something in your head, building it as a system that actually runs exposes the parts you couldn’t fully explain.
For details, see Research
About the Supervisor: Kento Koike’s page
Our Research Style
In one line, this is a lab where you do theory, system, and experiment — all three yourself.
- Build a theory — describe how people learn in a form a computer can process
- Build a system — turn that theory into a working learning support system
- Verify through experiment — have real learners use it and check whether the theory holds
Theory alone can’t tell you whether it’s actually correct, a system alone can’t explain why it works, and an experiment alone doesn’t give you something reproducible. Only by connecting all three can you say you’ve “understood human learning as a mechanism that actually runs.” That is what makes the PSI Lab style different.
How research themes are determined
You start from an existing lab project, not a blank slate. You don’t need to bring a theme from scratch. Framing a good question from nothing takes experience, which is why we set things up on the foundation of an ongoing project, letting you focus on “what do I want to clarify within it?”
From there we explore together. The supervisor doesn’t have the answers ready in advance either, so we work out the question by feeling our way forward together.
For our specific projects (CHUNK, CLOVER, OCEAN, CCS), see the Research page.
Daily Life in the Lab
Daily Routine
We’d like you to come to the lab as close to every day as you can. This isn’t a casual request — we treat it as part of the lab’s culture, for two reasons.
One: when everyone’s in the lab, a new idea can come out of an offhand conversation, and when you get stuck you can ask someone right away. Two: when research stalls, it’s easy to fall into a loop — no progress → worry → harder to show up → even less progress — and the habit of coming in is the brake on it. Even when you have no progress and you’re worried, just come in and talk to someone. That alone breaks the loop.
Meetings (planned)
- Weekly: Full lab meeting (progress sharing) — knowing what others are working on brings in angles you’d never reach on your own.
- Weekly: Group meeting (discussion) — in a small group working on related themes, you push your research forward through focused, specialized discussion.
- As needed: 1-on-1 meeting (research questions or anything on your mind), so you don’t carry a dead end alone.
Events (planned)
- Once a year: Joint retreat (summer) — an intensive discussion together with faculty and students from other universities, and a chance to deepen relationships among members
- As needed: Social gatherings, BBQ, and the like
- Ongoing: Conference presentations (domestic and international)
Who We Are Looking For
Interest in a topic matters, but fit with the lab matters even more. When the expected attitude doesn’t match, it’s hard on you and hard to produce results. Concretely, these are the attitudes we value.
- Think for yourself, act, and bring something back — research has no right answer, and the supervisor doesn’t hold the answer either. So rather than waiting for instructions, research only moves forward once someone shows up saying “I tried this.” Even if you’re off the mark, the trace of having thought it through becomes the next step.
- Take in candid feedback — comments like “your logic doesn’t hold here” fly around daily. This isn’t an attack; it’s material for making the question or the experiment better. If you take it as a personal attack you can’t improve, so the people who grow are the ones who take it in and come back with their own view.
- Share your situation honestly — hiding a problem delays the fix and deepens the wound. Sharing early and openly lets us deal with it together sooner, rather than papering it over.
- Lift the team’s ability — carrying things alone tends to narrow your view. When people spend a little time helping each other, everyone’s results go up in the end.
- Bring a different perspective — if everyone thinks the same way, we all share the same blind spots. Differences in background, specialty, and experience produce questions and solutions that no one would reach alone.
Conference Presentations and Papers
Once you join, you’ll work toward conference presentations and papers.
Why we aim for them
A conference is not a place where you get a grade — it’s a place to exchange views as equals. When you put your research in front of researchers who have thought deeply about the same topic, you start to see holes you couldn’t notice alone and the questions you should tackle next. Even as an undergraduate, a good question gets good feedback.
A paper is the same: organizing your thinking, showing your evidence, and putting it in a form anyone can read — that process itself trains how you think. So we believe what you gain along the way matters more than “where your name appeared.”
How we go about it
- Through the undergraduate, Master’s, and doctoral stages, we start with domestic conferences and aim step by step at international conferences and international journals.
- Even undergraduates aim to take part in international conferences and English-language papers as co-authors.
Effect on careers and graduate school
Having “your name on a paper” or “presented at an international conference” becomes concrete experience you can point to in graduate entrance exams or job hunting — it lands differently from the bare fact that “I was in a lab.”
Supervision Policy
This lab takes a “running alongside you” approach to supervision. Research has no clear path ahead, so working it out together by feel works better than the supervisor handing down one-way instructions.
We won’t leave you alone, but we won’t manage everything either. If you’re in the lab, we’ll watch how things are going and check in, and when you’re stuck we’ll think it through together. That said, you need to tell us what you’re stuck on and what you need — because the supervisor can’t see inside your head.
We don’t leave papers as “go write it” either. We think through the structure with you, and sometimes edit while explaining the key points right in front of you. So that you build up the experience of “I wrote it” and “it got accepted” early on, we finish conference presentations in short cycles and stay alongside you to the end.
In seminars and discussions, put your views forward as an equal regardless of position. In research, openly pointing out each other’s mistakes makes the work better faster than holding back out of politeness. We welcome counterarguments and questions from students too.
This isn’t a loose place, but it isn’t a scary one either. Comments like “your logic doesn’t hold” or “let’s rethink the experimental design” fly around as a matter of course, but that’s not an attack — it’s a dialogue for making the work better together.
Most of the students Koike has supervised through continuous discussion have produced results such as presentations at international conferences and publications in journals. Where you start doesn’t matter. Fit can vary, but it isn’t about ability — it’s about whether our way of working matches yours.
For Undergraduate Students
Faculty of Engineering, Kanagawa University students considering lab placement for graduation research:
Information for Undergraduates
For Graduate Students
Considering a Master’s or Doctoral degree, or joining from another university:
Information for Graduate Students
For Staff
Interested in joining as a postdoc, researcher, or collaborator:
Let's Talk First
Lab visits and consultations are always welcome.
Feel free to contact us by email.
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