Rate My Professor Tetsuya Sakai

Tetsuya Sakai is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Waseda University, where he has served since 2015, and Dean of the Center for Data Science since 2026. He is also a General Research Advisor at Naver Corporation since 2021 and a visiting professor at the National Institute of Informatics since 2015. Sakai joined Toshiba in 1993 and earned his Ph.D. from Waseda University in 2000. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge from 2000 to 2001 under Karen Sparck Jones. He later directed the Natural Language Processing Lab at NewsWatch, Inc. in 2007, joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2009, and returned to the Waseda faculty in 2013. At Waseda, he served as Associate Dean in the IT Strategies Division from 2015 to 2017 and as Department Head from 2017 to 2019.

Sakai specializes in information access, information retrieval, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and IPSJ Fellow. He was inducted into the SIGIR Academy in 2023 and received the Keith van Rijsbergen Award in 2026. Since 2021, he has served as Senior Associate Editor and Acting Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems. He has held numerous leadership roles in major conferences and journals, including PC co-chair positions for ACM SIGIR and other venues, and has organized multiple NTCIR tasks. Sakai has authored books including Laboratory Experiments in Information Retrieval (2018) and 情報アクセス評価方法論 (2015). His contributions have advanced evaluation methodologies in information retrieval and related fields through extensive publications, editorial work, and service to the academic community.