Takaaki is CEO of Empath Inc. He was a Smartmedical’s general manager of the ICT department in 2011. As GM of the department, he developed Empath, a vocal emotion recognition AI. Prior to joining Smartmedical, Takaaki served as the board director of Yunin Corp, and contributed to the revitalization of Yunin township in Hokkaido by developing an agricultural experience game app for Mixi (the largest SNS in Japan). He was a research fellow at the University of Tokyo, Division for Health Service Promotion. He holds a B.A. from Waseda University in Education from the Department of Japanese Language and Literature.