Yuri Ishitoya

Hi! I am a first-year master’s student at Ochanomizu University advised by Ichiro Kobayashi.　I am currently a visiting student at the DFKI Saarbrücken in Germany and at Rice University in the United States. I'm going to start my new position at OMRON SINIC X Corporation as a full-time research intern from January 2026!

My research focuses on Trustworthy NLP, AI safety, LLM Interpretability & Representation Analysis.

Please feel free to email me! ✉️

Research Experience

[New!]OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Japan

Full Time Research Intern, Incoming(Jan 2026 - )
Advisor: Dr. Mai Nishimura

DFKI(German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) Saarbrücken, Germany

Visiting Researcher, Aug 2025 - Oct 2025
Advisor: Dr. Boris Brandherm

Rice University, U.S.

Visiting Student at vislang lab, Feb 2025 - May 2025
Advisor: Prof. Vicente Ordóñez Román
Selected TOMODACHI-Dow Women’s STEM Leadership and Research Program

Artificial Intelligence Research Center at Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Japan

Short-term Research Intern, Feb 2025 - May 2025 [link]

Ochanomizu University, Japan

Pre-Graduation Research Project (Undergraduate), Apr 2023 - Mar 2024
Advisor: Prof. Takayuki Itoh

Work Experience

Software Engineer

Yamada Shintaro D&I Foundation, November 2024 - Present

Founder & Representative Director

Dots to Code Association, June 2024 - April 2025

Instructor, Curriculum Developer, & Data Analyst

NPO, Waffle.org, April 2022 - August 2023

Publications

Refereed / Under Review

Ishitoya, Yuri, Flores, V., Yang, Z., Cascante-Bonilla, P. & Ordonez. (2025) Evaluating Vision-Language Models through a Human-Centered Benchmark Under revision for resubmission to ACL Rolling Review.[paper] [poster]

Non-refereed

Ishitoya, Y., & Kobayashi, I. (2025) A study on detecting subtle biases by expanding the log-likelihood into a frequency space in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI2025) [DOI]
Ishida, K., Ishitoya, Y., Kobayashi, I., & Igarashi, Y. (2025) A study on the usefulness of an interviewer support system that points out gender-based judgments in Proceedings of the 212th Human-Computer Interaction Study Group (IPSJSIG-HCI)
Ishida, K., Ishitoya, Y., Kobayashi, I., & Igarashi, Y. (2025) Proposal and development of an AI interviewer support system that points out gender-based judgments in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI2025) [DOI]
Ishitoya, Y., & Ito, T. (2024) Analysis of the causes of the gender gap through data comparison and visualization by the 47 prefectures in Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI2024) [DOI]

Fellowships & Grants

Tobitate! Study Abroad Initiative, 2025

Japan Ministry of Education, Japan
Selected as 1 of 263 awardees out of 1,187 applicants (22.1% acceptance rate)

MITOU IT Program, 2023

Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), Japan
Selected as one of 21 projects out of 153 applications nationwide in FY2023 (13.7% acceptance rate)

Women Leaders Support Fund, 2023

Public Resource Foundation, Japan
Selected as one of 6 recipients out of 103 applicants (6.8% acceptance rate)

Honors & Awards

Research Awards:

Oin-kai Research Encouragement Award, Ochanomizu University (2025)
Pre-Graduation Research Excellence Award, Ochanomizu University (2024)
The 15th “Bud of Science” Effort Award Winner, “Using Recycled Paper to Control Liquefaction” (2020)

Hackathon Awards:

JPHACKS 2023: Finalist Award, Innovator Certification, Yamareco Inc. Award
Google Hardware Hackathon 2023: Best Teamwork Award
Giiku CAMP vol.8 Hackathon 2023: First Runner-up
JPHACKS 2022: Finalist Award, Innovator Certification, Nokia Solutions & Architecture Award, Special Recognition Award

Media

Research and Development Needs More Women: Exploring the Potential of Gender and IT from a Student Engineer’s Perspective (Reported by Recruit Co., Ltd.) [link]
Conference Report: "Women Tech Terrace 2024" for Female Engineers’ Technology and Career Development (Reported by CyberAgent, Inc.) [link]
Beyond Gender Barriers: The Future Envisioned by Gen Z Engineer Yuri Ishitoya (Reported by CORE Lab.) [link]
From My Perspective as Someone Familiar with PCs since 4th Grade: Lenovo "ThinkBook 13x Gen4" (Reported by Lenovo Japan) [link]