Ken Fukuda

Director for AI Industry Strategy Office, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI)

Ken Fukuda, Ph.D., is Director for AI Industry Strategy at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), where he leads the technical strategy for FRONTia, Japan’s flagship national initiative to develop real-world-native multimodal foundation models for Physical AI. He is also a professor at the University of Electro-Communications.

After earning his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Tokyo in 2001, Dr. Fukuda joined the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). From 2020 to 2025, he led the Data Knowledge Integration Research Team at AIST’s Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC), advancing research at the intersection of AI, knowledge integration, and scientific discovery.

Throughout his career, Dr. Fukuda has led numerous national and international AI initiatives spanning the life sciences, manufacturing, and service innovation. He has also held academic appointments at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. He now plays a leading role in shaping Japan’s strategy for AI infrastructure, foundation models, Physical AI, and sovereign AI capabilities.

A pioneer in biomedical natural language processing, Dr. Fukuda was the lead author of the first paper on biomedical named entity recognition, published in 1998 while he was at the University of Tokyo. He also made foundational contributions to biological pathway database research. Building on his long-standing work in knowledge representation and contextual understanding, his current interests center on world models for Physical AI: real-world-native multimodal learning; the integration of language, perception, action, and structured knowledge; the adaptation and distillation of general-purpose foundation models into specialized models and embodied agents; and uncertainty-aware alignment and evaluation for trustworthy, long-horizon human–AI collaboration.