Ray Otsuka大塚 嶺

I've been programming since I was eleven, anchored to one idea: technology that makes daily life a little more fun. In high school I built AIbou, an AI English-conversation app that integrated GPT-3 before its public release — over 1,800 downloads, modest revenue, and a lot of feedback collected by handing posters out around Shibuya.

At university I led the design and build of a long-horizon memory function for an AI voice companion for elderly users. A graph-theoretic water-flow model decides not just what to remember, but how strongly — modeling gradual forgetting and the integration of episodic into semantic memory. In production today; patent pending.

There are plenty of engineers with stronger fundamentals and plenty of people who understand graph theory better than I do. Fewer people, I think, take that knowledge all the way through to something a real person can use and feel value from. That last mile — designing the experience, fitting it into reality — is where I want to keep working.

What I want to build is technology that doesn't stop at being a useful function — but lands in the world as something people return to, talk about, and feel a little changed by.

I've been drawn since childhood to the moment someone's emotion shifts. Composing world-building, narrative, technology, and operations into a single coherent experience has stayed at the core of what I do — in apps and AI, I care more about how naturally people slip into the world than how clever the system is underneath.

Theme parks are the ultimate form of experience design — space, story, technology, and operations all locking together to produce something memorable. That philosophy of integrating complex elements into a felt, lived experience is what I want to keep working toward.