Establishing AI research collaborations and industry partnerships on topics that align so closely with the research that’s underway at CMU are essential for making progress in advancing the best possible impacts of AI on people’s lives. I’m excited for our faculty, researchers and students to start working with colleagues at Keio University who share our vision.
Martial Hebert
Dean, CMU’s School of Computer Science
About
Carnegie Mellon and Keio University
Unlocking Research Potential Across the Globe
In April 2024, Carnegie Mellon and Keio University announced that they joined forces with each other and industry partners to boost AI-focused research and workforce development in the U.S. and Japan. The collaboration unites two universities with outstanding AI programs and forward-looking leaders with leading technology companies committed to providing funding and resources aimed at solving real-world problems.
The partnership between Carnegie Mellon and Keio universities is supported by funding and collaboration from Arm, Microsoft and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG). In May 2025, the university announced that Arm, the company that is building the future of computing, and SBG, an investment holding company focused on breakthrough technologies, will provide CMU with $15.5 million to support the university’s efforts in the partnership. The funding will give CMU scientists access to cutting-edge commercial tools and models and support fundamental research in areas where AI will have a transformative effect.
CMU has been increasingly called upon for its AI expertise by public and private sector partners since the birth of the field. The CMU Keio partnership draws on this expertise and promotes research in multimodal and multi-lingual learning, AI for robots, autonomous AI symbiosis with humans, life sciences, and AI for scientific discovery. The partnership creates interdisciplinary collaboration across academic departments, faculties and students, and includes joint research projects, workshops and knowledge-sharing seminars between CMU and Keio researchers.
The partnership also paved the way for the SoftBank Group–Arm Fellowship, which supports CMU graduate students working at the intersection of AI and human collaboration. CMU announced its inaugural group of fellows in August 2025.
Keio University has taken a leading role in Japan in AI research as well in robotics and image processing. We are very excited to be moving on to the next stage in our research by forming a US-Japan collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, a globally renowned research institute in the field of AI.
Kohei Itoh
President, Keio University
