Hironori Yoshida is an incoming faculty member at Aalto University’s Department of Design. His research develops design and fabrication systems for non-standard, reclaimed resources—such as tree branches, stones, and leftover fabrics—that are typically absent from digital datasets. By leveraging the inherent irregularities of these materials, his aim is to achieve both the sustainable use of resources and unique aesthetic impacts.
His work is published in leading venues including SIGGRAPH, TEI, NeurIPS, IJCAI, and ICRA, where he received a Best Student Paper award for his autonomous robotic stone-stacking system (ICRA 2017). Drawing on his prior experience in a Tokyo-based AI startup specializing in physical-world computation and robotics, Yoshida focuses on bridging academic innovation with entrepreneurial and social implementations, particularly in the context of AI-driven design education.