NISHIO Hirokazu
Welcome to NISHIO Hirokazu's homepage! Here is homepage for Japanese.
Intellectual Productivity, AI Agents, and Digital Democracy
Research Director at Cybozu Labs. Ph.D. in Science (2006), researching software that enhances teamwork and intellectual productivity since 2007. His current hands-on work is putting AI agents into real operation — most recently LLM-driven vulnerability scanning, and building the knowledge bases that let agents make correct judgments from organization-specific context.
In digital democracy, together with Takahiro Anno, he has worked on broad listening in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election, the Tokyo metropolitan "Shin-Tokyo 2050" project, and the 2025 House of Councillors election, and has been involved in developing the "Public Opinion Map (Yoron Chizu)" for JAPAN CHOICE and "Kouchou-AI" for Digital Democracy 2030. He is also a contributor/editor of "Plurality" (Audrey Tang, Glen Weyl et al.) and led its Japanese localization.
He is also a co-founder and mentor of Mitou Junior, a program funding and mentoring creators aged 17 and under (see the story Nurturing the Next Generation).
Contact: nishio "dot" hirokazu "at" gmail "dot" com
What I do now
- Putting AI agents into practice: LLM-driven vulnerability scanning and knowledge bases that give agents organization-specific context
- Research on teamwork and intellectual productivity at Cybozu Labs
- Broad listening and digital democracy (Digital Democracy 2030; co-authoring a book, due September 2026)
About my name
I wrote this section for non-Japanese people. My name is "NISHIO Hirokazu" and "NISHIO" is the family name. All Japanese people say their family name first when they are speaking Japanese language, but unfortunately many people are misunderstanding that we must say given name first when we speak English.
My family name "NISHIO" is made of two characters "NISHI"(west) and "O"(tail). "O" has same origin with "WO"(fish) so my ancestor might be a fisher. "NISHIO" is pronounced like "knee see awe" but shorter. My given name "Hirokazu" is made of two characters "HIRO" and "KAZU". "HIRO" is pronounced like a hero. It means "big" and "calmful" (Wiktionary). "KAZU" is pronounced like a cousin without "n". It means "peace" and "harmony" (Wiktionary).
Please call me Hiro.
Broad listening & digital democracy highlights
- 2026: Co-authoring a book on Broad Listening (to be published September 2026)
- 2025-present: Digital Democracy 2030 project (Kouchou-AI / Idobata)
- 2025: Broad Listening (Kouchou-AI) in the 2025 House of Councillors election
- 2025: Japanese localization lead for "PLURALITY"
- 2024-2025: Broad Listening for Tokyo's long-term strategy "Shin Tokyo 2050"
- 2024: Broad Listening in the Tokyo gubernatorial campaign (Takahiro Anno)
- 2024: JAPAN CHOICE "Yoron Chizu" (public opinion map)
Stories
- Broad Listening in Practice
- Plurality
- Intellectual Production
- Nurturing the Next Generation
- Visualizing High-Dimensional Vectors
Recommended reading (English)
- Plurality (book) - source & contributions
- Broad Listening (forthcoming book) — pre-release draft, free to read in English
- Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge (English)
- Self introduction in East Asian context
- GitHub (code & tools)
Recommended reading (Japanese)
See the Japanese page for a curated list.