He received the degrees of Bachelor and Master from the Kyushu Institute of Design in 1979 and 1981 respectively, and the degree of Doctor of Engineering from Toyohashi University of Technology in 1991. While working for the Central Research Laboratories of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (1981-1985), Hideyuki Takagi researched software engineering, speech recognition, neural networks, fuzzy systems, and genetic algorithms. He was a Visiting Industrial Fellow of the University of California at Berkeley, USA. (1991-1993). During this period, apart from research activities, he played an educational role through research projects and technical meetings with students. He has received wide recognition of his work and is a member of a number of academic societies, providing administrative contributions to many of them.