Ryohei Nakatsu received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from Kyoto University in 1969, 1971 and 1982 respectively.  After joining NTT in 1971, he mainly worked on speech recognition technology.  In 1994, he joined ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute) as the president of ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories.  In 2002 he became a professor at School of Science and Technology, Kwansei Gakuin University.  Since March of 2008 he is a professor at National University of Singapore (NUS) and a director of Interactive & Digital Media Institute (IDMI) at NUS.

His research interests include interactive media, entertainment technologies and communication robot/agent.

In 1978, he received Young Engineer Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J).  In 1996, the best paper award from the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia.   In 1999, 2000 and 2001, Telecom System Award from Telecommunication System Foundation and the best paper award from Virtual Reality Society of Japan. In 2000, the best paper award from Artificial Intelligence Society of Japan.

He is a fellow of the IEEE and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers Japan (IEICE-J).  He is a member of various academic societies such as IEEE, ACM, IEICE-J, the Acoustical Society of Japan, Information Processing Society of Japan, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence., and so on.  Also he is a chair of IFIP Technical Committee on Entertainment Computing.