Graduate School of Systems Information Science

Tuition fees are 535,800 JPY per year.

Future University Hakodate offers a three-year doctoral program in Hokkaido, Japan, taught in English, with intake available in April or September. The university organizes its graduate study around the field of Systems Information Science, an interdisciplinary approach that aims to build harmony between computers and human beings by combining research and education across complex system science, information science, design, and cognitive science. Future University Hakodate describes its distinguishing feature as a fusion of science and art, treating information technology as the core of its education while also drawing on studies grounded in science and techniques grounded in art, with the broader goal of developing people who can design society through the thoughtful use of information technology. A doctoral program built on this interdisciplinary foundation typically asks students to develop an original research project that draws on more than one of these underlying fields, whether that means combining computational methods with design thinking, or applying cognitive science insights to system architecture. Doctoral study generally centers on independent research supervised by faculty, culminating in a dissertation, and is supported by seminars and access to specialized labs and research groups working across the program's combined disciplines. Graduates of interdisciplinary information science doctoral programs commonly pursue careers in academic research, advanced software and systems development, human-computer interaction design, and research roles in technology companies that value the ability to move between technical and design-oriented thinking. Studying within a program explicitly built around this science-and-art fusion gives international doctoral students a research environment structured differently from more conventional computer science programs, with faculty and coursework spanning both technical and creative disciplines.