Hideaki Aoyama obtained his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1982 and studied High Energy Physics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Massachusetts, and a lecturer at Northeastern University, Boston. He is an Advising Council for Credit Risk Database (Tokyo) and a Faculty Member of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, Tokyo (RIETI).