VTI Japan Engineer Receives Honorable Mention at Google-Sponsored AI Hackathon

Tokyo, October 2026 – VTI Japan’s Onsite Leader Tomobe Eiki (友部 瑛稀) has received another international AI recognition, earning an Honorable Mention for his project, EduAgent — Collaborative Partner Socratic Mentor at the All Things Agentic Hackathon, a global AI Agent competition sponsored by Google and hosted on Devpost.

Held online from August 4–31, 2026, the hackathon attracted more than 12,000 registered participants worldwide with entries evaluated by 78 judges including engineers and architects from Google. EduAgent was recognized with an Honorable Mention.

The recognition comes only a few months after Tomobe’s earlier project, CritiqAI, earned the “Agents for Good” recognition at Google and Kaggle’s AI Agents: Intensive Vibe Coding Capstone Project, which received more than 6,000 submissions worldwide. EduAgent marks the next step in his exploration of human-centered AI: moving from helping an individual learner challenge their own reasoning to creating an AI system that can support learning over time and give teachers clearer insight into where support is needed.

Supporting Learning Beyond a Single Interaction 

EduAgent is built around a simple reality: learning does not happen in a single conversation.

Instead of generating answers, the system is designed to follow a learner’s progress across multiple interactions, adapt its Socratic questioning to recurring strengths and weaknesses, and surface patterns that may help teachers understand where additional support is needed.

For individual learners, EduAgent encourages learners to revisit assumptions, evidence and reasoning rather than depend on ready-made AI responses. At the classroom level, it brings together learning signals so teachers can identify recurring patterns and make more informed decisions, while keeping final judgment with the teacher.

The project extends an idea Tomobe had already begun exploring through CritiqAI, but shifts the focus from a single debate-style interaction to a longer learning journey. In that sense, EduAgent is more about helping AI understand when and how to support the people using it.

“I like to think of AI as Tinker Bell flying alongside Peter Pan. A truly useful AI application should be able to support people throughout their journey, without taking over the most important part for them. That is the role I want AI to play.” – Tomobe describes his point of view.

From Experimentation to Practical AI Adoption

At VTI Japan, where Tomobe has contributed as an Onsite Leader and a member of the AI Committee, his work extends beyond individual AI projects. Together with onsite and offshore colleagues, he contributes to integrating AI into more structured working processes while exchanging practical knowledge and learning from different AI use cases across the organization. The Committee’s broader goal is to help employees use AI more effectively in their daily work, with a focus on improving both productivity and quality. 

For Tomobe, the next step is to create more opportunities for employees to turn that learning into solutions for real problems — whether by reducing effort in routine tasks, improving quality, or addressing challenges faced by colleagues and project teams. “Start with a real challenge, develop a practical solution, and put it into everyday use,” he said.  This human-centered approach reflects VTI’s broader direction toward AI adoption: using AI to extend what people can do, while keeping human understanding, critical thinking and final judgment at the center.