Hisashi Kobayashi's Blog

On Saturday February 9th, 2013, I was invited to give a 40 minute presentation entitled “The Life and Achievements of Shoshichi Kobayashi” 「小林昭七の生涯と業績」, at the Annual Meeting of San Francisco Akamonkai (桑港赤門会の年次総会), attended by about 40 members. Shoshichi, who was a Berkeley resident of 50 years, was one of the oldest members of the Akamonkai (the Alumni Group of the University of Tokyo). The slides and my talk were given in Japanese (Click here for viewing slides, and for the YouTube videos please visit the following, which I am afraid is too long: 1) http://youtu.be/N03PvMM6FQc; 2) http://youtu.be/SZKkRxDpa3Y; 3) http://youtu.be/FZt2mDJ97ic; 4) http://youtu.be/6njQgHL5IoI; 5) http://youtu.be/pfn2LiUtvVo; 6) http://youtu.be/0XSYjhFv9tg )  The outline of my talk was as follows.

プレゼンテーション内容 (Outline of Presentation)

• 小林昭七の生い立ち (Upbringing of Shoshichi Kobayashi)
• 数学者への道：林宗男先生との出会い (Guidepost to a mathematician: an encounter with Mr. Muneo Hayashi, Mathematics teacher)
• 東大で矢野健太郎先生に学ぶ (Studying from Professor Kentaro Yano at the University of Tokyo)
• フランス留学から米国へ (Study in France and move to America)
• プリンストン高等研究所、MIT、UBC (カナダ）(Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, MIT and the University of British Columbia, Canada)
• UC バークレーで５０年 (Fifty years at Berkeley)
• 数学者、教育者としての業績 (Achievements as a mathematician and educator)
• 啓蒙書や随筆集 (Expository books and essays)
• Friends of Todai について (On “Friends of Todai, Inc.”)

Invited Speech: “Big Data and Future Networks: A Perspective from the United States”

At the 7th New Generation Network Promotion Forum (第７回新世代ネットワーク推進フォーラム), I gave an invited talk entitled “Big Data and Future Networks: A Perspective from the United States” （「ビッグ･データと将来のネットワーク:米国からの展望」）. The forum was held on January 16 (Wed), 2013 at Hotel Floracion Aoyama, Tokyo (ホテル･フラシオン青山), and was attended by 120 people including representatives of the　 Government, IT and networks industry, and academia.

The outline of my presentation was

• How Much Information? How Big is Data?
• President Obama’s Open Government Initiative
• President Obama’s Big Data Initiative
• Big Data in Science and Technology Research
  NITRD Program, NSF, DARPA, DOE
• Big Data in Enterprises
• Call for Data Science and Data Scientists
• Big Data and Networks
• References

To view the slides of my talk, please click here http://forum.nwgn.jp/library/pdf/sokai_07/13_BigDataandNetworks-Jan19-withAppendices.pdf

The website of the Forum can be found by clicking here in English: http://forum.nwgn.jp/english/

日本語はこちら: http://forum.nwgn.jp/meeting/sokai07_repo.html

My acceptance speech

I was selected to receive the 2012 C&C Group B Prize (C&C賞グループB), and the award ceremony was held at ANA Intercontinental Hotel in Tokyo (ANA インターコンテイネンタル・ホテル東京) on November 28, 2012. (http://www.candc.or.jp/en/2012/ceremony.html).

With NEC C&C Foundation President Hajime Sasaki
（NEC C&C 財団佐々木元理事長と）

The C&C Prize, established in March 1985 by the NEC C&C Foundation (NEC C&C財団), is awarded to no more than two groups annually in recognition of their outstanding contributions to research and development and/or pioneering work in the fields of semiconductors, computers, and/or telecommunications and in their integrated technologies. In recent years, Group A Award has been given to Japanese researcher(s), whereas Group B Award is to non-Japanese researcher(s). http://www.candc.or.jp/en/recipient.html

The 2012 C&C Group A Prize was awarded to Prof. Osamu Yamada of Waseda University (早稲田大学 客員教授の山田 宰氏), Dr. Toru Kuroda and Mr. Masayuki Takada of NHK Research Lab (NHK放送技術研究所の黒田 徹氏と高田 政幸氏) for their “outstanding leadership in the research and development of the ISDB-T digital terrestrial television broadcasting system “（「地上デジタル放送伝送方式IＳＤＢ－Ｔの研究開発に関わる主導的貢献」） (http://www.candc.or.jp/en/2012/group_a.html).

Prof. Takashi Masuda, Managing Director of The Funai Foundation for Information Technology (船井情報科学振興財団業務執行理事益田隆司氏） gives a congratulatory speech

The citation of my award reads “For his pioneering and leading contribution both to the invention of high-density and highly reliable digital recording technology and to the creation and development of a performance-evaluation methodology for computer and communication systems.” （「情報記録の高密度化・高信頼化方式、ならびにコンピュータおよび通信ネットワーク･システムの性能評価のための解析的手法の発明、実用化に関する先駆的・指導的貢献」）(http://www.candc.or.jp/en/2012/group_b.html)

Prof. Hideo Miyahara, President of NICT
（情報通信研究機構理事長宮原秀夫氏） proposes a toast.

My inventions on signal processing and decoding technology for digital recording, made at the IBM Research Center in 1969-71, soon after I joined IBM upon receiving a Ph.D. degree from Princeton in 1967, is now widely known as PRML (Partial-Response, Maximum-Likelihood) , and are adopted in almost all digital magnetic and optical recording devices today. For this fundamental contribution, I received the 2005 Eduard Rhein Technology Award (2005年度エドワード･ライン・テクノロジー賞）http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S12/62/31O87/index.xml

For the slides (in Japanese) I used in my acceptance speech at the NEC C&C Prize ceremony, please click here.