2015 Recipients of C&C Prize
The recipients of the 2015 C&C Prize were selected as shown below.
Group A
>> Group A Detailed Description
Prof. Masaru Kitsuregawa
Professor, Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo
Director General, National Institute of Informatics
Citation
For Outstanding Leadership and Pioneering Contributions to Leading the Research and Development of Advanced Information Technologies for the Era of Large-scale Digital Data
Achievement(summary)
Today, a wide variety of information is rapidly increasing through the spread of social media and video content distribution over the Internet. It is believed that if more of this information could be collected, accumulated, and learned from (a process known as big data analytics), the results could be used to effectively resolve many issues facing society in recent years.
Prof. Kitsuregawa has long been involved in researching sophisticated database systems. In particular, he has achieved various pioneering and significant breakthroughs in research areas such as parallel database processing methods, high-speed database engines, computing hardware, and high-performance storage systems. He also led these research areas at the international level, and demonstrated actual system performance and effectiveness through various significant achievements.
Moreover, broadly anticipating technological and institutional issues in the age of massive digital information, also named "information explosion," Prof. Kitsuregawa has also been a pioneer in launching collaborative industry-government-academia projects to find solutions. As a very prominent leader in Japan, he has made various research efforts, including service- and legislation-related initiatives. Those have led to innovative and comprehensive contributions to the growth of R&D to resolve the issues. These pioneering activities have significantly contributed to the development not only of information and communications technology but also Japan's economy and industry. As a result, he is being recognized with the 2015 C&C Prize.
Group B
>> Group B Detailed Description
Dr. Martin Casado Fellow and SVP, VMware Inc. |
Prof. Nick McKeown Professor, Stanford University |
Prof. Scott Shenker Professor, University of California, Berkeley |
Citation
For Pioneering Research in Advancing Networking Technology and Outstanding Contributions Promoting the Development of Software-Defined Networking
Achievement(summary)
Information and communications technologies (ICT) have become a foundation of social activities in recent years. As such, these technologies must provide flexibility and efficiency and therefore be able to respond quickly to changing requirements and usage environments. However, there were still many physical limitations on the communication devices that play a vital role in networks, and these limitations were too often creating barriers to improved network performance. Software-defined networking (SDN), a term that refers to both the concept of controlling network behavior by using software and the technologies used to do so, eliminated these restrictions by decoupling data-transfer functions into a data plane and control plane in a network. Today, SDN becomes a core technology being implemented to continue to resolve the issues of infrastructure bottlenecks in data centers and carrier networks. This in turn will lead to more innovations in social infrastructure and the launch of a new era of the Internet of Things (IoT) in networking in which diverse and voluminous data can be distributed widely but securely.
Dr. Martin Casado, Prof. Nick McKeown, and Prof. Scott Shenker are the originators of the SDN movements, and OpenFlow protocol which was created as an interface to program the communication devices. They have combined their various talents and taken leadership roles in developing technologies for SDN and OpenFlow. The team developed various open-source platforms and tools. In addition, by involving academia, device vendors, telecommunications carriers, and service providers in research at an early stage, they have been able to cultivate and operate eco-systems that have led to widespread practical application of the SDN concepts. They also promoted the development and adoption of SDN by leading the standardization movement and encouraging the open-source community. Their achievements as ICT infrastructure innovators are highly remarkable. As a result, they are being recognized with the 2015 C&C Prize.