Japanese | Contact us

NEC C&C Foundation The NEC C&C Foundation

2024 Recipients of C&C Prize

The recipients of the 2024 C&C Prize were selected as shown below.

Group A

 Group A Detailed Description

秋葉 重幸 博士

Dr. Shigeyuki Akiba

Formerly President and Chief Executive Officer,
KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc.

鈴木 正敏 博士

Dr. Masatoshi Suzuki

Vice-President, Professor, Chitose Institute of Science and Technology Visiting Professor,Faculty of Science and Engineering,Waseda University Graduate School

森田 逸郎 博士

Dr. Itsuro Morita

Professor,Faculty of Science and Engineering,Waseda University


Citation

For contributions to the development and implementation of large-capacity, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical submarine cable systems

Achievement(summary)

Internet communications increases, there was a need to increase the capacity of undersea cables, but the nonlinearity of optical fiber has hindered the implementation of the large-capacity optical submarine cable systems.  

Doctor Akiba succeeded in achieving continuous oscillation at room temperature of a 1.5-μm-band semiconductor laser. Dr. Suzuki and Dr. Morita invented and demonstrated a new transmission scheme capable of stable, long-haul propagation of 10,000 km or longer for high-speed optical signals. These technologies became essential to WDM optical submarine cables and came to be applied to many optical submarine cables covering a total system length of 206,000 km.  

Dr. Akiba, Dr. Suzuki, and Dr. Morita pioneered the research and development of technology for expanding the capacity of long-haul optical submarine cables particularly through optical-nonlinearity control. These achievements have had huge ripple effects in academia and industry. For these outstanding achievements, it is more than fitting that Dr. Akiba, Dr. Suzuki, and Dr. Morita receive the C&C Prize.  


Group B

>> Group B Detailed Description

Transformer Team

Member:Eight authors of the paper “Attention Is All You Need”


アシシュ・ヴァスワニ 氏

Ashish Vaswani

CEO, Essemtial AI

ノーム・シェイザー 氏

Noam Shazeer

VP, Gemini Technical Co-Lead, Google Deepmind

ニキ・パルマ 氏

Niki Parmar

Research scientist, essential AI, Google

ヤコブ・ウスコライト 氏

Jakob Uszkoreit

Inceptive

ライオン・オーウェン・ジョーンズ 氏

Llion Owen Jones

CTO, Sakana AI

エイダン・ゴメス 氏

Aidan Gomez

CEO, Cohere

ルカシュ・カイザー 氏

Lukasz Kaiser

Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI

イリア・ポロスキン 氏

Illia Polosukhin

NEAR Protocol


Citation

For pioneering research of the Transformer deep learning model serving as the foundation of generative AI

Achievement(summary)

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been evolving remarkably in recent years and has come to deeply penetrate not only industrial fields but society as well. The appearance of generative AI, in particular, has sent shock waves throughout the world as AI possessing creativity. The third-generation AI boom arrived in the 2000s. Machine learning came into practical use, deep learning made its appearance, and the performance of AI improved in many fields including image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and other models. In 2017, the innovative Transformer model that revamped conventional neural networks appeared achieving a level of performance greatly exceeding existing models. It is said that the present progress in AI could not have occurred without Transformer.  

Transformer not only broke through the limitations of what were advanced technologies at that time like RNN and LSTM but also enabled the seamless integration of diverse types of data in multimodal AI while greatly improving the capabilities of AI systems. Although deep learning gave rise to AI-based innovation from around 2010, Transformer can be called the second great innovation in the sense of revamping existing neural networks. The present spread of generative AI using Transformer as base technology and its impact on society has been huge, and in view of these achievements, these eight members of the Transformer team are deserving recipients of the C&C Prize.