IPSJ/ACM Award for Early Career Contributions to Global Research

IPSJ/ACM Award for Early Career Contributions to Global Research

Name of the Award IPSJ/ACM Award for Early Career Contributions to Global Research
About the Award The IPSJ and the Association for Computing machinery (ACM) established a joint award in 2018 to honor early career researchers in the field of computing for their outstanding contributions through their international and collaborative research as well as high expectations of their continuing global research.
Selection Process The awardee should be decided annually by the joint award committee which consists of members from both IPSJ and the ACM. The decision should be confirmed by both societies.
Selection Criteria The awardees should have their achievements through their international and collaborative research and high expectations of further collaboration which are contributing in the field of computing. The awardees should be in the stage of their early career (e.g. 10 years or less from their doctor's degrees) at the point of the award. The awardees should be the members of the IPSJ.
Conferment The award will be presented at a national convention or other event organized by the IPSJ. The awardee will be invited to the ACM Award Banquet.

  • 2024

    Yuki Koyama (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)

    Computational Design Techniques and Interactions

    Yuki Koyama (https://koyama.xyz/) is a Senior Researcher at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). He received his Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo in 2017. His research fields are computer graphics and human-computer interaction. In particular, he is interested in supporting designers by using computational techniques such as mathematical optimization. He has published papers at ACM SIGGRAPH, CHI, UIST, etc. From 2021, he also started working at Graphinica, Inc., in which he is aiming at bridging art and technology in animation production. He was awarded JSPS Ikushi Prize (2017) and Asiagraphics Young Researcher Award (2021). He is a member of ACM and IPSJ.
     
    【Recommendation】
    Yuki Koyama is a prominent young researcher at the intersection of computer graphics (CG) and hu-man-computer interaction (HCI), working on Computational Design—a paradigm for applying mathematical optimization to address diverse design challenges. He has published 11 papers (with 7 as first author) in ACM TOG/UIST/CHI, the top ACM venues in these fields. This is a significant publication record for a re-searcher of his standing. His expertise in mathematical optimization and interaction design has advanced the ability of end-users to discover their ideal design solutions. Notably, he invented an innovative extension of Bayesian optimization, enabling efficient human-in-the-loop design optimization frameworks. This breakthrough has brought him prestigious awards, including the Asiagraphics Young Researcher Award and the JSPS Ikushi Prize.
    His worldwide research collaborations span 9 countries, emphasizing his international dedication. Notably, his internship at Disney Research and stay at MIT yielded an ACM TOG publication. He has contributed to the organization of key ACM and IPSJ conferences, serving as Assistant to Technical Program Chairs (CHI 2021) and Associate Chair (CHI 2020/2022/2023). Additionally, he has delivered three courses at top ACM venues (SIGGRAPH 2020/2021, CHI 2021) and authored two book chapters, establishing himself as a pioneer in computational design and human-in-the-loop optimization.
     

  • 2023

    Manato Fujimoto (Osaka Metropolitan University,Japan)

    Advanced Ubiquitous Computing System for Realization of Society 5.0

    Dr. Manato Fujimoto received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Kansai University, Osaka, Japan, in 2009, 2011, and 2015, respectively. From April 2015 to September 2021, he was an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology. From October 2021 to March 2022, he was an associate professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka City University. He is currently an associate professor at the Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University. His research interests include ubiquitous computing, wireless networks, sensing, and elderly monitoring. He was awarded ICMU Best Paper Award (2021). He is a member of IEEE, ACM, IEICE, and IPSJ.
     
    【Recommendation】
    Dr. Manato Fujimoto received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Kansai University, in 2009, 2011, and 2015, respectively. From April 2015 to Sept. 2021, he was an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, NAIST. From Oct. 2021 to Mar. 2022, he was an associate professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka City University. He is currently an associate professor at the Graduate School of Informatics, Osaka Metropolitan University. Dr. Fujimoto has consistently worked on research related to “Ubiquitous Computing Systems” for the realization of Society 5.0. He is targeting various fields toward making our world “Hyper-Smart” with a Cyber-Physical System that highly links the real world and cyberspace. Recently, he has achieved achievements both nationally and internationally, including acceptance to Q1 journals and/or top conferences. He has also been active in international collaborative research, especially with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), where he has achieved noticeable achievements, including acceptance to ACM ISWC’18, one of the most difficult international conferences. Furthermore, he has been selected to serve on the organizing committee of various conferences both in Japan and abroad, contributing greatly to the spread of the academic fields covered by IPSJ and ACM.

  • 2022

    Yuta Sugiura (Keio University,Japan)

    Next-Gen Ubiquitous User Interface Design Permeated in Everybody's Daily Life

    Dr. Yuta Sugiura (https://lclab.org/people/yutasugiura)is an Associate Professor of Department of Information and Computer Science, at Keio University. His research interest is in user interfaces and ubiquitous computing, and he has focused on medical-engineering collaboration recently. He received a Ph.D from the Graduate School of Media Design at Keio University in 2013. Before joining the Department, he worked as a post doctoral researcher at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (2015 - 2016). He has received more than 40 awards including the IPSJ Yamashita SIG Research Award, UIST Best Talk Award, and the Good Design Award. He served as a committee member for more than 20 various international conferences including ACM UIST, TEI, and SIGGRAPH ASIA E-tech.
     
    【Recommendation】
    As computers have been pervasively existing in people's daily life, the interface design between computers and human beings is increasingly focused. Yuta Sugiura has been focused on building a more ubiquitous and sensual interface, which altered the traditional forms of user interface. He contributed to several researches and published papers related to next-generation user interfaces design from theoretical investigation to application, including the top-tier ACM conference of CHI (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013), UIST (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014), MobileHCI (2017), VRST (2017), VRCAI (2018) and SIGGRAPH Etech (2009, 2011, 2014, 2015), SIGGRAPH ASIA E-tech (2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015). He received many awards, including from the UIST, Asian CHI and IPSJ. Besides, he is active in related academic services, including the organizer, PC members and chairs in top-tier ACM conferences and IPSJ domestic conferences.
    He established the LifeStyle Computing Lab in Keio University in 2018 and through serving the international conference to continuously expand international activities. He proposed not to disturb the user's manner and claimed a more natural and implicit expression approach and built the computer systems based on soft items, daily human behavior, and emotion. Such systems own a large range of population and permeate everybody’s daily life. 

  • 2021

    Jun Kato (AIST,Japan/Arch Inc.)

    Pioneering Work in Programming Experience Research for Creativity Support of Both Programmers and Non-Programmers

    Dr. Jun Kato (https://junkato.jp) is a senior researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and the technical advisor at Arch, Inc., where he leads Arch Research. He has researched Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), particularly creativity support, and worked on technology transfer, developing and managing public web services. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, The University of Tokyo, in 2014, after working as a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Microsoft Research Asia, and as a research intern at Microsoft Research Redmond and Adobe Creative Technologies Lab. He joined AIST as a researcher in 2014 and has been in his current positions since 2018. He received 15 awards, including the Honorable Mention Award at ACM CHI 2013 and 2015. Following his research on extending the user interfaces of programming environments to benefit creators with diverse technical backgrounds, he founded SIGPX, a domestic study group on "Programming Experience (PX)" at the intersection of HCI, programming language, and software engineering research. He served as a committee member for more than 40 international conferences, primarily in the fields of HCI (ACM CHI, UIST) and PX (IEEE VL/HCC, <Programming>, LIVE, PX).
     
    【Recommendation】
    The world is flooded with programs, and a more efficient way to build programs is needed. He has contributed to improving “Programming Experience (PX),” a technical term he coined in 2016, establishing a new research field through making publications at a wide variety of top-tier ACM conferences, including CHI '13/15/18, UIST '12, DIS '12/17, PLDI '13, and Multimedia '18. He has received awards from ACM at CHI '09/13/15, PLDI '13, SIGGRAPH '09 and served in thirty-five program committees (PCs) of relevant international conferences and workshops such as a founding PC member for PX and a steering committee member for LIVE. He also founded SIGPX, a domestic workshop co-sponsored by Japan ACM SIGCHI Chapter.
    He has formed a unique research agenda to deliver the benefits of programming to everyone, not only programmers. He has developed programming environments as inclusive, creative, and collaborative platforms for people with diverse backgrounds. The interdisciplinary collaborations with international researchers have influenced this view, such as research internships at Microsoft and Adobe and collaborations with UC Boulder and MIT. He has also impacted society through four publicly-available web services (TextAlive, Griffith Sketch, Songle Sync, and f3.js) and his technical advisor role at Arch, an animation production company.

  • 2020

    Koji Yatani (The University of Tokyo)

    Mobile Interactive Systems for Intellectual Productivity Support

    Dr. Koji Yatani (http://yatani.jp) is an Associate Professor and 2017 UTokyo Excellent Young Researcher at The University of Tokyo , where he leads Interactive Intelligent Systems Laboratory (https://iis-lab.org). His main research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ubiquitous Computing. His current research focuses on productivity/creativity support, sensing technologies and their applications, and usable security. Dr. Koji Yatani received his B.Eng. and M.Sci. from University of Tokyo in 2003 and 2005, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Toronto in 2011. On November 2011, he joined HCI group at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China. Dr. Koji Yatani was the recipient of several important awards. He received RIEC Award in 2019 for his research on productivity support tools. He also received two Best Paper awards at CHI (2011 and 2016) as well as four Honorable Mention Awards at CHI (2014) and MobileHCI (2014). He also contributes to the HCI research community through his services as a Program co-Chair for ACM UbiComp (2015) and one of the founding Editor for Proceedings of ACM Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technology (2016 -- 2020). He is currently the Steering Committee chair for ACM UbiComp.

    【Recommendation】
    Dr. Yatani has made a series of significant contributions on designing and evaluating mobile interactive systems for supporting people’s intellectual productivity. He has developed and validated various interactive systems which turn smartphones, which were initially designed as a communication device, into intellectual productivity support tools. Specifically, he deeply investigated three activities where intellectual productivity is critical: 1) decision-making using online user-generated reviews; 2) presentation rehearsals and delivery; and 3) college students’ study. His research outcomes demonstrate strong values of mobile interactive systems that combine computational linguistics, algorithms and interface designs for intellectual productivity support, and his international visibility and recognition are outstanding.

  • 2019

    Yasutaka Kamei (Kyushu University)

    Research on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) to Improve Software Quality Assurance

    Yasutaka Kamei is an associate professor at Kyushu University in Japan. He has been a research fellow of the JSPS (PD) from July 2009 to March 2010. From April 2010 to March 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Queen's University in Canada. From April 2011 to February 2015, he was an assistant professor at Kyushu University. His research interests include empirical software engineering, open source software engineering, and mining software repositories (MSR). He was awarded such as ESEM 2007 Best Paper Award, MSR 2014 Distinguished Paper Award, and IPSJ 2015 Outstanding Paper Award. He received the B.E. degree (2005) in Informatics from Kansai University, and the M.E. degree (2007) and Ph.D. degree (2009) in Information Science from Nara Institute of Science and Technology. He is a member of the ACM, the IPSJ, and the IEICE and a senior member of the IEEE.

    【Recommendation】
    Dr. Yasutaka Kamei has played a major role in the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) research field, which advocates for evidence-based recovery and modeling of software quality by analyzing large-scale software development datasets. Since his early days as a PhD student, Dr. Kamei has significantly contributed to developing novel knowledge and theory in the area. For example, Dr. Kamei proposed sampling methods that enhance a bug prediction dataset independent of a particular bug prediction model. Dr. Kamei has accomplished his outstanding contributions in the MSR field through global research. Based on his global research network, he has published a number of papers that are coauthored with 39 international researchers at 20 institutions in 9 countries. He has contributed the community through organization of international conferences like MSR2018 as Program Co-Chair. 

  • 2018

    Yasuko Matsubara (Kumamoto University)

    Research on Analysis of Time-series Data and Nonlinear Dynamic Systems

     Press release (Japanese)