Interview with Dr. Makoto Nagao
Dr. Nobuaki Kumagai
In Spotlight, the ATR Journal invites comments from various professionals
who have worked closely with and have a thorough knowledge of ATR. To mark the
completion of research by the Interpreting Telecommunications Labs as an important
milestone of ATR, we interviewed Dr. Makoto Nagao, President of Kyoto University,
for this Spotlight section. The establishment of both ATR Interpreting Telephony
Research Labs and ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Labs owe a great
deal to the leadership of Dr. Nagao, who advocated the development of speech translation
technology. The following is a brief biography of Dr. Nagao.
Dr. Nagao received the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University
in 1961 and 1966 respectively. Since then, he has served as director of the Computing
Center, director of the Central Library, and dean of the Faculty of Engineering.
He has been the President of Kyoto University since 1997. Dr. Nagao also held
a chair in ethnological studies by computer at the national Museum of Ethnology
from 1976-1994. His research activities are in the areas of pattern recognition,
image processing, natural language processing, machine translation, and artificial
intelligence. He has acted as program chairman and general chairman of more than
ten international conferences, symposiums, and workshops. He is currently acting
as an editor of several international journals, including Computer Vision, Graphics
and Image Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. He is often invited to give
talks at international conferences, and has received numerous awards, including
the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the medal of Honor of the International Association
of Machine Translation.
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