Event report

Technology Award 2013

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"Rakuten Technology Award" is given yearly to individuals or organizations who make the greatest contributions to the growth of technology and the web. We established this award in 2008, and this year it is the 6th time to give out this award. This year, we wish to praise the achievement in innovationand the evolution of web engineering technology under the theme of "We are Engineers!" We would like to congratulate all award recipient’s!! Here are a few of the comments we have received from them.

Gold

Satoshi Matsuoka

Reason

Prof. Matsuoka as a leader and designer has led the development project of TSUBAME, a world-class super computer. He and his team utilized the general purpose architecture and achieved great performance. In 2010, TSUBAME was upgraded to 2.0 with Intel Xeon CPU and nVIDIA GPGPU to obtain higher energy efficiency. The following year, TSUBAME recorded 1192 FLOPS and was ranked No. 5 in the world and No. 2 in Japan. In September 2013, they were busy putting their efforts into the next version, TSUBAME 2.5, to become the fastest supercomputer in Japan. He and his team have been delivering huge scale computing power which existing computer systems have never had before, and provided easy-to-use environments to many users. It enhanced the new potential of the super computer. We respect and highly appreciate his leadership. And, we are looking forward to hearing more about his further achievements.

Comment

I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my collaborators over the years, including the members of the TSUBAME team at Tokyo Tech GSIC., as well as our corporate partners, NEC, NVIDIA, HP, DDN, among others.

Although I have won various awards, this one is one of the most touching as it is really a community award, with recognition that TSUBAME is one of their premiere technology leaders they envision as the future of computing. I hope that there will be increased interest in the area of convergence of supercomputing and Cloud / Big Data, so that societal problems we face today can be best resolved using such IT infrastructures of the future.

Bio

Professor of Computer Science / Tokyo Institute of Technology

As the tech lead for the TSUBAME supercomputer at Tokyo Tech, Satoshi became Japan's leading proponent for using accelerator technology to provide cutting-edge computational performance. One of the first to jump on the GPGPU bandwagon, he believes the new graphics chips will usher in the era of commodity vector processing.

Silver

James O. Coplien

Reason

Mr. Coplien has been contributing to bringing pattern language, a methodology of knowledge capturing, to the software industry, especially to knowledge management and the process engineering area. His research on highly productive teams inspired Dr.Jeff Sutherland to create the Scrum framework and contributed very much to the establishment of agile development. In recent years, he has been working closely with the scrum community and provided practical influence in the field of software architecture and organizational software development. We evaluate his activities and contributions highly.

Comment

Hello, everybody,

I was greatly surprised to receive the great honor, in the company of so many other esteemed colleagues, of a Rakuten Technology Award. It is wonderful that Rakuten recognizes such contributions, but that I myself would ever receive such recognition was beyond my dreams. As I reflect on these ""technology awards"" I note that the majority aren't about technology but about people. The awards reflect the powerful message that great value emerges from harmony between technology and people, with the human element being the larger lever. Finally, to reiterate what I said in my acceptance speech: I am only giving back to Japan what Japan has given me. This award belongs to Nihon. Be proud of what you have done for the world, but don't cease the kaizen of doing greater things and ever becoming a greater people. We'll see you again soon. I'm ever at Japan's service and will see you in January.

— James O. Coplien

Bio

Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development

Jim Coplien is a well-known author of books on programming, design, and Agile organizational structure. His work on organizational patterns is one of the early foundations of the contemporary Agile disciplines. He continues to work closely with the Scrum community, to advance object-oriented software architecture and architectural patterns, and to support organizational development in software organizations world-wide.

Silver

Makoto Shirota

Reason

Mr. Shirota has worked on research of emerging IT technology and its business impact to provide easy-to-understand perspectives on technology trends to people. His books titled ""Impact of Cloud"" and ""Impact of BigData"" provided great overviews including technology details such as core software products, new computing theories and actual case studies based on thorough investigation. It has helped people not only in the internet field and but in other fields to understand the essential change very well. We evaluate his research works as the significant base contributing to technology literacy and precise understanding on the emerging technology trends of the internet.

Comment

It's a great honor to receive this Award. I have written some books about the emerging IT trends like cloud computing and big data to help share important information to many people. I am so glad that these activities have been evaluated so highly by my peers. I would like to say ‘thank you’ to many people who cooperated with the interviews, including Mr. Masaya Mori of the Rakuten Institute of Technoloy. Nowadays, I am often asked what the next ‘Syougeki’ is. I wish I could tell you, but it is still a secret. So, keep on the lookout for the next ‘Syougeki’! And thank you so much for this honor.

Bio

Makoto Shirota is a senior IT analyst at Nomura Research Institute, where he engages in research on emerging information technologies and its impact on business. His current primary research focus is big data and privacy, including how privacy issues impact marketing and how consumers will soon manage the sharing of their personal data with each other and with businesses. He is also an author of the bestselling business book "Kuraudo no Shogeki(The Impact of Cloud Computing)" and "Big data no Shogeki(The Impact of Big Data)" which is published in China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Twitter：@Makoto_Shirota

Ruby

Yuki Torii

Reason

Ms. Torii has worked as an organizer of Rails Girls Tokyo, a Tokyo version of Rails Girls which is a global movement. She wants many women to know what useful technologies there are and how fun it is to develop applications, and pave the possible way of new grassroot movements for the engineering community. We feel compassion for her passionate attitude providing opportunities of enjoying development to many people and would like to send some hearty cheers to her for her activities.

Comment

I'm very glad to receive this Award. This award is not only for my own activities, but also for the support and efforts of all the organizers and coaches of RailGirls in Japan. Also, this is for the vision of RailGirls. This vision, in a simple word, represents ‘diversity’. RailGirls is open to anyone who wants diversity as an organizer, a coach, or a sponsor like Rakuten. Please speak to us if you are interested in learning more about what we do. Thank you.

Bio

Yuki Torii is an organizer of Rails Girls Tokyo.

She opened the door to Ruby programming to women who are not programmers. At the same time, Yuki has presented new ideas on how to and where to promote the Ruby way of programming. She has done remarkable work in encouraging people to join the Ruby community throughout Japan and has become a coach to so many programmers.

Ruby

Hiroyuki Hourin

Reason

Mr. Hourin is an ex-chariman for Japan Unix Users Group a.k.a. jus and now serves as an organizer. He worked for a long time to support the community activities of UNIX and Linux, and played roles as coordinator and moderator for events within the opensource communities. Especially, he has led LL event or Lightweight Language event for over 10 years since 2003 and contributed very much to the growth of the community. We evaluate his passionate activities providing opportunities of communication, acknowledgement, learning, contribution and challenges for engineers.

Comment

Thank you to Rakuten Technology Award Selection Comittee, and all staffs of the Lightweight Language Event. I have worked more than 20 years for IT community, and at last, today, I was given a great award. But, this is not the goal. This is not the end. My work is not over. "I'm still walkin'" It's long, a very long road, a road that may never end. Still, I walk. See you next time, in an LL Event, Rakuten Technology Conference, or any other meetup. Thank you!

Bio

Hiroyuki Hourin is the former chairman and current steering committee of Japan UNIX Society (jus). He is well known reporter and contributor to jus, "ASCII.technologies" and "Software Design" for many years. He is also very famous as someone who is 'on top' of the current scene in the area of open source events. He held the LL event for a period of ten years starting in 2003 and has contributed significantly to the development of the Lightweight Languages community in Japan. He was awared "the 7th Japan OSS Contributor Award" and the "Japan OSS Contributor Award 2012".