Event report

Technology Award 2013

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 7th 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

Development of the Fastest Database Engine for the Era of Very Large Databas

Prof. Masaru Kitsuregawa

Prof. Kazuo Goda

Dr. Hiroyuki Yamada

Dr. Yuto Hayamizu

Reason

Now in the age of BigData, database is required for much higher performance than before. This project with mainly Prof. Kitsuregawa and other 3 members successfully developed OoODE or "Out-of-Order Database Engine" which is capable of executing query processing based on the out-of-order execution mechanism with the 1000 times faster performance than conventional database engine. And, the database product made in the project with Hitachi Ltd recorded the world's first TPC-H* benchmark test result in its largest-scale 100TB class and acquired a reputation globally. In addition, they implemented software based on PostgreSQL and Hadoop so to pervade innovative technology into wide software filed. We respect their achievements and highly appreciate their wide contributions to the IT field.

* TPC-H is a standard database system benchmark that provides decision support for complex database query processing, and is defined by the Transaction Processing Performance Council, a non-profit organization. (TPC-H website: http://www.tpc.org/tpch/default.asp)

Comment

Software technologies developed by Japanese universities were not so well transformed into real usage in the past. Most of the software comes from U.S. We are very happy to see that Rakuten award committee has got interested in our Out-of-Order Database Engine (OoODE), which was born in our laboratory at the University of Tokyo and got grown up with support from Japanese Cabinet Office and MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan). This technology is fully Japanese. Although our new idea is a bit complicated to understand, we hope more and more people will use it. We plan to make further efforts to apply our technology into various platforms.

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

The project "Development of the Fastest Database Engine for the Era of Very Large Database and Experiment and Evaluation of Strategic Social Enabled by the Database Engine" was conducted by mainly Prof Kitsuregawa, receiving support from FIRST or Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology. Prof Goda, Prof Yamada and Prof Hayamizu also contributed very much as a project member to the development of OoODE.
URL: http://www.tkl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/FIRST/home.php

Prof. Masaru Kitsuregawa: the director of National Institute of Informatics, a professor for Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo. Prof. Kazuo Goda, a project associate professor for IIS, the University of Tokyo. Dr. Hiroyuki Yamada, a project researcher for IIS, the University of Tokyo. Dr. Yuto Hayamizu, a project researcher for IIS, the university of Tokyo.

Silver

Nathan LeClaire - Docker, Inc.

Reason

They developed "Docker", one of the opensource software which is now an important component for IT infrastructure to accelerate the Time to Market and to promote DevOps leading to continuous service improvement for users. In recent years, the development environement for internet service has been diversified and complicated. So, one of the serious issues is how to make efficient complex tasks and procedures of initialization and configuration in each environemnt. Docker enables engineers to build independent OS execution environment and developer can transport it onto Docker in other machine to make application run regardless of machine. Thereby, developer can concentrate on developing application and service which is a main task to them, and Docker contributes to dramatic improvement of development and operation for internet service. With Docker, they also show a vision of bridging and integrating IT environments which tend to be separated. We highly appreciate their contributions and look forward to the further achivement of Docker.

Comment

Docker is exceptionally pleased to accept this award and wants to continue driving innovation forward on a global level. We firmly believe that Docker is the future of application design and delivery and we are honored to be recognized for our achievements so far by an organization as esteemed as Rakuten. We still have a lot of work to do to fulfill our dream of becoming the application layer that the Internet runs on, but we are of course very happy to gain recognition for what we've accomplished so far!

Bio

Docker, Inc. was formerly known as dotCloud, Inc. and changed its name to Docker, Inc. in October 2013. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Silver

Harurock - Ms. Nishimochi

Reason

These days, at the coming age of IoT, the area of so-called Makers, extending the internet service has been highlighted. Wearable devices such as Google Glass, smart watch and so on, robot or drone utilized for E-commerce are getting more and more attention. In that context, Ms. Nisihmochi drew the manga "Harurock" and spread the attraction and potential of electric craftwork integrating IT and craft which is catching on, so that many people easily can uderstand it. We feel compassion for her passionate attitude making many people enjoy the atmosphere of electrical craftwork and would like to send hearty cheers also to the future episodes of "Harurock".

Comment

I'm very honored to be selected for this great award. Thank you so much. I have been drawing a manga where a college girl enjoys electrical craftwork and invents many products. Some people say it looks like the concrete version of "Kiteretsu-Daihyakka". I became familiar with electrical craftwork through covering this as a topic of manga, and have been very impressed at high functionality of electrical parts, micro computer and development environment. I felt the potential of these works leading to an actual sci-fi world as in "Kiteretsu-Daihyakka". So, I hope to spread the fact that the near future sci-fi story is already starting to become a part of our daily life, and encourage all of you to become more familiar with such exciting technologies. Thank you.

Bio

Cartoonist.
Debuted with "Inugami Mokkosu". Currently drawing "Harurock" for "Morning" and "D Morning". (Vol.2 recently published)

Ruby

Misfit Wearables - Sonny Vu

Reason

Wearable devices and life logging service with them have been getting more and more popular. In that context, they delivered its first product, Misfit Shine which is a sleek and minimal design activity tracker through Indeigogo in 2012. Since then, Misfit has rapidly extended their product line introducing sleep monitor and fitness monitor, all easily blending into daily life. We feel these characteristics play a key role to bring in wearable devices to everybody's daily life and become a game changer in this expanding domain. We would like to praise their challenges and look forward to their further achievements.

Comment

We are thrilled to receive this recognition and award from Rakuten as we continue to devote ourselves to building great wearable and smart home products. We're particularly excited about Asian markets and are excited to be a part of the conference.

Bio

Misfit is focused on developing great wearable products: things that people would want to wear all the time for a long time. A pioneer in the emerging world of wearable products, the company is making products and services in the consumer health and fitness space to inspire people to be more active and develop healthy habits. Misfit’s first product is the award-winning Shine, an elegant physical activity tracker that you can instantly sync with your smartphone just by placing the device on the screen.

Ruby

Chef Practical Guide, automation of infrastructure configuration by code

Mr. Ryutaro Yoshiba

Mr. Yusuke Ando

Mr. Naoya Ito

Mr. Yutaro Sugai

Mr. Yuki Namikawa

Reason

They wrote a book explaining the practical introduction of Chef, which is software of automation and configuration for server management and is utilized widely all over the world, promoted and shared the standardization of knowledge about infrastructure management. In this book, they took actual use cases of building infrastructure and explained about tests, continuous integration, some various technologies such as VirtualBox, Vagrant, serverspec, etc, referring to each background, in addition to Chef itself, that contributed to popularizing DevOps and Infrastructure as Code getting attention as the important concept of system development and operation. There's more, they introduced examples of utilizing Chef based on their own experience, on blogs or at conferences, which made a practical influence on engineer communities. We appreciate their activities and contributions highly.

Comment

Thank you very much again for giving us such a great award. We are very thrilled this award. This book was written by 5 authors, Ando-san, Naoya-san, Sugai-san, Namikawa-san and me. It took approximately one year to publish the book after we started writing, but thanks to many readers we felt rewarded for our work.

In this fast changing world, we need to shorten the time to market from business perspectives. We need to improve any kinds of processes and works related to business. I know many of guys are adopting agile development in their organization but it’s not enough. As you know, you are paying lots of effort to build/manage environments for develop, test and production. It’s obviously time wasting. if you try to manage your infrastructures manually, your time will get robbed repeatedly. Thus you need to automate various kinds of your work to shorten the durations, improve quality and focus on valuable things. I know there are some barriers to adopt new things and abandon acquired habits, but you should consider to change these things. When you read this book and you feel useful, we are very happy.

Again, thank you very much for giving us a great award and We strongly appreciate event staffs’ hard work.

Bio

Ryutaro Yoshiba
Consultant on Cloud Computing, DevOps, Server Infrastructure Automation, Agile Development, Software Test Automation. Certified Scrum Professional(CSP), Certified Scrum Product Owner(CSPO) and Certified ScrumMaster(CSM) and Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM

Yusuke Ando
Developer and Evangelist for software development using PHP and Platform as a Service(PaaS). He has been contributing to software developer community through programming training for children, CoderDojo and various events.

Naoya Ito
Technology Advisor at KAIZEN platform, Inc. He has worked for Hatena as CTO, and GREE.

Yutaro Sugai
WebPay, Inc. He has been working as an server side engineer using Ruby on Rails.

Yuki Namikawa
Cyber Agent, Inc. He is well known as a pioneer of introducing Chef. Large scale introduction of Chef to Cyber Agent is especially widely recognized. He has also been validating, introducing and operating various Open Source software.