President Shojiro NISHIO's Profile


President Shojiro NISHIO received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. He became a full professor at Osaka University in August 1992 and was conferred the title of Distinguished Professor in July 2013 for his outstanding academic achievements. Prior to assuming his post as President in August 2015, he also served a number of positions at Osaka University including the Founding Director of the Cybermedia Center (April 2000 to August 2003), the Dean of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology (August 2003 to August 2007), an Executive Vice President (August 2007 to August 2011), and the Director of Multimedia Data Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Multimedia Engineering at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology (April 2002 to August 2015).

Dr. Nishio acted as the Program Director in the Area of Information and Networking for the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) from April 2001 to March 2008, and acted as the Program Director (May 2010 to July 2015) and a Specially Appointed Fellow (April 2012 to March 2013) for the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).

His areas of expertise in database systems include concurrency control, knowledge discovery, deductive and object-oriented databases, multimedia systems, and database system architectures for advanced networks such as broadband networks and mobile computing environments.

Dr. Nishio has co-authored or co-edited more than 55 books and more than 650 refereed journal or conference papers. His journal papers have been published in the Journal of Computer and System Sciences, International Journal of Computer and Information Sciences, Data & Knowledge Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Broadcasting, ACM Trans. on Internet Technology, and ACM Trans. on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications. His research works have been presented at VLDB, EDBT, WWW, IEEE ICDE, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE ICDM, Pervasive, ACM MobiCom, IEEE PerCom, ACM CIKM, and ACM SIGIR.

Dr. Nishio has served as a member of the Program or Organizing Committees for more than 100 international conferences including VLDB (11 times), ACM SIGMOD (3 times), IEEE ICDE, EDBT, DOOD, DASFAA, IEEE ICDCS, and IEEE Infocom. He served as the Program Committee (PC) Co-Chairs for several international conferences including DOOD 1989, PNPM 1989, ISOTAS 1992, VLDB 1995, AMCP 1998, and IEEE ICDE 2005.

He served as the General Co-Chair of Bio-ADIT 2004 and Bio-ADIT 2006, the Far East Conference Chair of VLDB 1993, the Area Coordinator of Japan for VLDB (1986-1994), the Asia and Australasia Area Coordinator of VLDB 2005, a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering (Asia Coordinator) (1992-1997), the Vice-Chair and PC Chair of the Japan Chapter of ACM SIGMOD (1994-1995), a member of the DOOD Steering Committee (1989-2000), a member of the Board of Directors of the VLDB Endowment (2002-2007), and the Asia and Australasia Area Coordinator of ACM SIGMOD 2007.

He served as an editor of "IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering", "VLDB Journal", "ACM Trans. on Internet Technology", and "Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery", and is currently serving as a member of the editorial boards of "Data & Knowledge Engineering" and "New Generation Computing".

He has led large-scale national research projects funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) under the theme of "Database Approach for Advanced Multimedia Content Processing (AMCP)" (1997-2001), "The 21st Century Center of Excellence Program" funded by MEXT under the theme of "New Information Technologies for Building a Networked Symbiosis Environment" (2002-2007), and the CSTP (Council Program of Science and Technology Policy) Coordination Program of Science and Technology Projects funded by the JST under the theme of "Very Large Information Integration and Application Platform" (2007-2009).

Dr. Nishio received the 2001 Achievement Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), the 2004 Achievement Award from Funai Foundation for Information Technology (FFIT), the 2010 Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award from the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), the 2010 Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award from the Database Society of Japan (DBSJ), the 2012 Distinguished Achievement Award from Tateisi (OMRON) Science and Technology Foundation, and the 2013 Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award from IEICE.

He has also received various best paper awards from learned societies including the 1995 Annual Best Paper Award from the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence, the 2003 Annual Best Paper Award from IEICE, the 2005 Annual Best Paper Award from DBSJ, and the 2007, 2008, 2010 Annual Best Paper Awards from IPSJ that honored the best paper among all journal papers published by that learned society in a particular year. Further, he has received several best paper awards at international conferences including ICMU 2005, CISIS 2009, AP2PS 2009, ICMU 2010, ANT 2010, and 3PGCIC 2012.

Dr. Nishio received the Medal with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan in 2011, which is awarded to individuals who have made outstanding and important contributions in academic fields, arts and sports. He also received the Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award in the information science and technology field from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan in 2014. In 2016, Dr. Nishio was named a Person of Cultural Merit for his significant achievements in the field of Information Science.

Dr. Nishio is a member of eight learned societies, including IEEE (Fellow), ACM, IPSJ (Fellow, a member of the board of trustees: 1999-2000, and Vice President: 2012-2013), IEICE (Fellow), and DBSJ (a member of the board of trustees and auditors: 2002-2011, President: 2012-2013).

He has been a member of the Science Council of Japan since March 2006 and acted as the Chair of Informatics Area (October 2011 to September 2014).

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