Akinori Yonezawa

Akinori Yonezawa
Born(1947-06-17)June 17, 1947
Japan
NationalityJapanese
Alma materUniversity of Tokyo, MIT
Known forConcurrent/parallel object-oriented programming models and languages
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
Institutions
Doctoral advisorCarl Hewitt
Doctoral students

Akinori Yonezawa (米澤 明憲, Yonezawa Akinori)(born June 17, 1947) is a Japanese computer scientist. Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo.[1][2] Received Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[3] Currently, a senior fellow at the Chiba Institute of Technology, Software Technology and Artificial Intelligence Research Center.[4] Former member of the Science Council of Japan.[5] Specializes in object-oriented programming languages, distributed computing and information security.[6] From its beginning, he contributed to the promotion and development of object-oriented programming, which is the basis of programming languages most commonly used today (Python, Java, C++, etc.), and served as a program committee member and chairman of the main international conferences OOPSLA and ECOOP. At the same time, he is internationally known as a pioneer of the concepts and models of “concurrent/parallel objects".[7][8] In software systems constructed based on concurrent/parallel objects, information processing and computation proceed by concurrent/parallel message passing among a large number of objects.[9] Yonezawa's concurrent (parallel) objects are influenced by Actors, the concept of which was proposed by Carl Hewitt at MIT's AI Lab in the early 1970s[10] and later rigorously formulated by Gul Agha.[11] However, concurrent objects and actors are fundamentally different. An actor is an object that does not have a "state," whereas Yonezawa's concurrent (parallel) object can have a persistent state. For this reason, concurrent (parallel) objects are often used in implementing large parallel processing software systems. Large-scale software systems built and put into practical use based on concurrent (parallel) objects include an online virtual world system Second Life,[12] social networking services such as Facebook[13] and X (Twitter),[14] and large-scale molecular dynamics simulation systems such as NAMD.[15][16]

  1. ^ Professor Emeritus Akinori Yonezawa receives the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology News, the University of Tokyo (November 4, 2020)
  2. ^ Akinori Yonezawa, Director of the Software Technology and Artificial Intelligence Research Center, receives the Order of the Sacred Treasure, the Chiba Institute of Technology TOPICS (November 3, 2020)
  3. ^ Specifications and verification techniques for parallel programs based on message passing semantics, MIT Ph.D. Dissertation, December1977
  4. ^ Software Technology and Artificial Intelligence Research Center, the Chiba Institute of Technology
  5. ^ The 21st term member list of the Science Council of Japan
  6. ^ Akinori Yonezawa, My software research, Computer Software, Vol.21, No.5, 2004
  7. ^ Akinori Yonezawa, Association for Computing Machinery(ACM) Fellows, 1999
  8. ^ The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2008
  9. ^ The first paper on concurrent object-oriented programming. It is based on asynchronous method invocations. Akinori Yonezawa, Jean-Pierre Briot, and Etsuya Shibayama. Object-oriented concurrent programming in ABCL/1. In Proceedings of OOPSLA’86. 258–268
  10. ^ Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger. A universal modular ACTOR formalism for artificial intelligence. In Proceedings of the 3rd international joint conference on Artificial intelligence (IJCAI'73). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 235–245, 1973
  11. ^ Gul Agha. "Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems". Doctoral Dissertation. MIT Press. 1986.
  12. ^ Jim Purbrick, Mark Lentczner: Second life: the world's biggest programming environment. OOPSLA Companion 2007
  13. ^ HACK, the programming language used to describe the Facebook infrastructure with objects and asynchronous operations. HACK home page
  14. ^ Much of the Twitter infrastructure is described in Scala with objects and concurrency. "effectivescala" page in twitter's GitHub
  15. ^ University of Illinois NAMD home page
  16. ^ Charm++ programming model used in constructing NAMD