Distinguished Educational Practitioners Award

  Professor Hideki Sunahara graduated from the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Keio University in 1988, and is now Professor of the Keio University Graduate School of Media Design, after working until 2008 as Research Associate of the University of Electro-Communications and Associate Professor and Professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. He has been engaged in the research fields of computer architecture, internet and sensor networks and has also contributed in the development and implementation of security specialist education programs thorough collaborations among universities and industry.
  He led the IT Keys (IT specialist program to promote Key Engineers as security Specialists) since 2007 concentrating on four graduate schools and enterprises in the Kansai area, which developed an education program to cultivate professional engineers/managers with practical abilities, and had success in a challenging approach. Since 2012, he has developed the SecCap course (practical security education course) in which five graduate schools and many other participating universities jointly collaborated to build an education system for human resources that the whole country needs. Moreover, he is endeavoring since 2016 to move forward with a Basic SecCap course in the security field for the 2nd period enPiT.
   The IT Keys and SecCap have both been highly evaluated by participating universities, graduates and the industrial community, and many of the 376 graduates of these courses are playing an active role as core talent in industry and in universities. Based on these achievements, he is working on scalable and sustainable human resource education as a leader in cyber security human resource development with the development project “Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure” for SIP (Cross-Ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program) from 2015.
  Although these developments in educational programs and implementation are not his contribution alone, his conception, planning ability, human connections and his energy have been absolutely essential for their success. I recommend Prof. Hideki Sunahara to the educational excellence prize as the main contributor in a series of achievements.