Globalization has become a keyword in academic societies as well as industry and universities. Because IEICE-ISS is a group of researchers in the field that accelerates the world’s globalization, its importance and responsibility should be highly recognized. My concern about the globalization is the decline of
Japan’s presence in international academic activities. Japan once certainly played a dominant role in Asia, but this passes into history. Indeed the enhancement of the academic level in the entire Asian region is very favorable, but it is not acceptable that Japan remains as it is. To solve this problem, ISS could perform a lot of issues, e.g. to make a plan of increasing the population of prospective young researchers. IEICE is the ‘mother’ society to me where I published my first paper and presented my first technical report. I would like to do my best for the future development of ISS.
Noboru Babaguchi received the B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in communication engineering from Osaka University, in 1979, 1981 and 1984, respectively. He is currently a Professor of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, Osaka University. His research interests include multimedia computing and visual privacy protection. He received IEICE-ISS Distinguished Service Award and Best Paper Award of PCM2006, IAS2009 and FIT2009. He served as a Chair of TG-PRMU and TG-EMM, and a General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2012 and MMM2008. He is a Fellow of IEICE.