Dr. Shoji Makino completed the Master's program at the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University in 1981 and joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (currently Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, NTT) in the same year. Since 1996, he was a Senior Research Engineer, Supervisor, at NTT Human Interface Laboratories, and since 2003, he served as a Head of Media Information Laboratory at NTT Communication Science Laboratories. He was appointed as a professor at the Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Tsukuba in 2009, and then, a professor at the Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems at Waseda University, in 2021.

He has been engaged in research on statistical signal processing for acoustic signals for more than 40 years, and his outstanding creativity and strong leadership have made remarkable achievements in the development and systematization of innovative technologies in this field.

After joining NTT, he promoted research on high-speed convergent acoustic echo canceller theory based on second-order statistics. By focusing on the attenuation characteristics of sound waves and the properties of voice, he developed an adaptive algorithm that realizes high-speed adaptive followability and realized a high-performance acoustic echo canceller device with an automatic learning function by voice. This made it possible to instantly erase echoes without disturbing conversations, and realize a seamless voice communication environment as if the user were in the same room at the remote location. In addition, he developed a board with the new adaptive algorithm in collaboration with AT & T in the United States. This device was introduced to the market worldwide, and more than 50,000 acoustic echo canceller devices have been sold in Japan based on this technology. These have dramatically improved conventional call performance and have had a significant impact on society.

He also analyzed the mechanism of blind source separation based on independent component analysis, which is an unsupervised learning theory based on higher-order statistics from the perspective of spatial acoustics. For the first time in the world, his team clarified that the principle of blind source separation based on independent component analysis is equivalent to the parallel simultaneous learning of a microphone array called an adaptive beamformer. By elucidating this principle, it has become possible to apply various acoustic signal processing techniques cultivated in adaptive beamformers to sound source separation techniques. As a result, he has significantly improved the separation performance of blind source separation technology and achieved the world's highest performance. With this as the start, he established a new acoustic signal processing and statistical estimation theory, led global research in the field, and established a new research field.

For these achievements, he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award, two Achievement Awards, and the title of Fellow by the IEICE. He was also awarded numerous awards, including IEEE Fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE SPS Leo L. Beranek Meritorious Award, ICA Unsupervised Learning Pioneer Award, IEEE MLSP Competition Award, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award, Hattori Hoko Award, and Technical Development Award of Acoustical Society of Japan.

At the IEICE, he has served as Vice President of the Engineering Sciences Society and a member of the Fellow Recommendation Committee and has contributed to the development of the IEICE. Internationally, he held key positions, including organizing chairs of international conferences, keynote speaker, tutorial lecturer, IEEE and EURASIP Technical Committee Chairs, associate editor, steering committee member, IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governor member, IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal Committee member, IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award Committee member, IEEE SPS Fellow Evaluation Committee member.

As mentioned above, Dr. Makino‘s contribution to the IEICE and the field of electronic information and communication is highly remarkable. We recommend Dr. Makino as an Honorary Member of the IEICE.