Toru Nakanishi is a specialist in educational engineering, and has particularly contributed to the education of engineering and information ethics. He worked for Mitsubishi Electric Corp., and has then been involved in education and research at Osaka University, Osaka Institute of Technology, the Open University of Japan, and Otemon Gakuin University over 30 years. He received his doctorate degree in engineering from Osaka University for his study on the design of database schema for speeding up retrieval processing.

He has practiced the education of engineering and information ethics with a new methodology to let students work seriously on the intricate problems in engineering and information ethics, with an awareness of the multifaced features of issues on which people tend to embrace diverse opinions. He started active learning of engineering ethics using world café type discussions from the year 2013. The world café is a collaborative conversation method by which participants practiced a structured process for knowledge sharing. Small groups of participants discuss a topic at their tables, and then all members but one at each table move to other tables after the discussion round ends. This process is then iterated several times. By this method, participants are expected to share the knowledge and various opinions from other participants. We cannot find any papers or presentations on the education of engineering ethics using world café in Japan other than those of Nakanishi. His class at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University has been attended by about 80 students every year, and we can see from anonymized comment papers that there have been openminded and frank discussions in these classes.

He started as early as the 2000s to develop educational methods using video for the education of engineering and information ethics as a member of a group of researchers in the education of information ethics, and the group has published a series of short videos for the education of information ethics. He also developed a lecture program which uses a virtual character (Vtuber) as the lecturer for information and engineering ethics for students of information engineering who are young and familiar with animation characters to help them learn the interests and viewpoints of consumers of information technology (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 15K00996).

We firmly believe Professor Nakanishi's outstanding and unique practices and achievements to provide many students with opportunities to seriously consider the issues of engineering ethics the multifaced features of these issues using world café method, and the struggle to develop new methodologies for such education using new media to keep up with the generational changes of students is worthy of the Distinguished Education Practitioners Award, and we recommend him as one of the recipients.