Dr. Kunio Kashino graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, at the University of Tokyo in 1990 and received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Engineering at the same university in 1995. He joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (now NTT, Inc.) in April 1995 and worked at the Basic Research Laboratories, where he conducted research on multimedia understanding, focusing on music and video.Thereafter, he has been affiliated with NTT Communication Science Laboratories from 1999 to the present; he served as a research group leader from 2010, as the director of Media Information Laboratory from 2014 to 2019, as a senior distinguished researcher from 2015, and has been serving as an NTT Fellow since 2023. During that time, he has also been actively involved in education and research in academia, serving as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge in 2002, a visiting professor at the National Institute of Informatics from 2008, an adjunct professor at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo from 2015 to 2020, and a guest professor at the University of Osaka since 2023.

For over 30 years, he has researched the understanding of multimedia, not only aiming to improve object recognition accuracy but also pioneering groundbreaking research. He has proposed innovative approaches, including analytical techniques to uncover the inherent structure in real-world media information (scene analysis), high-speed dictionary grounding techniques for media information (media search), and techniques to construct the dictionary itself from data (concept acquisition). In particular, his research into media search not only earned the first-ever paper award for a Japanese researcher in the international journal "IEEE Transactions on Multimedia," but the music video copyright management service developed based on this technology also received the “ASPIC Cloud Award 2015 Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Award.” It is now widely used as social infrastructure, serving as the foundation for the proper distribution of media content. Furthermore, in his research on concept acquisition, he was the first to achieve sound source separation based on the semantic content of spoken language, and this achievement was recognized at ACM Multimedia, a top international conference in multimedia. Thus, their series of efforts and research achievements, ranging from pioneering new research fields to social implementation, have been highly praised worldwide.

In addition to the aforementioned awards, he has also received numerous academic awards for his achievements to date, including the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Young Scientist Award and the Science and Technology Award. At the IEICE, he received awards such as the Achievement Award, the Information and Systems Society Excellent Paper Award, and the Information and Systems Society Distinguished Service Award, and was elected a Fellow in 2018. Furthermore, he has played a leading role in advancing his field of research through his roles as President of the IEICE Information and Systems Society, Director of the IEICE Editorial and Publishing Affairs, Chair of the IEICE Technical Committee on Pattern Recognition and Media Understanding (PRMU), Governing Board Member at the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and Associate Member of the Science Council of Japan.

As described above, his contributions to the field of electronic information and communications have been outstanding, and we are confident that he is a worthy recipient of the IEICE Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award.