NEC C&C Foundation Awards 2016 C&C Prize

Tokyo, October 13, 2016 – The NEC C&C Foundation today
announced that the 2016 C&C Prize will be awarded to two groups for their
contributions to the R&D of spintronics technologies, neural network and
deep-learning technologies. Professor Hideo Ohno will represent Group A and
Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton will represent Group B. Each recipient will be
recognized with a certificate of merit and a plaque. Each group will also
receive a cash award of ten million yen.

The
C&C Prize was established in 1985 and is awarded to distinguished persons
in recognition of outstanding contributions to R&D activities and
pioneering work related to the integration of computers and communications
technologies and the social impact of developments in these fields. This year’s
two recipient groups are outlined below.

The
prize ceremony and acceptance speeches will be held on Wednesday, November
30 from 15:00at the ANA InterContinental Tokyo.

Main
features of the new technologies include the following:

Professor, Research Institute of Electric
Communications, Tohoku University

For Pioneering Contributions to the Research
and Development of Spintronics Technology

It goes without saying that large-scale
integrated semiconductor circuits constitute a core technology of information
and communications technology (ICT). They also support the evolution and
development of society as the foundation of information-processing systems.
However, their products and fields are major energy users. This is because the
amounts of information dealt with by Big Data and the IoT continue to expand.
Moreover, as processing becomes increasingly sophisticated, high-level
integration of high-performance and energy-saving capabilities is a key
requirement for the integrated circuits and components.

Anticipating such societal development and a
rise in requirements, Professor Hideo Ohno thought of applying the electron
spin of magnetic materials to electronics technology. He then went on to
develop spintronics technologies one after the other with the aim of creating
innovative high-performance components.

He also conducted applied research focused on
the excellent energy efficiency offered by spintronics technologies. Notably,
he himself played a leading role in the creation and development of the field
of spintronics technology research. He achieved the world’s first crystal
growth of III-V ferromagnetic compound semiconductors, building models of
ferromagnetic expression in compound semiconductors, controlling phase
transitions between ferromagnetism and paramagnetism, and proposing and
demonstrating many different new components consisting of ferromagnetic
semiconductors.

Prof. Ohno also devoted himself to the
establishment of research and development systems. Through these endeavors, he
contributed to the fostering of superior researchers in his field by
constructing fabrication infrastructure, by establishing international research
centers for the creation of innovative spintronic elements. Moreover, his
achievements have gone well beyond the academic realm, to make the
technological breakthroughs for industrial applications needed by the society
of the future. In consideration of Prof. Ohno’s pioneering work on spintronics
technology described above, Prof. Ohno highly deserves the C&C Prize.

Emeritus
Professor, University of Toronto

Distinguished
Researcher, Google Inc.

For Outstanding Contributions to Neural
network Research and the Pioneering Development of Innovative Deep-learning
Technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fundamental
technology that is essential for the provision of efficient and sophisticated
services and the resolution of increasingly complex social challenges. Going
forward, it is expected to develop into a technology with enormous potential
for energizing society through its application to many different industries. AI
research is now experiencing its big boom. The combination of powerful
deep-learning algorithms, advances in big-data processing technology, and huge
increases in computing power have brought us to a stage where artificial
intelligence is capable of taking on previously impossible challenges. It is
safe to say that we are about to enter a period of full-fledged application and
popularization.

Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton is the foremost
contributor to the establishment of neural network technology. He has made
major contributions to the development of the Boltzmann machine,
backpropagation algorithm and other many fundamental technologies of neural
networks. In a seminal paper in 2006, he proposed an efficient learning
procedure to allow deep multilayer networks to be “pre-trained” without
requiring any labeled data. The procedure was used to achieve dramatic
improvements in speech recognition. Moreover, in 2012, in a major competition
of image recognition, Prof. Hinton’s team used deep convolutional neural
networks to achieve a major improvement over other regularization methods. This
result had a big impact on a lot of researchers in the machine-learning field.

The deep-learning technology that he
developed was a breakthrough in the field of machine learning. It accelerated
the practical application of machine learning to industrial fields, becoming
the driving force in the development of artificial intelligence as it exists
today. Through his pioneering roles, he has made major contributions not only
to the development of information and communications technology, but also to
socio-economic and industrial development. This is a record of achievement that
fully deserves the C&C Prize.