DATE2022.04.13 #Awards & Prizes

Associate Professor Shimpei Kato receives the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Associate Professor Shinpei Kato

Associate Professor Shinpei Kato of Graduate School of Information Science and Technology and Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, has received the 2022 Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The subject of the award is "Development of an Explainable Fully Automated Driving System.

Fully automated driving systems, which do not require human intervention, are expected to go beyond the conventional automobile industry to become a core technology that can solve various social problems such as aging society and labor shortage. At the same time, however, it is unclear to what extent responsibility should be entrusted to machines, and there is a need for technology that can clarify the boundary between human and machine responsibility from the perspective of social acceptability. Associate Professor Kato has established a methodology that systematically defines the conditions under which a fully automated driving system is expected to operate normally as an Operational Design Domain (ODD), thereby systematically explaining to various stakeholders the range of responsibility that can be entrusted to a machine. Some of these are computer system issues, such as real-time performance, and some are algorithmic issues, such as uncertainty, and it can be said that Associate Professor Kato, who is well versed in the field of computer science, was able to derive these results. The fully automated driving system developed by Associate Professor Kato was the first in Japan to create a car that can drive on ordinary roads without a person in the driver's seat, and all of this technology continues to spread around the world as open source software. This is truly an epoch-making achievement that has contributed to the development and improvement of Japan's social economy and people's lives, and is actually being utilized. We offer our heartfelt congratulations.

2022 Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/mext_00989.html

(Responsibility: Professor Yusuke Miyao, Department of Information Science)