Keynote
Hisashi KobayashiSherman Fairchild University Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
Executive Adviser, National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), Japan
Hisashi Kobayashi is the Sherman Fairchild University Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Princeton University, where he served as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (1986-91) and initiated a major expansion of Princeton's Engineering School and several new inter-disciplinary centers and programs. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty he was with the IBM Research Division from 1967 until 1986, where he held many managerial positions, including the Founding Director of the IBM Japan Science Institute (now called the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory) and directed various research projects in computer science and engineering (1982-86).
Among his technical contributions is his 1970 invention of a high-density digital recording scheme -- widely known as partial-response coding and maximum-likelihood decoding (PRML) -- which is now the industry standard for virtually all magnetic storage devices such as HDD (hard disc drive) and optical disk memories such as HD DVD. For this fundamental contribution he was awarded the 2005 Eduard Rhein Technology Award. He has also contributed to performance evaluation methodology, especially diffusion process approximations, queueing and loss network models, and their computational algorithms. He authored "Modeling and Analysis" (Addison Wesley, 1978) and several book chapters. Most recently, he and Brian L. Mark published "System Modeling and Analysis" (Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008). Kobayashi is a founding member of IFIP WG 7.3 and served as the founding editor-in-chief of "Performance Evaluation" journal (1980-86).
He was a visiting professor at UCLA (1969-70), Univ. of Hawaii (1975), Stanford (1976), Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany (1979-80), Free University of Brussels, Belgium (1980), Univ. of Tokyo (1991-92), and Univ. of Victoria, Canada (1998-99).
Kobayashi has been a Fellow of IEEE since 1977, and a Life Fellow since 2004. He received the Humboldt Prize (Senior US Scientist Award) from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany (1979), IFIP's Silver Core Award (1980); IBM Outstanding Contribution Awards (1975, 1984) and IBM Invention Achievement Awards (1971 and 1973) and was elected to the Engineering Academy of Japan (Japan's National Engineering of Academy) in 1992.
He has served as a scientific advisor for many organizations including NASA, Washington D.C., SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, the ISS (Institute of System Science) and KRDL (Kent Ridge Digital Lab) of Singapore, the ASI (Advanced System Institute) of British Columbia, Canada, the AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology) of METI, Japan, and the Program "COE (Centers of Excellence) in the 21st Century" Program of the JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). Currently he is a technical advisor for the NICT (National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies) of Japan for their new generation network architecture project, called AKARI.