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The Maejima Hisoka Award was established in memory of Mr. Maejima, one of the founders of Japan’s telecommunications industry, and to pass on and promote his spirit. The award is presented to those who have made outstanding contribution to the advancement of the information and communications industry (including postal services) or the broadcasting industry. Two parties of NICT researchers received this award in FY2020.NICT bestows the honorary fellow title on those who have made particularly outstanding achievements in research and development at NICT. This title was most recently awarded to TORISAWA Kentaro (Director General, Data-driven Intelli-gent System Research Center (DIRECT), Universal Commu-nication Research Institute) on July 1, 2020.Area of Research: Research and development for the advancement of high-speed satellite network technologyAward reception date: September 18, 2020Recipient’s comment: I have engaged in sat-Area of Research: Research on and develop-ment of a space division multiplexing optical transmission technologyAward reception date: September 18, 2020Recipients’ comment: The amount of internet trafc is expected to increase rapidly as 5G and later-generation networks are adopted. Our research has been focused on signicant-ly increasing the transmission capacity of op-tical ber communications to meet expected future communications demand. In the pro-cess of working on this, we achieved several ICT-related world records through close col-65th Maejima Hisoka Award presented by the Tsushinbunka AssociationIn addition to being a computer scien-tist, Dr. TORISAWA is also knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects such as phi-losophy and history. He has been researching Natural Language Processing (NLP), a sub-discipline of AI, using his broad knowledge.At NICT, he has led the development of a series of large-scale NLP systems: WIS-DOM X (a web information analysis sys-tem), DISAANA and D-SUMM (disaster information analysis systems) and WEKDA (a next-generation spoken dialogue system). His broad knowledge and high research skills in computer science and NLP enabled these achievements. Dr. TORISAWA’s knowl-edge and skills also greatly contributed to the development, in collaboration with private rms and other national research centers, of MICSUS (a multimodal interactive care sup-port system) and SOCDA (a disaster relief chatbot).He exhibited excellent leadership in or-ganizing a collaborative team effort by many researchers (including NLP researchers, par-allel and distributed computing specialists and linguists), programmers and data cre-ators to develop these complex, large-scale AI systems. Some of these systems have been used by local governments to carry out disaster drills and actual disaster relief op-erations. In addition, software licenses for these systems have been provided to private companies. His achievements and the con-cepts he devised have been highly valued by major organizations, leading him to receive many awards, including the JSPS (Japan So-ciety for the Promotion of Science) Prize and the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) Minister Award in Science and Technology. He was also granted access to Twitter, Inc.’s large tweet dataset through “Twitter Data Grants.”TORISAWA KentaroDirector General, Data-driven Intelligent System Research Center,Universal Communication Research InstituteKADOWAKI NaotoVice President, Member of the Board of Directors, NICTAWAJI YoshinariResearch Executive Director, Universal Communication Research InstituteResearch Manager, Photonic Network System Laboratory, Network System Research InstituteSAKAGUCHI JunSenior Researcher, Photonic Network SystemLaboratory, Network System Research InstituteRademacher Georg FriedrichResearcher, Photonic Network System Laboratory, Network System Research InstitutePuttnam BenSenior Researcher, Photonic Network System Laboratory, Network System Research InstituteSoares Luís RubenSenior Researcher, Photonic Network System Laboratory, Network System Research Instituteellite communications research since I joined the Radio Research Laboratory—a precur-sor of NICT. It is a great honor for me that my work—the development of broadband satellite network technologies, including the WINDS satellite—was highly received. I thank the many people who supported my research, including my seniors who provided me with guidance.laboration with the industrial and academic sectors. We thank NICT for understanding and supporting our work. We will continue our effort to develop high performance tech-nologies for this purpose together with and necessary strategy for putting them into prac-tice.NICT Fellowfrom left, Georg Friedrich Rademacher, Luis Rube Soares, Ben Puttnam, and Yoshinari Awaji13NICT NEWS 2020 No.6TOPICS