Keynote Speeches

Thursday, 31 August 2023, 15:25 – 16:25

Underwater Acoustic Communication and Underwater positioning towards the Promotion of Marine Industry in Okinawa

Invited Speaker

Tomohisa Wada
Vice Dean at Engineering Dept.,
University of the Ryukyus

Suppoter

Tatsuya Himeno
Executive Director, Okinawa Seabed Resources Industrial Development Organization

Abstract

Okinawa’s main industries are agriculture and fishing as primary industries, construction and manufacturing as secondary industries, which account for less than 20% of the total, and tourism, services, and IT industries as tertiary industries, which account for a large share. Until now, fishing and aquaculture have been the main forms of industry in the fisheries industry, but in the 2020s, the existence of mineral resources such as submarine hydrothermal deposits and methane hydrates in the seas around Okinawa Prefecture, as well as energy resources such as natural gas before that time, was confirmed, and new industries utilizing the ocean began to attract attention. This presentation will introduce the field of marine technology development in Okinawa. It will also introduce the development of underwater wireless communication technology that contributes to such marine technology development and the latest trends in underwater positioning technology that supports the use of underwater drones in marine civil engineering and marine surveys as an applied technology.

Biography

Tomohisa Wada was born in Japan on December 2, 1959. He joined the ULSI Laboratory, Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Japan in 1983 and engaged in the research and development of VLSI such as High-speed Static Random-access memories, Cache memories for Intel MPUs in 16 years. Since 2001, he has been a Professor at the Department of Information Engineering, the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan. In 2001, He was the founding member of Magna Design Net, Inc., which is a fab-less LSI design Company for communication related digital signal processing such as OFDM. Currently, he is also the chief scientist of Magna Design Net, Inc. who is engaging in the research and development of a terrestrial video broadcasting receiver, a wireless LAN, WiMAX, 4G-LTE and 5G systems. After 2009, he also started Underwater OFDM Acoustic communication systems and developed Underwater Acoustic OFDM wireless communication systems and Underwater Acoustic Positioning systems targeting for Underwater Drone controls.

Thursday, 31 August 2023, 16:45 – 17:45

Portable Audio Players: From birth to death

Invited Speaker


Akihiko Sugiyama
Yahoo! JAPAN Corporation

Abstract

This talk presents a history of portable audio players. The origin is the Sony Walkman released in 1971 as the portable audio player. Its all digital version can be dated back to 1994 which was born at an intersection of audio coding algorithms to provide sufficient subjective audio quality and a sufficient memory size on a single chip. LSI technology was indispensable to its birth which had a revolutionary impact on the hardware business. The audio-only device was naturally extended to include video signals to cover multimedia applications commonly encountered today in our daily life. Integration with a mobile phone brought us continuous extensions to wearables, connected operations, and sensing functions. Portable audio players have been replaced by music streaming services thanks to the advanced audio coding technologies and high-speed Internet access such as 4G mobile network technology and beyond.

Biography

Akihiko Sugiyama (a.k.a. Ken Sugiyama) is an experienced research engineer with 35+ years of experience developing a wide variety of telecommunications, speech, and audio signal processing systems for consumer and network system products.  In addition to proven record of adoption in products and international standards as well as publication and granted patents, marketing and sales experience to develop over 300 new contacts in the world in two years for technical licensing is unique as a research engineer.  Once representing Japan for ISO/IEC MPEG Audio standardization, experiences extend to ITU and 3GPP standardization as a delegate.  He has been teaching for 20+ years at the universities and has supervised 75 internship students. He has delivered 174 invited talks in 87 cities of 31 countries, and received 23 awards on signal processing and its education.  The sole inventor or a co-inventor of 272 registered patents in Japan, US, EPC, Canada, Australia, Korea, and Taiwan as well as 7 registered trademarks.  He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow and Honorary Member of IEICE, a past Distinguished Industry Speaker for IEEE SPS [2020-2021], a Renowned Distinguished Speaker (The Rock Star) for IEEE CTS (Consumer Technology Society) (Class of 2020) and a past Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE SPS [2014-2015] and for IEEE CTS [2017-2018].