Transitioning humanoid robots from laboratory to home: From 3D printing to AI-driven computation

Hironori Kasahara is a senior executive vice president at Waseda University with responsibility for research innovation, including entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and industry collaboration. He was the 2018 IEEE Computer Society president and is also an IEEE Fellow, an IEEE Eta Kappa Nu professional member, an Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) Fellow, a member of the Science Council of Japan, a board member of the Council on Competitiveness-Nippon, and a board member of the Engineering Academy of Japan. He has led several Japanese national projects on low-power, high-performance multicores and parallelizing compilers, supported by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1980, an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1982, and a Ph.D. in 1985 from Waseda University, and subsequently joined its faculty in 1986. He has been a professor of computer science since 1997 and a director of the Advanced Multicore Processor Research Institute since 2004. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (1985) and at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign’s Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (1989–1990). Dr. Kasahara’s numerous honors include the Commendation for Science and Technology from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the Spirit of IEEE Computer Society Award, the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Member Award, the IFAC World Congress Young Author Prize, and the IPSJ Contribution Award. He has published 222 reviewed papers and has 58 international patents in the fields of multicore processing, automatic parallelization, and green computing.

Dr. Umezu has been a research associate at Waseda University since 2003. He completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Hiroyuki Kawamoto at Waseda in 2006 before moving to RIKEN as a special postdoctoral researcher in 2007. He later worked as an assistant professor and then as a junior associate professor at Tokai University. In 2014, he returned to Waseda as an associate professor and in 2019 became a full professor in the Department of Modern Mechanical Engineering. His current research is focused on studying 3D printing and microfabrication and their application in bioengineering, green technology, and biomimetics.

Dr. Sanders did his undergraduate training at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, UK, supported by the Wellcome Trust. Following postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health and Georgetown University, Dr. Sanders joined TranXenoGen, a startup biotechnology company in Massachusetts working on avian transgenics. Pursuing his parallel passion for writing and editing, Dr. Sanders joined BioTechniques as an editor, before joining Science/AAAS in 2006. Currently, Dr. Sanders is the Director and Senior Editor for Custom Publishing for the journal Science and Program Director for Outreach.