He graduated from Azabu High School in 1966, and graduated from the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Mathematical Engineering
in 1970. He received Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science in 1977. His dissertation is entitled "Specification and verification techniques for parallel programs based on message passing semantics".[3][15]
He engaged in research on parallel and distributed computing models at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. After returning to Japan, he studied and taught at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and became a professor at the University of Tokyo, Department of Information Science in 1988.[16] He held various positions of the University of Tokyo, including director of the Information Infrastructure Center.[16] He was elected as a member of the Science Council of Japan in 2008.[5] In 2011 he retired from the University of Tokyo and became a professor emeritus. He was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2009 [17] and the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in 2020.[1][2][18][19] After retiring from the University of Tokyo, he served as deputy director of the RIKEN Computational Science Institute until 2015, contributing to the operation of the supercomputer "K".[20] Then, he served as Director of the Software Technology and Artificial Intelligence Research Center, the Chiba Institute of Technology until 2022.[21] Currently, he is a senior fellow at the research center.[4]
In 2012, an international symposium commemorating Yonezawa's 65th birthday was held in Kobe, and a collection of papers (Festschrift) authored by the symposium participants was published by German publisher Springer-Verlag in 2014.[22]
Additionally, an article overviewing Yonezawa's computer software research up to around 2003 was published in a journal of the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology.[6]
He served as a member of the project evaluation and promotion committee for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry's Real World Computing (RWC), which began as a 10-year project in 1988.[24] From April 2001 to March 2004, he was a member of the Cabinet Office Regulatory Reform Council[25] and the chief of the Education and Research Working Group.[26] He concurrently served as Auditor of the National Institute of Information and Systems,[27] Director of Database Center for Life Science,[28] and deputy director of the Information Security Research Center in the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology(AIST).[29] Furthermore, from April 2005 to March 2006, he was the chairman of the Sugimori Junior High School Regional School Management Council in Suginami Ward, Tokyo.[30] A former member of Engine 01 Cultural Strategy Council.[31][32]
International & domestic academic roles and awards[edit]
He served as the chairperson and committee member of numerous international and domestic academic conferences and societies related to programming languages, object-oriented computing, and parallel & distributed computing, and served on the editorial board of academic journals and journals of American academic societies.[33] He was awarded the title of ACM Fellow from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),[7] Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan[34] and Fellow of the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology.[35] He served as chairman of the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology[23] and scientific advisor to the German National Institute for Information Science and Technology (GMD).[24] Furthermore, since 2006, he has served as a member of the TCAAB (Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board) at Microsoft headquarters (Redmond, Washington).[36]
In 2008, he received the Dahl-Nygaard Prize from the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO) as a proponent of the concept of "concurrent/parallel objects" and for his long-standing research results ranging from theory to practice.[8][16][37] This award was given to him for the first time in Asia. He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2009,[17] the Okawa Prize in 2018[38] and the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in 2020.[1][2][18][19]
