Dr. Nagao graduated from Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University and received his Ph.D in Information Engineering from Kyoto University in 1966.
He was appointed the President of Kyoto University in 1997 and became Emeritus Professor in 2003. He took up the position of President of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in 2004 and has been acting as the Librarian of the National Diet Library since April 2007.
He also served as the President of the Japan Association of National Universities; as the founder President of International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) and the Association for Natural Language Processing (NLP); and as the President of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), and Japan Library Association (JLA).
Dr. Nagao’s research activities cover a variety of topics, including natural language processing, image processing, machine translation, information engineering, and intelligence information science.
His academic contributions were recognized through the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1993) and the Medal with Purple Ribbon honored by the Japanese Government (1997). He was Japan Prize Laureate in the prize category of Information and Media Technology (2005), and Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur, France (2005).

Thomas DeFanti, PhD, is a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), is a founder and co-director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is co-creator, with Dan Sandin, of the CAVE™ virtual reality theater. Dr. DeFanti is principal investigator of the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) International Research Network Connections Program’s TransLight/StarLight award, and was previously principal investigator of the NSF-funded EuroLink and STAR TAP/StarLight initiatives.
He is also a co-principal investigator of the NSF-funded OptIPuter project. Dr. DeFanti was one of several American technical advisors to the G7 GIBN activity in 1995, is a founding member of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), is a founding member of CineGrid, and is a member of the GigaPort/SURFnet Scientific Advisory Committee. Dr. DeFanti has served as chairman of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization and has been very active in ACM SIGGRAPH and ACM/IEEE Supercomputing conferences. He also co-created and co-chaired the international grid (iGrid) Workshops. In recognition of his services to UIC and the community at large, Dr. DeFanti was recognized as an ACM Fellow in 1994, and is the recipient of the 1988 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award, the 1989 UIC University Scholar Award, and the 2000 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award.

Dr. Shojiro Nishio received his B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1975, 1977, and 1980, respectively. He has been a full professor at Osaka University since August 1992. At Osaka University, he served as the founding director of the Cybermedia Center from April 2000 to August 2003, and as the Dean of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology from August 2003 to August 2007. Since August 2007, he has been serving as a trustee and Vice President of Osaka University. He is currently leading the CSTP (Council for Science and Technology Policy) Coordination Program of Science and Technology Projects funded by JST (Japan Science and Technology Agency) under the theme of "Very Large Information Integration and Application Platform" (2007-2009). His current research interests include database systems and multimedia systems. Dr. Nishio has served on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, and is currently involved with the editorial board of Data and Knowledge Engineering. He received the 2001 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) and the 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Funai Foundation for Information Technology (FFIT), and annual best paper awards from four learned societies: the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (1995), IEICE (2003), the Database Society of Japan (2006), and the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) (2007). Dr. Nishio is a fellow of IEICE and IPSJ, and is a member of six learned societies, including ACM and IEEE.