Hideyuki Sotobayashi wins the ICO Prize
The ICO Prize for 2006 is won by Dr Hideyuki Sotobayashi of Japan.
Dr Hideyuki Sotobayashi, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.
ICO established in 1982 the ICO Prize, to be given annually to an individual who has made a noteworthy contribution to optics, published or submitted for publication before he or she has reached the age of 40. (Specifically, the Prize winner must not have reached the age of 40 before December 31 of the year for which the Prize is awarded).
The proposal of the ICO Prize Committee for the year 2006 has been to deliver it to Dr. Hideyuki Sotobayashi, a Senior Researcher at the Advanced Communications Technology Group, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan. This proposal was unanimously approved by the ICO Bureau held in Saint Petersburg (Russia) last September 2006. The award citation reads: “The ICO Prize for the year 2006 is given to Dr. Hideyuki Sotobayashi in recognition of his outstanding contributions in the areas of optics communications, optical fiber technologies and new photonic devices. These achievements were done as a researcher younger than 40 years old (as per December 31, 2006)”.
Hideyuki Sotobayashi received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1997 at the University of Tokyo. He then was engaged as an attached researcher at the NICT and is currently a senior scientist in the same institution inside the Advanced Communications Technology Group in Tokyo (Japan). Also, he is a researcher affiliated at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States of America. His research interests include fiber lasers, highly nonlinear optical fibers for supercontinuum generation, nano-scale photonic crystal microcavities, broad-band optical amplifiers based upon optical fibers, optical code division multiplexing (OCDM) transmission systems and ultrafast hierarchical hybrid OCDM/Wavelength Demultiplexing (WDM) photonic, devices. Among these research activities and achievements, one should mention that in 2002 Hideyuki Sotobatashi and two other collaborators in Japan were proposing a photonic gateway performing the bilateral conversion and reconversion of multiplexing format and operating at 40-Gb/s (4/spl times/10 Gb/s). The optical OCDM-to-WDM conversion and WDMO-to-CDM reconversion was experimentally demonstrated for the first time. The experimental scheme was based upon ultrafast photonic processing both in the time domain and frequency domain, namely, optical encoding/decoding along with optical time-gating in the time domain and supercontinuum generation followed by spectrum slicing in the frequency domain. Thus, they were demonstrating the feasibility of ultra-high-speed operation features in photonic networks. Moreover, Hideyuki Sotobayashi has reviewed the very current photonics devices for redesigning with simplified configurations. Thus, he has significantly contributed to improve the performances of key technologies for hierarchical Optical Time Domain (OTDM)/WDM multiplexing format conversions, and OTDM wavelength-band conversion networks.
Hideyuki Sotobayashi has authored or co-authored more than 60 peer reviewed articles in international journals. He has been invited to various international conferences, has received many distinctions and awards, to mention for example the 1999 Young Engineer Award from the Institute of Electronic and Communication Engineers of Japan and the recent 2005 Young Scientist Award from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan. He holds one awarded patent. He is also very active in various professional societies in the area of optics, photonics and electrical engineering and has participated in many scientific committees and tutorials in the area of photonics and optics communications technologies in the recent past years.
With the contributions of Hideyuki Sotobatashi it is nowadays demonstrated that the optical transmission technologies are dramatically progressing. The future of photonic networks seems to be very promising and will allow performing routing and switching in the optical layer by use of ultrafast photonic processing.
It is expected that Hideyuki Sotobayashi will deliver an invited plenary lecture at one of the forthcoming major ICO Topical Meetings, and where the corresponding award ceremony will take place as well. This event will be announced in due time.