External Awards

The Young Scientists’ Award, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

Winner: Tatsurou Hiraki, Device Technology Laboratories, NTT, Inc.

Date: April 15, 2026

Organization: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

For his research on high-performance optical modulation devices based on heterogeneous integration technology.

IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award

Winner: Shota Horiguchi, Human Informatics Laboratories, NTT, Inc.

Date: May 5, 2026

Organization: IEEE Signal Processing Society

For “Encoder-decoder Based Attractors for End-to-end Neural Diarization.”

Published as: S. Horiguchi, Y. Fujita, S. Watanabe, Y. Xue, and P. García, “Encoder-decoder Based Attractors for End-to-end Neural Diarization,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Vol. 30, pp. 1493–1507, 2022.

ITU-AJ Encouragement Award

Winner: Yoichi Matsuo, Network Service Systems Laboratories, NTT, Inc.

Date: May 15, 2026

Organization: The ITU Association of Japan

For his contribution to international standardization through his work on formulating ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector) recommendations and as an associate rapporteur at Study Group 12. He played a leading role in the proposal and verification of Recommendation P.1211 (Derivation procedure for contribution values to quality degradation of adaptive audiovisual streaming services) and contributed to the formulation of the recommendation as an editor.

Distinguished Service Award

Winner: Noritsugu Egi, Network Service Systems Laboratories, NTT, Inc.

Date: June 23, 2026

Organization: The Telecommunication Technology Committee (TTC)

For his contribution to standardization activities related to methods for voice quality evaluation of IP (Internet Protocol) telephony.

JSAI SIG Research Award 2025

Winner: Kengo Nakamura, Communication Science Laboratories, NTT, Inc.

Date: June 29, 2026

Organization: The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence

For “Linear-time Exact Influence Spread on Bounded-pathwidth Graphs.”

Published as: K. Nakamura, “Linear-time Exact Influence Spread on Bounded-pathwidth Graphs,” Proc. of the 135th Special Interest Group on Fundamental Problems in Artificial Intelligence, Okinawa, Japan, Jan. 2026.

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