Akinori Yonezawa
(born June 17, 1947) is a
Japanese
computer scientist.
Professor Emeritus of
the University of Tokyo. Received
Ph.D. from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Currently, a
senior fellow at the
Chiba Institute of Technology, Software Technology and Artificial Intelligence Research Center. Former member of the
Science Council of Japan. Specializes in
object-oriented programming languages,
distributed computing and
information security. From its beginning, he contributed to the promotion and development of
object-oriented programming, which is the basis of
programming languages most commonly used today (Python, Java,
C++, etc.), and served as a program committee member and chairman of the main international conferences
OOPSLA and
ECOOP. At the same time, he is internationally known as a pioneer of the concepts and models of “concurrent/parallel objects". In software systems constructed based on concurrent/parallel objects, information processing and computation proceed by concurrent/parallel message passing among a large number of objects. Yonezawa's concurrent (parallel) objects are influenced by Actors, the concept of which was proposed by
Carl Hewitt at
MIT's AI Lab in the early 1970s and later rigorously formulated by
Gul Agha. However, concurrent objects and actors are fundamentally different. An actor is an object that does not have a "state," whereas Yonezawa's concurrent (parallel) object can have a persistent state. For this reason, concurrent (parallel) objects are often used in implementing large parallel processing software systems. Large-scale software systems built and put into practical use based on concurrent (parallel) objects include an online virtual world system
Second Life, social networking services such as
Facebook and X (
Twitter), and large-scale molecular dynamics simulation systems such as NAMD.
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