Youichi NONAKA, Ph.D. (Eng.)
Corporate Chief Researcher,
Hitachi, Ltd.
Nonaka joined the Production Engineering Research Laboratory of Hitachi, Ltd. in 1992, working in R&D for industrial robot application systems, digital engineering technology, and production control technology. He was a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, assumed his current position as Senior Chief Researcher in the Center for Technology Innovation – Production Engineering in 2015.
In the area of smart manufacturing, Nonaka has been promoting joint research with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2007, and serves as an international expert and Japan representative to convening ISO / IEC international standardization activities since 2014. He is a member of the Germany – Japan IoT collaboration among Japan Robot Revolution Initiative Council (RRI) and the Germany Plattform Industrie4.0 (PI4.0) since 2015, etc.
At the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) in 2019, he promoted a Japanese-German industry-academia expert discussion on the new relationship between humans and machines in a digital society, and published it as a discussion paper from acatech. In 2017, he served as the director of the Manufacturing Systems Division of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineering (2017), and has been an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University since 2018.
Nonaka received his doctoral degree in Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2011. He is a member of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineering, the Japan Society of Precision Engineering, the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, CIRP and the Japan Academy of Engineering.