Tosiyasu L. Kunii was born in Tokyo, Japan on 1 January 1938. Kunii is a professor at Hosei University, director of IT Institute at Kanazawa Institute of Technology, visiting professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology, honorary visiting professor at University of Bradford, and professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo.
He was the founding president and professor of the University of Aizu dedicated to computer science and engineering as a meta discipline, from 1993 to 1997. There, he coined and installed an integrated and computer-based educational system on UNIX workstations and on the Internet to cover all academic disciplines. He received a B.Sc. in 1962, M.Sc. in 1964, and D.Sc. in 1967, all from the University of Tokyo. He was a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Tokyo from June 1978 until March 1993.
In January 1991, he was elected Fellow of IEEE for his contribution to visual computer and visual computation. He was also elected Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) for “International Contributions to Pioneering in and Establishing the Discipline of Visual Computing,”14 March 2000. He authored and edited more than 50 books in computer science and in general areas, and published more than 500 refereed original academic/technical papers in computer science and applications.
His development of raster graphics in late ’60 is recorded in the first SIGGRAPH and in the special issue of Computer and Graphics as its proceedings. He also developed networked workstations porting UNIX in early ’80. He was the first in Japan to contract the UNIX source code license for academic use and commercial use from Bell Lab. He exhibited the UNIX workstations at COMDEX in Las Vegas in 1983, making him among the first originators of UNIX workstations in the world. Soon after, he also developed a broadband network system, now a hot subject, and installed it at 500 sites for real-time control of various equipment and multimedia. The University of Aizu networked business system, interconnecting 1,000 UNIX workstations on campus including a digital library system, was developed by the team having the core of people he used to train at the Information Science Department he founded in 1970 at the University of Tokyo and then employed and trained as professional software experts by Software Research Center of Ricoh under the direction of Dr. Hideko S. Kunii.
