（The 4th Award for persons of merit in Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration by the Conference on the Promotion of Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration in June 2005）

- Research on ubiquitous computing technology （The Prime Minister's Award）

 The TRON Project started for the purpose of building a ubiquitous network society to help people's lives by installing TRON, which is a basic OS made in Japan, in various equipments used in people's daily lives and using network connections. "ITRON," designed for the TRON Project, is suitable for reducing the size of the OS and has been adopted in many industrial products including household appliances, audio-visual equipments, office machines, and automobiles. However, due to the development of computer technology and sophistication of functions with it, the importance of design recently shifted to the efficiency of development, and to cope with it, the environment for real time system development including hardware architecture with high portability has become necessary. For this purpose, the OS was standardized to make the enhancement of functions easier. This is the T-Kernel, which is the result of basic research of computer science at a university, and its platform is T-Engine. By using T-Kernel, it has become possible to cope with small systems to high-level large-scale systems, and many kinds of products that have the T-Kernel as an installed OS are used around the world. At present, many demonstration experiments are promoted towards a ubiquitous network society with electronic tags and mobile terminals as the result of research in distribution, stock management, food traceability, management on medication, tour guides, and others.

- Research on the Healsio water oven （Chairman of Nippon Keidanren （Japan Business Federation） Award）

 The industrial need to seek products to satisfy people's desires for health, due to the decreasing and aging population, and the environmental purification technology which was basic research of a university were combined together and the water oven as a kitchen appliance was commercialized. Based on the knowledge of generation and characteristics of superheated steam of which research was promoted as the method to extract, analyze, and measure endocrine-disrupting chemicals in a university, the conventional large superheated steam generator was shrunk to the size for family use, and eight times as the temperature of a conventional microwave with constant voltage was realized. Thus, a system to efficiently use superheated steam was developed jointly by industry-university collaboration. This product created a new realm of cooking that is "to bake by water," and is said to have the effects of fat/salt reduction and of preventing decomposition of antioxidants such as vitamin C and CoQ10 by low-oxygen cooking.

- Development and commercialization of the "cryo-TEM （cryogenic transmission electron microscope）" and structural analysis of membrane protein （Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy Award）

 An electron microscope enables you to observe an object at atomic level by using short electron rays of which the wavelength is much shorter than visible wavelengths. It illuminates high-energy electron rays on the object to observe and therefore destroys weak-bond molecules or crystals, so that there are several restrictions when selecting the object to observe. The cryo-TEM （cryogenic transmission electron microscope）, jointly developed by a university and a company, uses the phenomenon where damage to a molecule or crystal by electron rays is extremely small below -270 degrees C. It was successful in enabling the observation of the structure of liquid and organic matters that were vulnerable to electron rays, which could not be observed by conventional electron microscopes.

 In addition, the decomposition capability was improved up to the world’s highest level by developing a rapid quenching method to prevent degeneration of membrane protein samples caused by dryness under ultra low temperature, an energy filter to prevent noise caused by the electron scattered from the ice of the water around the protein, and an automatic sample exchange device that enables great improvement of operability. As a result, it has become possible to analyze the structure of membrane protein in human cells, which was difficult to observe in the past but is very important as a target of medicine. All six types of membrane protein that have been analyzed so far were analyzed by cryo-TEM, and a great ripple effect in the drug discovery industry is expected.