Akira Tsukamoto

Akira Tsukamoto

Biography

Akira Tsukamoto grew up in Kanagawa prefecture which is next to the south of Tokyo and studied at Kyushu Dental College in Kitakyushu city located at the north part of the south-west island called Kyushu. He was always enthusiastic about computers and helped host web servers for his friends while he was working as a Dentist. He gained involvement in protecting security attacks from abroad hackers, configuring firewalls on both routers and computers.

The time to engage in computer knowledge for the first time was twelve years old when his father brought home microcomputer magazines in around 1980. Quickly he started to self-study inside computers by reading digital logic and electronic engineering books since his family did not have a computer. When finally had an 8 bit microcomputer with Z80, reversed engineered BIOS, developed circuits for copying games in ROM cartridges, removed copy protection of package software helped improve his engineering skills. The experiences of hand wiring, soldering digital circuits and debugging until it became functional helped his career of designing printed circuit boards (PCB).

He was pursuing reverse engineering FAT format of DOS to recover erased files on the floppy disks which are currently USB drives, even studying Dentistry at the College. Other his home brew projects were designing fast access video memory from the CPU without any wait cycle, lead help later in his career on optimizing GPGPU on OpenCL projects [1] [2] on Cell/B.E. The Cell/B. E. is the CPU used on the PlayStation 3, IBM Blade Servers, and Toshiba’s TV.

After working as a Dentist in Tokyo for 5 years, did not start his own dental practice, proceeded to MSc in Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York instead. Conducted on developing the world’s first tele-conference system [3] with features of voice, image, screen sharing, and text chat utilizing Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) which is the main protocol on current VoIP and VoLTE, and Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) which is the main protocol of video streaming such as Apple Quicktime. The SIP and RTP are standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
It was a precious experience of learning the method of combining both source codes of open and proprietary licenses while keeping where it contains valuable technologies as closed source code. He contributed mainly on measurements of keeping the voice and video quality under the Internet while packets having random delays, drops, corrupted content, swapped order. Also involved development inside the kernel for improving real time capabilities.

Started to work at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. in 2006 and participated in projects of Linux on Cell/B.E. One of the achievements from the collaboration on developing IBM QS2x Blade Servers was that the Roadrunner, a super computer, became the first HPC to exceed 1 PFLOPS and hold the top on TOP500 from 2008 to 2009.

Currently, working as a Senior Researcher at the Cyber Physical Security Center of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. Main focus is development and standardization of CPU security based on his broad experiences of technical development of CPU, OS, and hardware.

At AIST, developing and standardizing Trusted Execution Environment Provisioning (TEEP) protocol [4] at the IETF. The objective of TEEP is to control software and sensitive data in a secure manner while keeping interoperability among different device and service vendors on the IoT and Edge devices or machines in data centers that are connected on the Internet. The TEEP consists of two other working groups, one is Software Updates for Internet of Things (SUIT) and Remote ATtestation ProcedureS (RATS).

In his spare time, participating as a RISC-V Ambassador of RISC-V International and holding RISC-V Technical Study meetings [5] periodically. Also exploits RISC-V kernel developments [6] .

Education and Employment History

1987 - 1994　Kyusyuu Dental Collag, Doctor of Dental Surgery
1994 - 1999　Asagata Dental Clinic, General Dentist
2001 - 2003　Columbia University in the City of New York, MSc in Computer Science
2003 - 2004　Toshiba Corporation, Laptop division, Software Engineer
2004 - 2006　NEC Corporation, System Platform Laboratory, Principal Researcher
2006 - 2011　Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. Software Engineer
2011　Nomovok Ltd. Principal Architect
2011- 2016　Linaro Ltd. Software Engineer
2017　Toyota Motor Corporation, Connected Advanced Development Division, Project Manager
2018 - Current　Cyber Physical Security Research Center, AIST, Principal Researcher

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