Chairperson: Ryokichi Onishi (Toyota)

Dr. Ryokichi Onishi is General Manager at Information Systems Group and Project General Manager at Software Development Center at Toyota Motor Corporation. His 22-year engineering career has spanned various projects, including communication models for cooperative adaptive cruise control and floating car data collection. He was also in charge of next-generation global communications platform design between vehicles and the cloud. His current interest lies in end-to-end digital infrastructure combining communication, computation, and storage, which is geared for emerging software-defined user-centric services, intelligent driving system with “greener” generative AI, and remote monitoring and control of automated driving system. He received his Ph.D. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Tokyo and had four years of on-site collaboration experience at Telcordia Technologies, formerly known as Bell Communications Research. He has been issued 31 patents by the U.S. Patent Office. He was the chair of the AECC Use-case Development Working Group from 2018 to 2020.

Treasurer and Communications Vice Chair: Roger Berg (DENSO Corporation)

Roger Berg is Vice President of DENSO’s North American Research and Development group. His latest research interests and responsibilities include connected and automated vehicles, transportation data collection and analytics, cyber security, and most recently, Blockchain for mobility services.

Berg has experience in military and consumer electronics from previous engineering management and executive positions at Northrop Grumman, Motorola and Sony Electronics combined with his 19 years as an executive for automotive electronics product development and R&D at DENSO.

Berg earned a BSEE from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and a MSEE from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.  He is the inventor or co-inventor on 12 U.S. and international patents.  He is a long standing member of SAE, where he currently holds the position of vice chair for the V2X Communications Steering Committee and V2X Vehicular Applications Technical Committee.  Berg is also a member of IEEE, the USDOT ITS Program Advisory Committee, the DriveOhio Expert Advisory Board, and serves on the Affiliate Advisory Board for the Auto-ISAC.  He was most recently appointed vice chair of MOBI’s Connected Mobility Data Marketplace and core member of their Supply Chain working groups.  In December of 2016 he was voted one of Automotive News’ “60 people driving the self-driving movement”.

Secretary: Christer Boberg (Ericsson)

Director: Tomohiro Otani (KDDI)

Tomohiro Otani is an executive director of KDDI Research, Inc., where is responsible for R&D activities related to IoT, connected car, big data platforms, and associated operational technologies. Previously, Otani was general manager of the Operation Support System Development Department of Operations Sector at KDDI Corporation. That role was responsible for developing operational support systems (OSS) for fixed and mobile networks. Otani has been a member of the technical programming committee of international technical conferences and was a co-chair of TPC of MPLS2007 and iPOP2017. He is a co-author of IETF RFCs 3471, 5146, 6825, and 7025.

Founding Chairperson: Ken-ichi Murata (Toyota)

Ken-ichi Murata is a Fellow at Software Development Center in Toyota Motor Corporation. Prior to his current role, Murata joined Toyota in 2008 as a Global Chief Engineer of in-vehicle multimedia/telematics systems, and then a General Manager of connected car strategy. His career began as a research scientist at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., later moving to Sony Corporation and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. as a systems architect of software platforms for various consumer electronics products.