Executive Team
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.
Secretary: Christer Boberg (Ericsson)
Christer Boberg serves as a Director at Ericsson CTO Office driving strategies around IoT and Cloud technologies; his focus is bringing new technologies in place to solve networking industry challenges on a global scale. Prior to this, he drove Ericsson Communication Services technology strategy and was responsible for bringing several products and solutions to market.
Treasurer: Masaru Sugano (KDDI)
Masaru Sugano is a senior expert at Advanced Technology Research Division of KDDI Corporation. His work has focused on research and development, international standardization, and product development in the fields of video compression, transmission, and analysis technologies. After a 25-year career at KDDI Research, he transitioned to KDDI, where he is now dedicated to developing solutions for the automotive, mobility, and other industries by leveraging 5G networks.
Directors
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.
