Makoto Nagao was born in 1936. After graduating Dept of Electronic Engineering, Kyoto University he served as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor at Kyoto University and in 1973 became Professor of Faculty of Engineering, Kyoto University. Since then, he served as 23rd President of Kyoto University (1997-2003), Chair of the Japan Association of National Universities (2001-2003), Founding Director of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (2004-2007), and Librarian of the National Diet Library (2007-2012）.
He has been awarded Medal with Purple Ribbon (1997), Person of Cultural Merit (2008), Japan Prize (2005), the Order of Culture (2018), IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1993), Medal of Honor (IAMT) (1997), ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2003), Legion of Honor (2004), and others.
Some of his published books are “Knowledge and Reasoning”(1998), “AI and Human” (1992), “Electronic Library” (1994), “What is ‘Understanding’” (2001), autobiography titled “Ability to read information and mind to learn” (2010) and others. Also, he edited “Natural Language Processing” as one of Iwanami Software Science Series and others.
He served as Founding Chair of the Association for Natural Language Processing (1994), Chair of the Institute of Electronic, Information and Communication Engineers (1998), Chair of Information Processing Society of Japan (1999), Founding Chair of International Organization for Machine Translation (1991), and others.