Chihiro Sawada
Vice President, Central Research Laboratories
NEC Corporation
Chihiro Sawada joined NEC Corporation as Vice President of Central Research Laboratories in
April 2009. In this role, Mr. Sawada is responsible for research and development of software,
solutions and services as a whole at Central Research Laboratories. In his group, 350 researchers
cover broad research areas including cloud computing, system security, data management, service
integration, system modeling, mobile management, multimedia communication service, sensing
networking, media processing, image and object understanding, computational linguistics,
cryptography, knowledge management, human computer interaction, and data mining.
Prior to joining NEC Corporation, Mr. Sawada was Business Unit Executive of Lotus Software at
IBM Japan, and had achieved consecutive steady growth in business for five years since his
appointment in 2004.
Mr. Sawada started his carrier in IBM in 1986 as a Researcher of robotics and artificial intelligence
at Tokyo Research Laboratory, IBM Research Division, and had held a variety of key management
and executive positions at development, strategy, business development, and sales in IBM Japan.
In 2001, Mr. Sawada was appointed as Technical Consultant at Corporate Technology of IBM
Corporation in Somers, New York.
Mr. Sawada received an M.S. in Information Engineering in 1986 and a B.S. in Mechanical
Engineering in 1984; both from the University of Tokyo.