Takeo Kanade, Carnegie Mellon University's U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, is the 2007 recipient of the Okawa Prize, which is sponsored by the Japan-based Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications.

The prize pays tribute to and publicly recognizes people who have made outstanding international contributions to research, technological development and business in the information and telecommunications fields. Kanade, a former director of the university's Robotics Institute and founding director of the National Science Foundation Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center, is being honored "for far-reaching and pioneering research achievements in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and robotics, and the outstanding and innovative teaching that has produced the next generation of leaders in these fields."

He will be honored at a Nov. 21 award ceremony in Tokyo where he'll receive a certificate, gold medal and a prize of 10 million yen (approximately $86,000 dollars). The Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications is a 21-year-old non-profit organization established in 1986 to promote the growth and development of the information and telecommunications fields, through donations from the late Mr. Isao Okawa, founder of CSK Corp. and president and chairman of the Sega Corp.

Kanade is the second Carnegie Mellon faculty member to be honored with the Okawa Prize. Raj Reddy, the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, received the prize in 2004.

"Receiving the Okawa Prize is a special honor to me," Kanade said. "Not only is it a major award in the area of information and telecommunications in Japan, it is also especially significant because my mentors -Professor Toshiyuki Sakai in Japan and Professor Raj Reddy in the United States - are both recipients of the same prize."

For more information on the Okawa Foundation and the Okawa Prize, see http://www.okawa-foundation.or.jp/e/oka/index.html. .

About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business, public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif., and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe. For more, see www.cmu.edu.