Dr. Chieko Asakawa of IBM Receives Highest Honor from the Society of Women Engineers
CHICAGO – November 9, 2010 – The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is pleased to announce IBM’s Chieko Asakawa, Ph.D. as the recipient of the 2010 SWE Achievement Award. She is being honored for challenging conventional ideas about how people with visual impairments use technology and for pioneering research and technical advances in Web accessibility.
“Dr. Asakawa is recognized worldwide for her expertise and research in information technology accessibility for individuals with visual impairments,” says Siddika Demir, SWE president. “Her groundbreaking work developing tools and frameworks helps solve accessibility problems, allows those with special needs the same Internet capabilities and will influence the next generation of cutting-edge technologies.”
Dr. Asakawa is the chief technology officer of accessibility research and technology at IBM Research. In this role, she provides technical guidance to the accessibility research team worldwide. Dr. Asakawa is also an international thought leader in the field of information technology accessibility for persons with disabilities, the elderly and others with special needs.
“The tremendous achievements of Dr. Asakawa have opened the wonders of the World Wide Web and other technologies to thousands of people around the world who have vision and other disabilities,” says Linda Sanford, senior vice president at IBM. “As an IBM Fellow, Asakawa-san serves as a wonderful role model and inspiration to the next generation of technologists who aspire to make the world a better place.”
Having lost her sight at age 14, Dr. Asakawa has a deep understanding of people with special needs. She began her career with IBM 25 years ago, and has focused on accessibility research ever since. In the 1980s, she drove development of the first Braille editing system, and in 1997, developed the innovative voice browser, Home Page Reader, a program that reads aloud words on a webpage, opening up the new information resource for the blind. Dr. Asakawa has also managed the development of numerous other accessibility tools and frameworks for developers and users with visual impairments, as well as a transcoding technology that improves webpage readability among the aging population. In 2008, she and her team launched the Social Accessibility Project, a research experiment using a social computing approach to solve real-world accessibility problems.
Dr. Asakawa has received numerous recognitions from her peers and IBM, including being named an IBM Fellow, the company’s highest technical honor. She is one of only 218 Fellows in company history and the first Japanese woman to receive the honor. Dr. Asakawa was also named an IPSJ Fellow by the Information Processing Society of Japan, inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2003 and has been granted 20 patents for her work.
Dr. Asakawa holds a B.A. degree in English literature from Otemon Gakuin University, and a Ph.D. in engineering from The University of Tokyo, Japan.
The Achievement Award is the highest award given by SWE. Criteria are based on the significance of the nominee’s lifetime achievements and on her sustained contributions to the field of engineering. The Achievement Award was presented Friday, November 5 at WE10, the Society’s Annual Conference. WE10 took place at the Orange County Convention Center, Nov. 4-6, in Orlando, FL, and more than 5,300 attendees included collegians and professionals from the industry, government and academia.
