Tokyo, October 17, 2025 - The NEC C&C Foundation today announced that the 2025 C&C Prize will be awarded to two groups for their contributions to the invention, practical implementation, and global spread of QR Code, and contributions to high-performance scientific computing and its applications. QR Code Team (Members; Masahiro Hara, Motoaki Watabe, Takahiro Kurobe and Hiromitsu Takai) will represent Group A and Jack Joseph Dongarra will represent Group B. Each recipient will be recognized with a certificate of merit and a plaque. Each group will also receive a cash award of ten million yen.

The C&C Prize was established in 1985 and is awarded to distinguished persons in recognition of outstanding contributions to R&D activities and pioneering work related to the integration of computers and communications technologies and the social impact of developments in these fields. This year’s two recipient groups are outlined below.

The prize ceremony and acceptance speeches will be held on Wednesday, November 26 from 15:00 at the ANA InterContinental Tokyo and will be streamed live to those who apply at the Foundation’s website.

Group A: QR Code Team

Group B: Jack Joseph Dongarra

2025 C&C Prize Recipients

Group A

QR Code Team

Members
Masahiro Hara
Chief Engineer, DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED
Specially Appointed Professor, Nagoya Gakuin University

Motoaki Watabe
R&D Division, DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED

Takahiro Kurobe
Executive Director, DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED

Hiromitsu Takai
Expert, Solution Services Department, GS1 Japan

Citation
For the invention, practical implementation, and global spread of QR
Code

Achievement
In the 1980s, barcodes (one-dimensional codes) were widely used in manufacturing, logistics, retail and other fields for identification, tracking, and managing items. However, as the number of parts managed at manufacturing sites increased during 1990s, the limited data storage capacity of conventional barcodes became a problem. QR Code (two-dimensional code), invented in 1994, addressed this challenge by enabling dramatically greater data capacity with fast, accurate scanning. Today, QR Codes are used in a wide range of fields—including distribution, manufacturing, payment, mobile authentication, and ticket management—and are contributing significantly to the digitalization and efficiency of both society and industry.

In 1992, Masahiro Hara, who was involved in the development of barcode scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) devices at DENSO CORPORATION, was given permission by his supervisor for the need to develop a new code to replace barcodes. He joined forces with Motoaki Watabe and two researchers from Toyota Central R&D Labs, and the project began with four people. At the time, two-dimensional codes had been developed in the United States, but none could satisfy all the necessary requirements: large data capacity, compact size, fast reading, and resistance to dirt or damage. Therefore, they aimed to develop a two-dimensional code with advanced features not available in existing codes.

Hara chose a matrix type as the information storage method for the 2D code, which has a high information density and can be read from any angle. Position detection patterns are placed at the three corners of the code to quickly detect the code's position and serve as markers that can be recognized from the top, bottom, left, and right. To prevent misrecognition of the position detection patterns, Hara and Watabe identified the least commonly used ratio of black to white among printed materials, 1:1:3:1:1, and used this to determine the ratio of the widths of the black and white parts of the position detection patterns. In this way, they created a system that could determine the code's position and read it quickly from any direction. To make the code more suitable for use in the workplace, it was equipped with an error correction function that allows information to be read correctly even if it is dirty or damaged. It used a Reed-Solomon code that is resistant to burst errors, and by balancing this with the amount of information stored, it achieved a recovery rate of up to 30%. In August 1994, two years after the project began, a two-dimensional code was completed that could store large amounts of information, including alphanumeric characters and kanji, in a small space, was resistant to dirt and damage, and could be read in as little as 0.03 seconds. The code was named QR Code, an abbreviation of Quick Response, highlighting its most important feature: high-speed scanning. The subsequent QR Code Model 2 added an alignment pattern to enable reading even when the code is distorted, and could store approximately 200 times as many characters as a barcode, or up to 7,089 numbers.

At the time, leading U.S. companies in 2D code technology declared their patents public domain and chose not to enforce them. The 2D Code was adopted as a standard by industry groups, and efforts to standardize it began. DENSO accelerated efforts to establish industry and international standards. Through lobbying with the automotive industry, QR Code was recognized as an industry standard. After becoming a standard of the Japan Automatic Identification Industry Association in 1996, QR Code was declared public domain, and in 1997 it was established as a standard of the International Automatic Identification Industry Association. Subsequently, efforts were made to standardize it at ISO/IEC. In 1998, a New Work Item Proposal (NP) was submitted to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC31. After discussions and verification by the Working Group (WG), QR Code standard was published as the international standard ISO/IEC 18004 in June 2000. Hiromitsu Takai was responsible for the standardization of QR Code and served as project editor for the ISO/IEC standardization process.

DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED made active efforts to promote and expand the market for QR Codes. Takahiro Kurobe was one of the key contributors to these promotional activities, helping to achieve global spread of the technology. QR Codes were initially used for factory production management and parts traceability. Their high versatility has been recognized across a wide range of industries, including distribution, logistics, healthcare, electronic payments, electronic tickets, identity authentication, and personal information management, and their applications are expanding year by year. In Japan, QR Code reading services for mobile phones launched in 2002, and in 2006, ANA adopted QR Codes for e-tickets, helping to further establish them socially. QR Code payments have been widely adopted in China since 2011, with Alipay and WeChat Pay accounting for 85% of payment methods by 2020. In Japan, QR Code payments named "XX Pay" have become widespread and widely used since the late 2010s. QR Code payments are steadily expanding worldwide.

While new applications for QR Codes continue to be developed, the code itself has also evolved to meet social needs. Derivative types include the Micro QR Code, which can print about 20 alphanumeric characters in a 1mm-square micro-format; the SQRC, which can store encrypted private data for enhanced security; anti-counterfeit QR Codes to prevent ticket forgery; Frame QR, allowing integration of illustrations or logos; and tQR, used for platform door control at railway stations.

QR Code, by not only offering technological superiority but also promoting open patents and international standardization, has become a social infrastructure technology accessible to everyone worldwide. Its versatility and extensibility have enabled the creation and expansion of new applications in a variety of environments. QR Code technology has made enormous contributions to advancements in ICT and the creation of social value. DENSO WAVE, especially the QR Code Team, is highly regarded for its role in developing and spreading QR Code and is deemed fully worthy of the C&C Prize. Going forward, QR Codes are expected to continue to lead the creation of new application fields and innovations, contributing further to the advancement of society and industry.

Group B

Jack Joseph Dongarra
Emeritus Professor, EECS Department, University of Tennessee
Turing Fellow in the Mathematics Department, The University of
Manchester

Citation
For Contributions to High-Performance Scientific Computing and Its Applications.

Achievement
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the performance of computers improved dramatically, and simulations and analytical processing using computers became increasingly widespread. As hardware rapidly advanced, the development of high-performance software that matched these capabilities became essential. In particular, efficient and reusable numerical computation libraries were indispensable. Jack Dongarra made significant contributions to the development of these numerical libraries such as LINPACK, and the launch of the TOP500 project, which ranks computer performance. He also played a key role in advancing high-performance computing (HPC) technologies. Moreover, through the development of the Message Passing Interface (MPI), he worked to propagate distributed computing technologies. These efforts greatly contributed to the advancement and foundation of high-performance scientific computing and its applications.

Dongarra participated in an internship at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and took part in the EISPACK project, sparking his interest in mathematical software, while studying mathematics at Chicago State University. After obtaining his MSc in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology, he worked full-time at ANL from 1975, where he was responsible for the development of linear algebra software packages. In 1980, he obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico, and in 1989, assumed a joint position at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Over 40 years, Dongarra has been involved in the development and practical application of major numerical computation libraries, such as LINPACK, BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, PLASMA, MAGMA, and SLATE. He has also engaged in the development of leading-edge techniques, such as autotuning, mixed precision arithmetic, and batched computations. These innovations greatly enhanced the performance and scalability of libraries, which are now foundational platforms used across a wide range of computers, from laptops to supercomputers.

Dongarra deeply influenced the establishment of MPI, the de-facto standard for inter-process communication in parallel computing. In the early 1990s, as HPC shifted to distributed memory systems, vendor-specific communication libraries made portability difficult. Dongarra proactively engaged with the research community to standardize message passing for distributed memory environments, resulting in the release of MPI 1.0 in 1994. MPI offers robust message-passing capabilities broadly adopted in numerical simulation and scientific computing. MPI is widely used as the standard interface for HPC, and its development facilitated the abstraction of hardware differences, improving research productivity and enabling long-term sustained results.

Dongarra is also well known for creating the LINPACK benchmark to evaluate computer performance and for co-founding the TOP500 project, which ranks the world’s fastest computers. In 1979, he published a table in the first edition of the LINPACK Users’ Guide listing data for solving sets of linear equations for 15 computers, beginning the LINPACK benchmark tradition. He and his collaborators later created the TOP500 list, first published in 1993, which ranked the world’s fastest computers. Since then, new lists have been published twice annually, and the LINPACK benchmark itself has evolved. TOP500 and its benchmarks have become key to tracking and analyzing trends in HPC performance.

Dongarra has contributed to the growth of the HPC community and the advancement of the HPC field through his important research and development of efficient linear algebra libraries, parallel programming mechanisms, and computer performance evaluation tools. These achievements have driven the progress of scientific computing, and the scientific discoveries and technological innovations originating from simulation and numerical analysis have become a driving force for accelerating social development. His accomplishments are highly recognized internationally, and the receipt of the C&C Prize is truly a tribute to these outstanding achievements.


See the attachments for profiles and detailed achievements of the recipients:

Attachment 1: Profile and Detailed Achievements of the Group A Recipients of the 2025 C&C Prize

Attachment 2: Profile and Detailed Achievements of the Group B Recipient of the 2025 C&C Prize

For additional information, please visit The NEC C&C Foundation website at: https://www.candc.or.jp/en/index.html

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About The NEC C&C Foundation
The NEC C&C Foundation is a non-profit organization established in March 1985 to foster further growth in the electronics industry by encouraging and supporting research and development activities and pioneering work related to the integration of computers and communications technologies, that is, C&C, and ultimately to contribute to the world economy and the enrichment of human life. The Foundation is funded by NEC Corporation.

The Foundation currently has the annual C&C Prizes to recognize outstanding contributions to R&D activities and pioneering work in the area of C&C. Candidates are recommended from all over the world. Each prize winner receives a certificate, a plaque, and a cash award (ten million yen per group). As of 2025, 131 prominent persons had received the prize.

For additional information, please visit The NEC C&C Foundation website at: https://www.candc.or.jp/en/index.html

About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of “Orchestrating a brighter world.” NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.