Obituary of Yutaka Ohno

Yutaka Ohno, a professor emeritus of software engineering at Kyoto University, died 27 October at his Kyoto home due to complications from prostate cancer. He was 88 years old.

Figure 3.

Yutaka Ohno.

In 1960, the first online seat reservation system in Japan, named the Magnetic Electronic Automatic Seat Reservation System (MARS), started its service. Ohno was the chief leader of MARS. After he moved to Kyoto University in 1947, he helped establish research fields in software engineering, requirements engineering, and intelligent programming environments.

Ohno served as the chief technology officer of the Sigma Project, a national project for improving software productivity. Although the project was not ultimately a success, it helped promote the importance of software. Ohno also established the Japanese Society of Software Science and Technology in 1983 and served as its first president. He later served as president of the Information Processing Society of Japan from 1987 to 1989.

His contributions were not limited to academic fields. To encourage collaborative work between academic research and industrial development, Ohno established the Advanced Software Technology and Mechatronics (ASTEM) research center and Kansai Technology Licensing Organization.