In May 2016, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) and the Japan Statistics Society (JSS) jointly launched the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award program. The purpose of this award is to commemorate the achievements of the late Dr. Hirotugu Akaike, who established a novel paradigm to evaluate the predictive accuracy of statistical modeling. He proposed a metric for model selection, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), based on an approach completely different from the statistical theories common at the time. Dr. Akaike’s ideas have influenced a wide range of theoretical and applied research areas.
The Fourth Award goes to Professor Aapo Hyvärinen of the University of Helsinki, Finland. Professor Hyvärinen has contributed numerous outstanding achievements in machine learning and computational neuroscience, including the development of well recognized statistical techniques in signal processing and image analysis. Among his accomplishments, his contributions to the development of independent component analysis (ICA) are well recognized and valued in the statistics and machine learning communities. His academic interests and research style are closely related to those of the late Dr. Akaike. Professor Hyvärinen is a renowned international leader in pure and applied statistical science and deserves the Akaike Memorial Lecture Award.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and related overseas travel restrictions, Professor Hyvärinen will present his lecture online at the plenary session of the Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting (JJSM) 2022 which will be held on September 5 at Seikei University, Tokyo.
For more about the recipient and the award, please see https://www.ism.ac.jp/ura/press/ISM2022-05_e.html.

IMS Fellow Hirotugu Akaike passed away in 2009. On November 5, 2017, which would have been his 90th birthday, there was a Google Doodle in his honor, with an image of Dr. Akaike “against a Google-inspired approximation of functions, parameters, and their respective curves.” You can read a little about his work at https://www.google.com/doodles/hirotugu-akaikes-90th-birthday