(CAREER) OVERVIEW

I'm originally from Nagoya, Japan. After several years in the industry in my home town, I decided to go to the US to go to a university. Since then, my life started to diverge to an unexpected direction. I've been living outside of Japan for many years more than half of my lifetime. I've spent ~30 years in the mobile telecom industry as an enginner, then decided to change to academia. Along the way, I did a lot of things, saw a lot of things, and learned a lot of things. I've met and worked with a lot of people from many different countries. Accumulation of all those life experience shaped me to what I am today...

WORK HISTORY/EXPERIENCE

I have been pursuing a career as an engineer in telecom industry throughout my career, almost entirely in the mobile systems in the infrastructure product development space. My career trajectory includes several different companies in several different countries in the past. Some of the changes were intentional, some were rather side effect and consequence of various life events. The types of companies include both multi-national large companies as well as small start-up companies (I have seen and gained insights in both pros and cons of both types of environments as a result). I've done almost all types of engineering work associated with the lifecycle of telecom infra system/product development, starting from next-generation system design, architecture, requirement specification, software development, testing, system integration, deployment, and customer support.

Another rather large part of my career is my involvement in standardization such as 3GPP for well over 10 years. Reading standard specification documents is not so trivial due to their contents and the way they are written. Due to my long-time involvement with 3GPP, I have gained intricate understanding and knowledge of creating standard specifications, such as why they are written in such complex and not-so-easy-to-digest manner. Due to this, digesting them has become a relatively not-too-difficult task.

Aside from this (and more than anything else) working in different countries and cultures, and having (ex-)colleagues from many different countries with different cultural backgrounds were the most important and precious intangible asset for me. Relatively recently, I decided to pursue and obtained a PhD (a long story). I'm currently continuing research work and some teaching in academia environment. This experience in non-industry environment gave me yet new different perspectives.

Timeline

2022 - 2025: Tao Consulting, (Boom, Belgium)

• Independent telecom consultant -- analyzing technical details of future trends of mobile telecom technologies and 3GPP standard to help a client company to gain technical insights for the objective to conceive future businesses.

2019 - Present: COSIC Group, ESAT Dept., KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium)

• Post-doc researcher (2023~): continue to focus on V2X security and machine learning security.
• Lecturer (2020~): mobile system security in Master of Cybersecurity degree, and TA for Telecom and Security Management class.
• PhD researcher (2019~2023), focusing on communication security (mainly V2X security) and machine learning security.

2015 - 2019: NEC Laboratories Europe Gmbh, (Heidelberg, Germany)

• Senior Standard Engineer -- 3GPP delegate to SA6 (Public safety), SA3 (Security) WGs. Conceive contribution ideas based on the ongoing study items (SI) and work items (WI), prepare contribution documents, and propose them in these working groups (WG). Negodiate and collaborate with delegates from other companies to standardize the proposed contributions. SA6: contributions related to Public Safety LTE (PS-LTE) standardization. SA3: contributions related to 5G security standardization.

2011 - 2015: Ubiquisys Ltd, (Swindon, UK.), Cisco Systems (Diegem, Belgium)

• Senior System and Standard Engineer -- 3GPP delegate to RAN3 (RAN protocols), RAN plenary. System engineer for smallcell products design and development. Mainly monitor standardization activities (SIs and WIs) in RAN3, and gaining overall standardization of RAN technologies in RAN plenary.
• System engineering of new featues in 3G (UMTS) and 4G (LTE) femtocell/smallcell products by analyzing customer requirements and create company-internal specification documents to implement them (transfer to Cisco systems was due to its acquisition of Ubiquisys Ltd. in 2013).

2006 - 2010: Thomson / Technicolor, (Edegem, Belgium)

• System Architect -- Standard delegate to 3GPP RAN3 (RAN protocols), SA5 (Telecom management), Broadband Forum（BBF), Femto Forum (FF) (This leadership work resulted in receiving the first Femto Forum award in 2009).
• System engineer of 3G (UMTS) smallcell products design and development.

1992 - 2006: Motorola Inc. (Arlington Heights, IL. US.)

• Principal Staff Engineer (2002-2006), Senior Staff Engineer (2000-2002), Lead Engineer (1998-2000) Senior Engineer (1996-1998), Engineer I, II (1992-1996)
• System engineering of 2G (PDC)　and 3G (CDMA) infrastructure product engineering, development, testing, deployment, customer support. Have experienced engineering work in all phases of mobile infrastructure system development lifecycle.

1982 - 1987: Nagoya IGS, (Nagoya, Japan)

• Software engineer, team leaderSoftware development of bespoke banking OS and banking transaction applications. Leading/mentoring a small group of developers.

Standardization Work

I have participated and actively contributed to various Work Items (WI) and Study Items (SI), spanning over diverse topics between Rel.8 ~ Rel.15 time frame in the following working groups. The total number of contributions are approximately 260. As a result, this experience helped me to gain general expertise to grasp and understand details of technical content rather quickly and effectively, written in usually difficult-to-understand manner. This experience also gave me opportunities to learn non-technical soft skills, such as discussing and negotiating with difficult people on technical matters, explaining complex topics clearly to people, effectively reach agreement and consensus in professional manner.

• 3GPP SA3 (Security), SA5 (Management), SA6 (Public Safety).
• 3GPP RAN plenary, RAN3 (Protocols)

During the period of 2007~2010, I actively drove the standardization work of femtocell management system and its data model. This work resulted in BBF TR-196. This is a culmination of collaboration with various people from various companies. I was lucky to have this opportunity to take a leading role to drive this activity.

• BBF: Standardization of femtocell Data Model TR-196
• Femto Forum (Small Cell Forum): Femtocell management, architecture

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EDUCATION

My education and career progression ended up highly convoluted (please see the figure above). It was not intentional. It was rather an end result of career-long endeavour to undo my prior (poor) decision to not pursue higher education when I was a teenager. You can call it a entire-career-long quest for repechage (2nd chance) in life. It's not the optimal way of doing things, but I'm happy that I've done this. Having said this, I'm don't quite recommend doing it this way to anybody.

• PhD, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) (Belgium), Thesis title: “Digital Certificate Usage and Management in Vehicular Communication Systems”, 2023 (Downloadable from: Here)
• MS Telecommunication, Southern Methodist University (US) , 2002
• BS. Information and Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology (US) , 1992

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RESEARCH WORK

My research interest is in communication security. I found vehicular communication (V2X) an interesting research area as it is an intersection of communication industry and automotive industry, and I was curious to see if this relatively-new technology will be a great success in the marketplace or a failure. I have not yet reached conclusion on this point.

I did my PhD in 2023 in Katholiek Universiteit in Leuven (KU Leuven) in Beligum. My thesis is regarding security and privacy of vehicular communication. This work revolves around analysis of standard specifications.

Research Interests:

• Security and privacy of communication systems, including vehicular communication (V2X), Cooperative Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM)
• Security of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in the context of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs)
• Certificate management issues in other security contexts (e.g. certificate revocation in TLS)
• Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) migration issues in communication systems (e.g. V2X)

Notable Talks/Presentations:

• ULTIMO Webinar: Cybersecurity and Privacy in Autonomous Mobility, Online, Dec. 2025 video
• PQC Impacts on V2X, PQCSA Workshop, Frankfurt, Germany, Nov. 2025 video
• TLS Certificate Revocation – theory and reality, NAIST, Nara, Japan, Apr. 2025
• A New Privacy Enhancing Beacon Scheme in V2X Communication, ASRG webinar, Jan. 2022video and video

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RESEARCH PAPERS

ML (Machine Learning) Security-Related Research Papers:

PQC Migration-Related Research Papers:

V2X Security-Related Research Papers:

Other Research Papers:

Full list of publications: Google Scholar

OTHER ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES

Technical Programme Committee:

Paper Reviews:

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PATENTS

Granted Patents:

Pending Patents:

Full list of patents: Google Scholar

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OTHER (MISC) INFO

Interest:

Reading, Engineering, Teaching, History, Music, Learning something new, Gaining insights and perspectives on various things,...

Motto:

Honesty goes a long way.

Be willing to lose a battle in order to win a war.

The only constant thing in life is changes.

(more of an observation, but) People's nature is essentially the same regardless of where they come from and langurage and cultural differences, etc.

Language:

Japanese (native), English (99.9%-native), Dutch (intermediate), German (elementary)

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