The Inamori Foundation has awarded its advanced technology prize to US computer scientist Ivan Sutherland, who developed the graphic interface program Sketchpad in 1963.
In addition to Sutherland, Gayatri Chakrovoty Spivak, an Indian literary critic and professor at Columbia University, also received a Kyoto Prize, hers for arts and philosophy.
Yoshinori Ohsumi, a molecular biologist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, received the basic sciences prize for his work on autophagy, a cell-recycling system that could be used to help treat neurodegenerative and age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer.
The Kyoto-based Inamori Foundation was set up in 1984 by Kyocera Corp.'s founder, Kazuo Inamori.