I received the honor to attend the Town Meeting with US’s Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at Hongo Campus, The University of Tokyo.

There was approximately 200 students in the round hall of  Yayoi Auditorium.  I was sitting at the mid-center, literally a sweet-spot, but thanks to the enthusiasm of the other students, I did not have the luxury of an opportunity to ask question or having direct interaction with Secretary Clinton.

It was a pleasant and inspirational experience.

Links -> Project Abstract, About MITOH program

I visited the NTT’s ICC with Professor Rekimoto’s Human-Computer Interaction class members.  

ICC Open Space is a community space that is free of charge and open throughout the year. ICC held a variety of events concerning the arts and science, with performing artists not only from Japan, but often overseas, too.

Link -> ICC Online

Okay, the robot we designed was not really stupid, actually it has the ability to recognise human faces and performs tracking with 3-Dimensional motorics. 

However, it does not answer any crucial needs of human life, nor it solve ANY problems. It just have the ability to do complex stuffs, with the lack of user demands.

Please refer to BAKAROBO2008 site for the competition news. And below is the movie posted by Maywadenki  contains the brief explanation of each contestant.

PlanetLab is an open platform for developing, deplyoing, and accessing planetary-scale services.

It provides nodes from top universities and industrial research facilities, mainly as a test-bed for planetary-scale network programs and services.

Thanks to our Advanced Network Programming Supervisor, Professor Nakao Akihiro, we actually able to develop and test our winter projects directly on PlanetLab.

The projects including advanced crawling algorithms, large dataset visualization, implementations of MapReduce frameworks, etc.

今回初めて参加したシンポジウムで、テーマは「ユビキタスと空間情報」でした。

プログラムの内容は、坂村先生のご挨拶に続き、鈴木先生（新潟大学大学院医歯学総合研究科教授）、原田豊先生（科学警察研究所犯罪行動科学部長）、と神山和夫（NPO法人バードリサーチ研究員）の講演が行われました。

パネル・ディスカッションは上記の方々と岡部先生（東大空間情報科学研究センター教授）がパネリストに加わりました。

The YRKN is only a toy robot and made to make some of us laugh. But still, it has the great technology behind it, and all the credits belongs to Rekimoto Sensei and Tajima-San at Sony CSL.

The sessions are mainly free discussions, focused not only on Computer Science field, but also covered a wide interests on Human-Environment Interaction.

It was started only from curiosity about stock market and investment business, and how the IT department plays role in the company.

It turned out to be a great experience, and I really thankful for the opportunity i had.

The system’s installation was a breeze. We only took a few setbacks and by the mighty coding skill of Miyaki Sensei, we’ve overcome it pretty good.

Now, the system is ready to accept the paper submissions. 

I hope for the best to all of the submittors.