Nice to meet you. My name is Yuki Shimizu from D2.
This might be my first time writing something for our lab’s blog!

This time, I’d like to share my experience attending the workshop of the on-campus fellowship program “Granite / Granite-AI”.

At NAIST, there is a fellowship program called the Granite Program for doctoral students, through which selected students receive financial support for living expenses, research costs, and study abroad. (You can find more details [here]!)

I’ve been supported by this program since the second year of my doctoral course (D2).
As part of the program, a workshop was held on October 31, where Granite fellows from various research fields gathered to present their work to one another as well as to invited company representatives.

[Program Schedule]

In the morning session, three guests from industry gave insightful talks on their own career paths and on possible trajectories for Ph.D. students.

Without going into too much detail, I was deeply inspired by their stories emphasizing that what truly matters is not only research expertise but also experiences such as overcoming challenges with lab members and having the courage to take on ambitious problems. These, they said, are essential for building a strong career foundation.

In the afternoon, we had two presentation sessions: 100-second short talks by all Granite fellows (more than 60 speakers!) and a 90-minute poster session.

Delivering a memorable 100-second talk that draws people to your poster is not easy when there are so many presenters.
I had prepared thoroughly—getting advice from both senior and junior lab members—and I think I managed to leave quite a good impression.
(Some presenters struggled a bit, talking about very technical topics that were hard to follow in such a short time!)

[My Poster]

During the poster session, we actively introduced each other’s work and enjoyed interdisciplinary exchanges across different research areas.

Personally, I found the bio-related research particularly fascinating—how researchers observe biological reactions under varying conditions and turn the discovery of unexpected phenomena into academic papers.
That process embodies the very essence of science, and I found it truly inspiring.
(Did you know that there are even students studying chimera research at NAIST?)

[Award Ceremony]

After the poster session came the award ceremony, where students with outstanding presentations received Excellence and Best Presentation awards.

The selection was based on voting—including votes from fellow students!
Unfortunately, I didn’t win any awards (probably because I don’t have many friends… just kidding). Still, I felt confident about my performance and satisfied with how it went.

Finally, Professor Kato presented the awards and delivered the closing remarks, bringing the workshop to a warm conclusion.

That wraps up my report on the Granite Workshop.
If you’re considering pursuing a doctoral degree, I highly recommend attending such events—you’ll have the chance to hear directly from current students and get a real sense of the atmosphere.

I look forward to seeing you again in the next post!

We recently held a farewell party for Oat and Rahman, who will be graduating this autumn.
Gathered around curry, naan, sushi, and good conversation, we all enjoyed a warm and lively time together.

After graduation, Oat will begin a new chapter by working in Japan, while Rahman will continue his journey in the IMD Lab as a Ph.D. student.
We are truly grateful for their contributions to the lab, and we sincerely wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

Next up will be the welcome party for the new students joining us in the upcoming academic year. We look forward to meeting them!

(Left : Party scene, Right : Party food🍛)

Article by Yoshinari Nishiki

Main Topic:
Sir Robin Saxby is an English engineer and most known for his work as the founding CEO and chairman of ARM Holdings, which is now a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. Through personal connections, I somehow became acquainted with Robin from around 2016. While I exchanged with him many opinions on the possibilities of business applications for my artistic concepts, I had only met him in person twice. This was our third time to physically meet, being invited to his residence in a suburb of London and to have lunch in the area. Typically around this time of the year, Robin is hiding away in the mountains of Switzerland (skiing), but luckily for me, he happened to be in England for some days, and at a time that I was planning to visit the country.

Upon arrival to Robin’s place, which is a former residence of a local vicar (senior priest) built in the early 19th century, he showed to me all of the paintings he had made over the years in different spots he visited for various reasons. Robin then took me to his “lab”, which also functions as a museum and a sports gym. The lab was built inside a former horse barn on the premises, and he works on past technologies in his spare time, which is very little.

“When I was 13, I started to fix electronics to earn money.” It was the beginning of Robin’s journey as an engineer. He showed me one of the oldest transistors, of which he said, “the number of transistors evolved from 50 to 50 billion (50,000,000,000).” At that moment, I saw a clear connection from what he was occupied with as a teenager, to the founding CEO of ARM. Like it’s mentioned in the book Mobile unleashed: the origin and evolution of ARM processors in our devices, it was not a straight forward process to make the ARM architecture, but in a sense it was a natural process for Robin, that’s the feeling I got.

For Robin, old technologies are not obsolete, but rather useful in terms of determining the solidness of a piece of technology from a given moment. Since latest technologies are not necessarily the best, understanding old technologies helps you go back to a historical point and allows you to rethink the state of now.

Robin also claims that he has been “(un)making throughout his life.” (Un)making is the topic of my PhD research which is a variant of unmaking (please notice it is without a pair of brackets), which is a counterpart to making (as in the Maker movement). Unmaking looks at reframing the general goals of making in order to better address the environmental urgency of our planet. To extend unmaking to an extreme, (un)making focuses on creativity in avoiding production to foster ecological value creation.

In the “museum” he built inside the barn were a number of gramophones and vintage machines. A demonstration of how a TV works before its existence drew my attention in particular. It reminded me of when I had to explain what AR was to non-researchers before Pokemon GO came about.

Conversation over (un)making: The reason why I wanted to meet Robin was to discuss about (un)making. I had already sent him some descriptions about the concept in advance so he already knew the outlines, but he asked me, “among all the world’s problems we have today, what can (un)making fix?”

My answer was, “(un)making can resolve the duplications in production and people’s efforts.” Since everybody has to make their own ends meet, they engage in some kind of productive activities. However, the scope of these activities are too biased by how monetary value is generated, people end up with more or less the same kinds of things, making duplications of production.

Robin listened to me for a while before saying, “for me, the biggest problem is having to show quarterly earnings growth.”

I felt that we basically have the same view, but Robin sees the problem lying in the basic protocol of how a business operates.

I also talked about my own ambition about where I’d like to take (un)making to, and how it may have some similarities to the way the ARM architecture is situated in the current economic climate. My PhD research has been somewhat loose in terms of approach, but after the appointment with Robin was fixed, I was thinking my approach should be more systematic, or in my own word, mechanical.

About the AI hype: We naturally ended up talking about the current AI hype. One of the issues that Robin sees is that companies compete with each other rather than sharing. After all, OpenAI is not open at all.

However, the biggest issue of the AI hype is that “[t]hey can do the complicated stuff really well but quickly fall over on the stuff that 5-year-old children can do, implying that they are not really reasoning but merely offering a sophisticated simulation of it.” (this is from a link later shared by Robin [1])

Robin said, “AI is fear of missing out, money, and power.”

Unpredictable political situation: In the age of techno feudalism (the owners of big tech became the world’s feudal overlords) [2], we are re-witnessing global conflicts akin to before WWII. When the world is full of garbage, both online and offline, Robin says that it’s important not to overreact.

Conclusion: After the conversation, we moved to a local pub/restaurant for lunch. Robin had several appointments after ours, but postponed them slightly so that we could finish an entire bottle of white wine!

References:

1. https://www.radiofreemobile.com/artificial-intelligence-spray-and-pray/
2. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781529926095