Hi, I am Atsushi Keyaki who is a first year doctoral student. I will report about conferences I attended.

DBS153

A conference of DBS153 was held on November 3rd. I made a presentation in the conference. Because my presentation contained much information, it was hard for non-professional people of my research area, i.e., XML element retrieval to understand my presentation. From now on, I will try to have audiences understand a motivation of my research goal.

Anyway, fortunately, I got some good comments and suggestions. So, I want to refine my research to consider them.

WebDB Forum 2011

A conference of Web DB Forum 2011 was held on November 4th-5th. As you can see from the conference name, the main target of topics is Web search. The conference invited a lot of companies and asked them to talk about managing big data and support for disasters.

I really enjoyed the conference to see and discuss with my friend and professors. It encouraged me very much:-)

Terve!
Minä olen Matoba.
Minä opiskelen Oulun yliopistossa.

It means

Hi!
I am Matoba.
I study at Oulu university.

Hello!
I have stayed in Finland for a couple of months.
In this article, I will report what I research, study, and feel in Finland.

The impression of Finland

So BEAUTIFUL!!
Generally speaking, there are lots of lakes and forests in Finland.
I have realized that since I arrived here.
Most of  forests in Finland  are  not so humid or dark as it is in Japan.
The atmosphere of the forest in Finland is bright and comfortable as if Moomin would appear 😀

I found some interesting living things which I can rarely see in Japan.

Mashroom

woodpecker

In addition, I realize people in Finland are so kind as they have grown up such an wonderful environment.

For examples,

• When I lost my way, a passenger got of the bus with me and guided me to my home.
• When I was having lunch, a shop assistant served me a desert.
• When I was hiking a mountain, another hiker gave me a reindeer meat and taught me how to pick up wild berries.

Everyone in Finland is very nice!!

Since I left Japan and came Finland where is far away from my country, I have been able to look back my life objectively.

• Am I kind or tender to other people?
• Could I imagine enough what other people want or think

I will not forget this feelings, and try to think up or pay attention to others as people in Finland.

Next, I am writing my student life in Oulu university.
I set two goals when I arrived here.

The first goal is to make an best effort in my research.
The second one is to study what I can hardly learn in Japan.

Research

Currently, I research the User Interface for people with dementia.
Last month, I visited some related research institutions and care home for elderly people.

I have just one month left, so I am struggling to progress my research as much as possible.

Survival Finnish

I take Finnish class named Survival Finnish.
In this class, we can learn the basic of Finnish language to be able to survive in Finland!
At one time, I could not catch up the class because the class progress speed was fast.
However, the teacher and friends helped me a lot and I tried to use Finnish practically.
Finally, I could do well on the final exam, and I am just waiting for the result.

Scandinavian Study

I also take Scandinavian Study course which we can learn Scandinavian cultures such as politics, musics, and architectures.
For examples, we played the traditional Finnish instrument “Kantele”.

Also we danced the Finnish original dance.
Finland is the only country which dancing was prohibited during the world war second.
At that time, people in Finland created the original dance which does not look dancing but like just stepping or moving legs.
We all danced it together in the class.
It was so fun and I enjoyed a lot.

In this article, I reported my life in Finland.
Thank you for reading.

Hopefully, I will write more till going back to Japan.

Näkemiin(See you) !!

Hello everyone,
I am Uranishi, an assistant prof. of IMD lab.
During the last week, I was at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR2011) in Basel, Switzerland. Kato sensei, Yamamoto sensei and Oikawa san were also attending the conference from the IMD lab.

Tourist Information

Switzerland is not so far from Oulu. It takes only 3-4 hours from Oulu to Basel (not including connecting time). Intracity transportation in Switzerland is well orgernized so I could use trams or buses wherever I went.

And it is pretty easy to use mobile data communication in Switzerland:

1. Visit Swisscom stores,

2. Say “I want buy Natel Easy Befree”,

3. Then you get 5days-mobile data communication with 20 CHF.

But everything is expensive in Switerland. I paid 13 CHF to eat hamburger meal at Burger King…

Conference

ISMAR2011 had several events. There are two lines in the main conference: “Science and Technology” and “Arts, Media & Humanities”, and workshops and tutorals were held in addition to the above lines. I made a presentation of my work in Finland at the satellite workshop on Visualization in Mixed Reality Environments. Oikawa san also made a presentetion about her work at the workshop on TrakMark, and Yamamoto sensei did at the S&T poster session. The best paper of S&T was “KinectFusion”. It was “interesting”.

Cheeses

No more cheeses.

I miss Japan

I met many Japanese colleagues in Basel. And, amazingly, I met Jaakko at Helsinki airport on the way.

And I visited a Japanese restaurant,
This is because I really miss Japanese foods.

Additional tour in Zurich

I and Yamamoto sensei visited MesaImaging, the manufacturer of SwissRanger. The SwissRanger is one of famous Time-of-Flight range image sensor. We had presentations about our researces, and fruitful discussions.

Good morning,

This is Hyry.

I went to 4th International Symposium on Applied Sciences in Biomedical and Communication Technologies (ISABEL) conference which was held in Barcelona, Spain this year. Also Ass.Prof. Ikeda attended the same conference.

Conference venue and the hotel I stayed in was the same so I had easy access to everything.

Unfortunately I got sick on the way to the conference so most of the time I was trying to get better in bed. Probably due to cold air in the airplane. I still have the same flu here at NAIST so watch out for me, but I feel a bit better already.

I held my presentation about the Requirements guideline of Assistive Technology for Elderly late on Friday, the final day of the conference and I think most of the conference members had already left back to their countries, so not a lot of people attended our session on Ambient Assisted Living and Health Informatics. Either way, it was nice to be session chair for the first time and watch Dr. Ikeda present his current research in the same session. Attending people were interested in his topic a lot.

The conference however was very medically oriented so not a lot of topics were suitable for our field of research. There were a few interesting RFID topics and some Computer Vision related talks, but most of others I missed because of my illness.

Best thing about the trip was that University of Oulu Masters’ Student Ye Zhang won “Best Student Paper Award” which is going to make my professor Petri Pulli happy as Zhang is also one of his students.