Recently

On Friday we had a farewell karaoke party for Douglas who is returning home after working with us at AIST for two months. It was lots of fun. And the Japanese are great at karaoke. And we were able to detect many “interest points” in the pieces. Here are some pictures.

Drinking...



And singing...



And that’s me, singing the Beatles “Yesterday”, probably with my mic turned off. Hiro was so nice to help me out with that difficult song.



And this is what is what we were looking at ... random videos with subtitles.



Afterwards we went to an Australian bar. In a dramatic game of pool the Europeans defeated the Japanese :-)



This is the view from my window at work. A sight I enjoy almost everyday.



I learned to say: “Chotto hen desu ne?” (Bisserl verrueck, oder?) This friendly Brazilian capoerista is driving while the picture is taken.



I noticed that there are only very few trash bins. Recently I found some instructions on how to deal with this problem:
“After the corner was turned, the trash was tossed away. It was a blind spot in the city.” In the lower right it says “meet your delight”. (Picture taken at a train station)



By the way, the Sockenpabst has moved to a new address. In her most recent blog entry she explains (in German) why they always give us so much plastic junk at the supermarket. Actually, the first phrase I learned to say and most frequently use is: “Spoon wa keko desu.” (Thanks, but I don’t need a plastic spoon with that yoghurt.)

Last weekend we had a capoeira event at a bonfire party. This picture was taken after our performance and shortly before the fire was lighted.



While warming up we had some difficulties getting used to the wet and slippery grass. It was lots of fun, and some of us (like me) got really dirty :-)

Bicycling: Non-Verbal Communication

Today I noticed something so extremely interesting that I decided to share it with the world (at least with that part of the world that looks at my blog) :-)

When bicycling I often use my nose and my eyes to communicate where I want to go. This helps when cycling through crowded pedestrian zones or when there is an ambiguous situation with another cyclist. It works really well, and it’s a technique I learned when working as a bicycle messenger. So basically it works like this: I point my nose and eyes to the ground about 2-3 meters in direction I intend to cycle (and continuously stare in the direction I'm heading to). Others usually understand, and either realize that I am no danger to them (even if I'm moving fast or close to them), or will move out of the way (if I have the right of way). This works in Vienna (tried at least a million times) and London (tried a few times). However, this does not seem work in Japan!

I’ve tried it about 4 times now (in Tsukuba). Every time it failed... every time the other person reacted as if they did not know where I was heading to. I’m pretty sure now that it simply does not work. Maybe because in general Japanese don’t have such big noses which can be used to point into certain directions? Or maybe it doesn’t work because the others never try to look into my eyes? It actually seems that they prefer to look at the ground themselves. I’d love to ask a bicycle messenger in Tokyo how they manage to quickly move through crowds of people without scaring everyone (and thus resulting in people jumping directly into the direction you wanted to cycle to...). Or maybe Tokyo is different from Tsukuba? I wish I could spend some more time investigating this... but today I learned on Wikipedia, that post-docs are supposed to work 80+ hours per week. That means I'm still a few hours short this week, and if I want to spend my weekend doing other things, I better start getting some work done now...

The Loudest Insect in the World

Just in front of my door an insect has decided to settle and start it’s mating call. I had no idea how loud a single insect can be. At first I thought it might even be a fire alarm. Here is the picture of this amazing Japanese individual. It’s about as big as my camera.

Goto's Lab

Masataka Goto is supervising my work at AIST. At the same time he is supervising at least 7 other students at the lab. Most of them are spending one or two months of their summer vacations at AIST (like an internship).

I've seen various styles of supervision of students, but I've never seen anyone so intensively supervising so many students at the same time. Sometimes it seems that he has meetings with students all day... one day after the other. All students have very different topics. And all of these topics are really interesting. None of the students needs to worry that another student could "steal" an idea from them, or come up with a solution to the problem they are working on before they do. Instead they identify areas where results from one project could help another one, and work together. Every student also seems to have a very clear picture of what they are working on, what the next steps could be, and how they want to evaluate progress. It's amazing!

I used to think that the best way to work together in research is to be working towards the same goal. I guess that can work really well in special cases, but it is somehow a problem when you need to write two different doctoral dissertations about the same topic, or when it comes to the order of authors on a publication. However, given this experience in Goto's lab I think the best way (in computer science) is to work on different but somehow related topics and just sit next to each other. (Most of the students' topics deal with music analysis in some way.) However, this also means that one needs to come up with many interesting topics to work on...

BTW, today I learned that in Japan the labs at universities are officially named after the professors. Instead of names such as "Intelligent Music Processing Group", "Music Technology Group", or "Centre for Digital Music", the last name of the professor is used. In general it seems that professors are very highly respected. However, it seems a bit strange to me that the name of the professor is more important than the research field the group is actually working on.

Here is a picture of Masataka at his desk. He actually did some cleaning before I was allowed to take a picture... but I didn't notice any difference :-)



These are the students Masataka supervises (including Masataka, Doug, and me).



This picture was taken a few hours later at the "all-you-can-drink" place. (Yes, alcohol!)



And this is my new business card in Japanese! :-)



Business cards are very important in the Japanese communication culture. If I would give you one of my cards, you should receive it with both hands. Look at it, marvel at its beauty (or talk about how impressive the font is) and then after 10 minutes or so of admiring it, carefully put it into the special shiny metal case in which you store all the important business cards you receive. Do not take notes on the card! And do not stick the card in your back pocket! The way you treat the card is an indication of what you think about me :-)

Here are two updates to my last posts. First, here you can see what "PreKla" looks like when experts do it. And here (2.45MB) you can find a great video of the HRP2 robot (which is partly developed by some of my colleagues at AIST) dancing the dance which I saw the old ladies dance last Sunday.



Find out more about this dancing robot here (in Japanese).