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).