Today professor Fukunaga from the Tokyo University of Engineering (Toukoudai), came to Toudai to make an invited lecture about Heuristics. I had a very nice chance to talk to him after his lecture, where we discussed some questions about my research which are likely to result in a chapter of my thesis (and possibly a publication somewhere), and I also had a chance to pick his brain about his opinions on cooperative research here in Japan and in the United States.

I always had some problems with Cooperative Research. It is in my nature to try and get people to participate in what I’m doing – be it parties, or my hobbies, or anything – and yet I had very little success in trying to do some cooperative research. Until very recently, I was never able to do it at all. Fortunately, I think I’m finally getting the hang of what exactly you can and cannot expect to share with other people in terms of work and research tasks.

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Later this night I had a meeting with a group called the “Asia Interaction Club”, which was introduced to me by Chaminda. “International Clubs” like this one, for those who have never been in an university in Japan, are student associations which aim to have meetings to integrate foreign and local students. An interesting thing about this one is that they concentrate mostly on
east asian foreign students, while most of the other International Clubs I have seen before seemed to just consider tall blue eyed blond foreigners as “proper” international students. The meeting was quite fun, as they were planning for an “games afternoon” event in the near future and I was able to give many suggestions of what kinds of games to run. Managed to take my head off my many research tasks I’m swamped to these days (the fact that some of the results from my experiments came today and were quite positive also made the night meeting a bit more fun, I guess :-P)

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After watching the move “Us Now”, like I blogged abotu a few days ago, I made my Couchsurfing profile. Since then (about 3 days ago), I already got more than 10 requests for couchsurfing for the next month – half of them for the next week – WOW! I wonder if october is holiday season in Europe or something like that. Of course, I could not accept many of them because of my thesis or stuff, but I actually got guests staying at home for the most part of the next few days. I’ll report about it as they come.