interACT Signing Ceremony

An event that's already a few weeks past: on Apr 9 the interACT agreement, as part of which I'm here in Japan right now, was officially signed with NAIST. It was quite a big event in fact, we had some important visitors from Germany (the KIT president and two professors). After the signing ceremony itself, there was a lab tour for the German visitors, and also a meeting of Michael and myself (the first representatives of this new cooperation) with the president. I hope it has also left an impression on some Japanese students, so that we might meet some of them in Germany sometime!

Sakura sakura

Looks like I'm running behind a bit writing posts, there's just too much going on these days. Well, 2 weeks ago we went for the お花見 ("o-hanami", flower viewing, of course referring to the famous cherry blossoms).
Around that time, the cherry blossoms had finally decided to show. A bit late, but fortunate for me, since it allowed me to witness the complete cherry blossom season this time. The scenery we chose couldn't have been nicer: The big park around Osaka castle, which is a great place to go any time of the year, with lots of green, spots to walk or rest, and of course the impressive castle itself. Adding all the cherry trees in full bloom to a place like this made it easy to understand why cherries are such a big deal in Japan. That being said, it's not surprising that we were not the only people among the 2.6 million Osaka-jins that decided to use a sunny Sunday afternoon to visit the park..

The second お花見-related event I want to write about is our lab picnic last week. Staff and students drove to the nearby Keihanna Park, and brought one of those big blue plastic sheets to sit on. Each brought their own obentou-lunchboxes which we then enjoyed while talking and watching the cherries.  Here are some pictures:

ここ どこ？

Koko doko ("here where?" = where am I?). Like last time, I live in Ikoma, which is in Nara Prefecture (next to Osaka). Ikoma is a tiny city of just about 120,000 inhabitants (yep, in Japan that's tiny). Actually, I don't even really live inside that tiny town, it's more like a quiet spot across the mountains which still happens to belong to Ikoma. This quiet spot is part of a larger area where my university as well as a number of research institutions are located in what is called Keihanna Science Town.
Michael has created a nice map which you can find here:

My University is called NAIST, which is short for Nara Institute of Science and Technology. In Japanese it's 奈良先端科学技術大学院大学 (Nara-sentan-kagaku-gijutsu-daigakuin-daigaku), but even the Japanese don't want to pronounce that... NAIST is a rather small graduate school, and there are about 1000 master's and doctoral students in the fields of computer science, biology, and materials science. Despite (or maybe because of) the small size, it has gained a pretty good reputation for it's computer science program, and I think it was a good choice to come here. At my lab, there is one professor and 3 assistant professors who are in charge of around 20 students, so the supervision is very good. It's really more like a team working together, there's less of a distance between professors and students like in Germany.
Well, here are some pictures of my room (especially noteworthy: the cleaning sign for my door. No cleaning, taking out the garbage, or changing sheets for the next 6 months!).

This is the university and my lab:

First Impressions

I had the chance to buy an SD card reader on Sunday at Yodobashi Camera (which is probably the most enormous electronics store I'll ever see, with 7 or 8 stories!). So, here are just a few pictures of my first days.

747-400, pretty impressive airplane:

On Thursday night, my first night in Japan, despite me being all jetlaggy, we already set out to breathe some Osaka air (and eat the obligatory Okonomiyaki-food):

Most students had been attending a conference in Kyoto during the week, so I didn't meet most of them until Friday evening. They were all really friendly, and on Friday night we had a little lab party (Okonomiyaki again!). It was supposed to be a birthday party for Michael (the other German from Karlsruhe) and also my welcome party.