Day 6: The first technical excursions

Tuesday March 1st, 2011 by Celine Vincent

When the weekend ends and monday comes, it is once again time for serious business. So, after a weekend packed with cultural excursions, it was time for some company visits. It must have been quite a sight for the other guests of the hostel when suddenly the lounge was filled with people in suits; the same people that left the day before with a pikachu in their midst.

Our prayers at the Sensoji Temple for good weather must have reached deaf ears, since it never stopped raining. When we left it downright poured from the sky, but fortunately this is common in Tokyo, and the hostel could provide us with some spare umbrellas. We had heard nightmare stories about the rush hour in the Tokyo public transit, and therefore left early. Although some trains and stations were crowded, it was not as bad as we had feared. So we made it to RCAST, our first technical excursion, with time to spare.

RCAST, which stands for ‘Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology’ is one of the research centers of the University of Tokyo. The name does not show what discipline the center focusses its research on, and this is for a reason: RCAST believes that an interdiscipinary approach to research can not only give new insights, but can also save time and expenses. This belief showed in the presentations that were given to the group. The first presentation from the director general gave us a brief summary of the research center and an overview of Solar Quest, a project that focuses on making solar cells more efficient. The second presentation showed the diversity of the ‘Barrier Free’ group, with demonstrations of both a pen which can wireless send everything written with it to a notebook and store it on internal memory, and the work of an artist to pursuade people to communicate. After the presentations, the group was divided for four laboratory tours. With the official program finished, we enjoyed a lunch in the Italian restaurant of RCAST and left for NEC, our second technical excursion.

NEC is a company dedicated to creating an information society friendly to humans and the earth. They do this through ‘C&C’: the integration of computer and communication technologies. We were given a short summary of the company before a tour through NEC Innovation World, an exposition area for completed technologies. After that, we traveled to a second building by train at the Tamagawa plant, where the Central Research Laboratories are located. Here, four poster discussions were prepared for us. We had the opportunity to talk to researchers about their work: an availability model for cloud computing, face recognition technology, openflow technology and realtime video image processing for automotive applications.

Tuesday we will visit Toshiba and Fujitsu with high expectations after the very interesting technical excursions of today.