Heading to ICALT 2007 in Niigata Japan.
Day 1 (16th July):
Rush-hour traffic woes meant shlepping suitcase on London underground was actually more reliable. Worked fine, though even a wheeled suitcase and nice rucksack are tiring – glad I’ve taken featherweight laptop – thanks Lewis!! Dell Latitude X1 saved the day when my old fave HP TC1100 tablet had a nasty virus prob, my slick MacBookPro was too much of a shoulder-buster to lug all the way, and my little Fujitsu Lifebook has an RSI-inducing keyboard
During checkin discovered that my ultimate destination (Niigata) had just suffered a 6.8 quake – trying to soak up relevant stories, both via gadgets and even in mid-air through in-flight news. Conference website says conference will go ahead, but to expect possible train/transport disruption. News reports talking about ‘minor radiation leaks’. YEAH, RIGHT – sounds very nasty to me!
Smooth flight – finished talk in the pathetic low battery time allotted. Watched “Blood Diamond” – thought it was great, even with the “too-many-implausible-escapes” and improbable reporter; would have been too intense for me on the Big Screen.
Day 2 (17th July): Arrived Tokyo 9am ‘next day’ – took Shinkansen / Narita Express into town, then subway to Takebashi via Otemachi. Navigating was no problem thanks to advance printout and so many years spent on New York and London systems, which deploy a lot less logic (like stations numbered by the line they’re on, e.g. station M08 is on the Marunouchi line, T09 is on the Tozai line, etc.)
Visited National Information Institute, courtesy Prof. Honiden and Dr. Abdullah – both of whom increasingly collaborating with the OU, the former on requirements analysis / software engineering and the latter on fine-grained dialogue modelling, based on a sample of BuddySpace transcripts and shortly on the same for FlashMeeting. Also met Paul and Eric who are working on multi-agent systems, particularly open heterogenous architectures which involve arbitrary ‘fresh’ negotiation strategies, of which the archetypal case is real-time electricity supply/demand and finding the optimal buy/sell strategies. Paul worked on a related system for mixed-initiative (multi-human + multi-agent) problem solving, devising a series of scenarios to enable to collect real ethnographic data. Prof. Honiden’s secretary kindly helped me out with train bookings for Niigata, and (more importantly) wrote down a few key instructions (a) for me, in English regarding a quick route to finding the train and (b) for a few taxi drivers en route, in Japanese.
Evening caught the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) to Niigata – got mildly drenched getting to the hotel… and then… presto-mundo.. .here I am in… YIKES… the TALLEST building for miles around (that’s it in the nearby photo on the right!)… as if my anxiety levels were not already high enough entering the ‘earthquake zone’…. hmmm… and the news, as I suspected, is reporting quake/radiation damage side-effects are a ‘worse than reported at first’, but ‘no threat to the environment’. As I said above, YEAH, RIGHT: what are the odds?
