articulated robotic lobsters
May. 22nd, 2003 02:19 amIt wasn't an auspicious start today -- I had an urgent message from home, which proved to be about something financially annoying -- but the day got better. I was an hour late to the conference (after dealing with the home-front issues), and skipped breakfast. But there were two really good diagnosis papers today, and Yuki found a small restaurant in the middle of Nara-koen (park), serving a local specialty (kind of a rice-tea soup with bamboo pieces). A group of NASA colleagues followed, and were complimentary. She was happy to meet some of the people that had worked on the Remote Agent project and Livingstone (diagnosis software), which had caught her interest four years ago.
This afternoon included more papers, then wandering around a poster session, then a plenary talk (anthropomorphic robots! dancing and twirling batons! I'm not kidding... I wonder how they managed the training-set examples for the neural nets used).
Then there was a "special cultural presentation", a noh theatre performance. A picture from it is ( here ). Yuki had obtained front-row seats, and the music and chanting sent shivers up my arms at times. She then headed back home to Tokyo, while I went to the conference banquet.
Not just the equivalent of US conference rubber-chicken meals in dim hotel ballrooms, either... it was outdoors in a section of Nara-koen (fenced from the evil deer). With traditional red-cloth-covered benches for seating. We could wander from station to station, to several booths, taking plates or bowls. Sushi, of course (tuna, mackerel, squid); bowls of soba; a tempura booth; a table with various sashimi on ice; little tofu squares topped with crab; something resembling a stuffed lobster or giant crayfish; thin sliced beef with some kind of mild spicy sauce; all the sake, beer and cocktails we wanted; and fruit and strawberries with ice cream. A weird combination of novelty, elegance, friendliness, and a sense of family reunion (since a large percentage of the people there knew each other). It felt like![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hopeforyou should have been there, too.
A picture from the banquet is ( here ), with a group of my NASA colleagues.
This evening, I wandered around Nara a bit, joining a larger group of Ames folks for awhile. Then tried to book a ryokan in Kyoto for Friday night (no luck), and finally joined a MARTE project drilling telecon at 12:30am local time, back to the US. I'm not sure that it was worth the $60 in airtime (my Japanese cellphone costs $2/minute back to the US), but I hadn't participated in one of these for a while. Besides, given the Spanish participation, we had a globe-spanning meeting ;-).
This afternoon included more papers, then wandering around a poster session, then a plenary talk (anthropomorphic robots! dancing and twirling batons! I'm not kidding... I wonder how they managed the training-set examples for the neural nets used).
Then there was a "special cultural presentation", a noh theatre performance. A picture from it is ( here ). Yuki had obtained front-row seats, and the music and chanting sent shivers up my arms at times. She then headed back home to Tokyo, while I went to the conference banquet.
Not just the equivalent of US conference rubber-chicken meals in dim hotel ballrooms, either... it was outdoors in a section of Nara-koen (fenced from the evil deer). With traditional red-cloth-covered benches for seating. We could wander from station to station, to several booths, taking plates or bowls. Sushi, of course (tuna, mackerel, squid); bowls of soba; a tempura booth; a table with various sashimi on ice; little tofu squares topped with crab; something resembling a stuffed lobster or giant crayfish; thin sliced beef with some kind of mild spicy sauce; all the sake, beer and cocktails we wanted; and fruit and strawberries with ice cream. A weird combination of novelty, elegance, friendliness, and a sense of family reunion (since a large percentage of the people there knew each other). It felt like
hopeforyou should have been there, too. A picture from the banquet is ( here ), with a group of my NASA colleagues.
This evening, I wandered around Nara a bit, joining a larger group of Ames folks for awhile. Then tried to book a ryokan in Kyoto for Friday night (no luck), and finally joined a MARTE project drilling telecon at 12:30am local time, back to the US. I'm not sure that it was worth the $60 in airtime (my Japanese cellphone costs $2/minute back to the US), but I hadn't participated in one of these for a while. Besides, given the Spanish participation, we had a globe-spanning meeting ;-).
