News and Updates

At my class for Innovators Seminar, I invited Mr. Hideto Nakahara a Member of the Board and Senior Executive Vice President of Mitsubishi Corporation which is one of the most important companies in Japan, and perhaps the world.

As a leader of such an important company, he gave some excellent advice to our students which is an important message to all youth. He said Mitsubishi Corporation has to take very safe decisions because it is a large trading company with many employees. However he told our students the following advice

1. Do the things which are the most risky

2. Do it now because you will not be young for long

I thought this was amazing and visionary advice, coming from such a high up leader. We normally would expect conservative thinking at the top level of Japan, but I found Mr. Nakahara incredible engaging and visionary.

http://www.mitsubishicorp.com/jp/en/about/bmembers/hnakahara.html

ACE – the Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference – has become the leading scientific forum for dissemination of cutting-edge research results in the area of entertainment computing. Interactive entertainment is one of the most vibrant areas of interest in modern society and is amongst the fastest growing industries in the world. ACE 2012 will bring together leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present their innovative work and discuss all aspects and challenges of interactive entertainment technology, in an exciting emerging world environment of Nepal.
Submit your work here: http://ace2012.info/submission
For this year, we will accept papers up to and including eight pages long.
Important date
Submission deadline: Friday, June 1, 23:59 GMT
Reviews will be single blind (i.e., include authorship information with the submitted paper).
Submission rules
– Papers must be in English.
– Previously published work may not be submitted, nor may the work be concurrently submitted to any other conference or journal. Such papers will be rejected without review.
– Papers must be submitted as PDF documents. The paper submissions must use the exact ACM SIG templates. Please find the template at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates. There are word, word perfect and Latex templates linked on the template page. If you use Latex, please use the style “Strict Adherence to SIGS style” on that page.
– Authors may include supplementary materials (such as a video) with the submission, and such materials are highly encouraged if they provide evidence of the claimed contribution. Videos should not be longer than 5 minutes long, and the total size of all submitted materials (including the PDF document) must be under 20MB. If you include a video, also include a text file describing what codec you used to create the video. Videos should be playable by either the current Windows Media Player or Apple Quicktime player. It is preferable that your video be playable by these standard players without requiring additional codec installations. If you require a special codec (e.g. DivX), make certain that you include instructions on how to find and install that codec. If the reviewers cannot play your video file, it will reduce the chances of your submission being accepted.
Submission procedure
Please submit all materials via the conference submission system located at http://ace2012.info/submission
If you have questions about Papers for ACE 2012, please contact the Program Chairs at submit@ace2012.info
For any other information please contact info@ace2012.info
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As a foreigner it is quite rare to be asked to the standard Japanese company meetings. What I mean are those meetings which are not something to do with international matters and there is no information in English. I was asked to represent our faculty to a meeting of the “Information Technology Center” (basically handling all computer administration and “Media Center” (basically libraries), representing our school. It was 6pm to 8pm on Friday night. On the one hand it was on the one hand extremely boring way to spend a Friday evening. But on the other hand I really could experience some secrets of Japanese culture. At each meeting there were two men doing almost all the talking. One man looked a bit older, talked less, and looked like the boss. We basically listened to a long list of reports. In western cultures meetings are held to actually discuss or decide something. But in Japanese meetings I think that the purpose is not to decide anything. In fact it seems everything had been decided before the meeting. At the end of the meeting they asked if anyone had questions but nobody did. We all bowed. I wondered what was the purpose of the meeting. But I guess it is a kind of “wa” or harmony which is important in Japanese culture. By me being physically present and representing the school we showed harmony with the decisions. I found it an interesting and somewhat entertaining experience of some more secrets of Japanese culture.

Emotivate: n. using utopian visions of the future, dramatic pleas, and dire consequences to inspire an organization to change. Derek Abbott posted in Dictionary of Funny Neologisms