[Research Activities] [Laboratory Activities] [Educational Activities] [Private Events] [ver.2012] [ver.2011] [ver.2010] [ver.2009] [ver.2008] [ver.2007] [ver.2006] [ver.2005] [ver.2004]
Dear my friends in the world,
I made this 2013 annual report as my season's greetings to my friends.
Thinking of you from Japan in early 2014
--- My topics in 2013 ---
Hideyuki TAKAGI (Faculty of Design, Kyushu University)
(worked concurrently for Research Center for Applied Perceptual Science)
4-9-1, Shiobaru, Minami-ku, Fukuoka, 815-8540 Japan
TEL & FAX <+81>92-553-4555
e-mail 
URL http://www.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~takagi/
Research Activities
[February and March]
I attended three domestic conferences.
[March]
I proposed to our colleagues of Dept. of Human Science to have a faculty seminar series for students, faculty members, and public, and we started it since March, 2013. More than a dozen of our colleagues give lectures for a year. The biggest feature of our Faculty of Design is a diversity of our faculty members from arts to psychology, physiology, and engineering science. It becomes a strong point when they collaborate each other but becomes a weak point when they work individually in their own areas. I aimed to let them know other faculty members' works well, have enough background knowledge of other colleagues' areas to discuss, and encourage to start joint research in their interdisciplinary areas. Their titles and abstracts are posted here.
[April]
Research Center for Applied Perceptual Science was established at Faculty of Design, Kyushu University on 1 April, 2013, and I have worked concurrently for the Research Center since then. I am aiming to analyze several human characteristics using interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) and trying to provide the IEC technique for perceptual psychological research.
I gave my first tutorial on statistical tests at 2013 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence held in Singapore. I am not a statistician but need to use statistical tests for my research as a user, so that I designed a two-hour tutorial from the user point of view. I felt uneasy about the response of audience as I am not an expert statistician. However, I had considerable responses from audience and community members though Internet, and they encouraged me to have the same tutorial here and there. It is important for statistical users to use statistical tests correctly, and their wrong use results to tell a statistical lie.
[June]
Bilateral joint Seminars between Japan and Finland was held at the Muroran Institute of Technology, Hokkaido, and I was invited as one of speakers. The same seminar is planned to be held at Alto University, Finland in 2014 summer, and I may become one of speakers, too.
[July]
I attended an international conference (ICNC-FSKD2013) held in Shenyang, China in the middle of July. I visited Northeastern University on the next day of the conference and discussed on the possibility of making an academic exchanging program between two universities. We agreed to start a visiting professor, for example, as the first step toward the contract.
[September]
I attended a symposium (SETINAIR2013) held at the Technical University
of Kosice, Slovakia and presented our research on applications of computational
intelligence to analyzing human characteristics. Prof. P. Sincak who is
a SETINAIR2013 organizer and I had several personnel exchanges in these
around 10 years; I hosted Dr. R. Jaksa from his lab for two years as a
postdoctoral fellow; I supervised Dr. J. Dolinsky from his lab until he
received a doctorate from Kyushu University; total four his Master students
attended our 2011 and 2013 Summer School held at our campus; his doctoral
student, Maria Vircikov, and he visited Fukuoka; I visited him three or
four times and gave talks.
I gave a keynote speech on major directions of interactive evolutionary computation research at an international conference (CICS2013) organized by Prof. G. Tomar and held in Mathura, India. Many active students of GLA University, a conference venue, participated actively. Famous Taj Mahal locates one hour far from Mathura, and I visited it with other conference participants.
[October]
I attended two international conferences: SMC2013 held in Manchester, UK, and IWACIII2013 held in Shanghai, China on the way back from SMC2013. SMC annual conference is a flagship conference of IEEE SMC Society, and I have been deeply related with the society; I was a vice-president and a member of Board of Governors, and have been a Chair of Technical Committee on Soft Computing, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and am a Chair of SMC Japan Council Chapter in 2014-2015.
[December]
I organized an event on evolutionary computation (EC) co-sponsored by the Japanese Society for Evolutionary Computation and the Research Center for Perceptual Science of Kyushu University at our campus on 13 December. I have felt that presentations at the EC society are biased to narrow EC areas and thought that we should have found many interdisciplinary areas with other academic areas. It was a background why I organized a future planning event for the EC society. Nine invited speakers from human science, color and visual sciences, economics, membrane computing, mathematical biology, biogenesis and morphology, evolutionary biology, idea support and emergence, and language education provided topics in their areas and discussed the possibility of EC applications to their areas. Before the event, I gave a tutorial on statistical tests.
I drove a university car and attended 2013 Evolutionary Computation Symposium held in Kirishima, Japan in December 14-15 together with my student. The symposium is a flagship event of the mentioned EC society, all participants stay at the same hotel, and all presentations are assigned to a single track poster session. These features are based on the society policy, "discussion in deep." It is a rare style that we do not find in other academic societies.
Laboratory Activities
My laboratory consists of one Doctoral student, two Master students, two Bachelor students, and myself in 2013 fiscal year (FY). The doctoral student, Yan PEI, is my student of Human Science International Course, the Graduate School of Design and will receive a doctorate in March, 2014, hopefully; as of New Year day, he passed a preliminary examination and is waiting the final examination and an oral presentation to public scheduled to be held in January, 2013. He has worked quite hardly since he enrolled to our Graduate School and had many papers in spite of different topic from his Mater research.
Our lab aims Humanized Computational Intelligence and has attacked several sub topics along with this main stream. My main focus now is to apply interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) for analyzing human characteristics. I am conducting a joint research on IEC-based cochlear implant fitting with Medical Department of Fukuoka University and that of Kyushu University, and its main objective is to obtain unknown auditory knowledge from optimized fitting characteristics rather than fitting itself. We have other IEC-based project for auditory perception in our Research Center. Lab students' topics in 2013 FY are accelerating EC, parallel IEC, search visualization of differential evolution, IEC application for experimental psychology, and support system for imagining motion poses of animals and humans.
Educational Activities
I served as an external examiner of Hong Kong City University for two doctoral dissertations and their oral presentations in the end of 2012 and 2013. Their works are on evolutionary computation, and I spent quite a long time for reviewing them in detail. Their oral presentations were connected with me in Japan using Skype and an international phone call.
Graduate School of Design has the Human Science International Course, and I teach at the course. It is a doctoral program in English where we provide educations and supervisions in English and students can get doctorates without Japanese language capabilities if they have enough capabilities of English language and research. Our international course was established in 2010, and five students are conducting their doctoral research now. Since Japanese students cannot enroll to this course basically, we must recruit non-Japanese students outside Japan. Publicity and recruitment in the world are essential for the course.
One of such activities is our Summer School in 2011 - 2013, and we invited about 10 Master students with our full financial supports. We provide 90 minutes * 15 times lectures on three areas of the Human Science International Course and lab works: physiological anthropology, perceptual psychology, and applied mathematics and computer science. We issue two credits to Summer School students from partner universities who make student exchanging contracts with us. Interests to participating to the Summer School without bearing expletives increase year by year, and the Summer School became a good publicity of our International Course. Actually, the number of our course students who participated to the Summer School became four as of 2013.
Especially, the number of applicants from University of Gadjah Mada, Indonesia to our Summer School and our Graduate School is quite higher than other universities. Since the number of Summer School participants whom we can support financially is limited, we decided to send three lecturers including me to University of Gadjah Mada and will hold a one-day seminar for many their students in March, 2014.
In July, I visited University of Malaya, Malaysia and gave two talks of total five hours on interactive evolutionary computation and statistical tests. Prof.s Loo Chu Kiong and Chiew Thiam arranged them and supported me.
In August, I gave a tutorial lecture of three hours as the first lecturer of a five-day Summer School on Cybernetics held at Technical University of Ostrava, Czech. I was a lecturer of the Summer School in 2012 and 2013 and gave a lecture on computational intelligence in 2012 and that on statistical tests in 2013. I must have left as soon as my lecture ended to reach to our university before an enrollment examination of our Graduate School starts; I gave a lecture in 9:00 - 12:00, took a train departing 13:30, and went to Prague. It was pity that I could not attend whole Summer School.
Five my ex-students visited me, though it may not be a topic in my educational activities. Mrs. Nagai, formerly Nagasaki, who received a Master degree in 2007 FY, Mr. & Mrs. Nakano, Mrs. Nakano was formerly Kaseyama, who both received Master degrees in 2008 FY visited my lab with their children in September, 2013. Prof. Ohnishi of Kyushu Institute of Technology who received a doctorate in 2002 FY and Mr. Fujii of Panasonic who received a Master degree in 2001 FY visited me in December. Actually, this is benefit that educators can obtain, and I must thank to my job.
Private Events
I bought a 10-year old used car and had used for these 10 years. However, I was informed that repair cost would be about 180,000 JPY to pass an official vehicle inspection in July. As it became difficult to get components of a 20-year old car, I put the car out of service before the deadline of the inspection. I live in a convenient area where there is a car-sharing service within the walking distance, it takes six minutes to a train station on foot, and it is about 4 km to the most active downtown areas in Fukuoka of 1.4 million populations. Thanks to this convenient, I decided to use a car-sharing service rather than owning a car. The cost of the car-sharing service is only 200 JPY per 15 minutes including gas and insurance. However, sometimes no cars are remained when I want to use a car and driving time weighed on my mind. As the result, I bought a used car one month later and left from the car-sharing membership.
My father who lives with my mother and brother's family 700 km far from our city became 88 years old, and we planned to celebrate his birthday in September; it is a special anniversary age in Japanese custom. As he hesitated to have a big party and dislike to leave from a house, my wife and I visited my old home with the ostensible reason of sightseeing to some areas around its city and took dinner together. My father became hard of hearing but is enjoying music and a musical instrument. My mother has an Alzheimer disease, but my brother's care to her daily life and health foods look quite effective to arrest the disease through our observing for these several years. My parents do not have serious healthy troubles so far.
My wife works part-time as a licensed childcare worker. She is now in a transition period to move to a new nursery until March, 2014 and works at two nurseries temporally. She is enjoying Taijiquan, a traditional Chinese pugilism, and tatting lace.
Our elder daughter, who worked for a software company in Tokyo but worked at a pharmaceutical company, changes her job to a pharmaceutical company in January, 2014.
Our younger daughter, who is a Master student researching on international relations, stayed at Moscow State Institute of International Relations in September to November, 2013 using a student exchanging program of these two universities. Her master research topic is related with East Europe, and it was her excuse of her visit to Romania and attendance to an international conference and her sightseeing in the Ukraine before arriving to Moscow. Although this is not the first time for her (she stayed in California for two years when she was two - three years old and in Missouri for a year as an exchange high school student), we hope that she obtained something worth through this short-term stay.