Weather: sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast, hard to decide · Sleep: plenty, just fell asleep a bit late · Meals: onigiri · Music: Nightwish, Dalriada
Of course I’m nervous. I got in a bit late, because last night I’d celebrated myself over the papers’ results. And I was waiting for everything to be all right back home — I was a little worried, my parents went to Sopron, and I like to keep the family together, at least in my thoughts.
While I was still preparing the handouts (I generated them in Japanese too, among others), I gathered my thoughts.
The vending machine
While waiting at the vending machine, I got to experience a sweet and funny moment. I simply couldn’t decide what to buy — I’d already tried lots of things, but now I was after something new. Suddenly a very sweet Indian girl came over, wanting to help. She thought I didn’t know how to use the machine; I explained that I was actually looking for new flavours, and had used the machine before. Then we discussed the flavours too, who had tried what from it. In the end, as she was about to leave, I told her thank you very much for being so kind and wanting to help. Finally I bought my usual tea.
In any case, that little moment helped lower my stage fright.
The seminar
Well, you can see how stage-frightened I can get. And, all the same, the seminar time arrived. It was already 16:45 when, fairly nervous and anxious, I asked poor Sakuma which room it would be in. When I learned it was in the other building, I was already packing up so as not to be late.
As it turned out, the “other building” is “other” in the sense that you have to cross a bridge to get there. So there’s no need to rush quite that much. In any case, I was floored by the seminar room’s equipment. Here every lab has its own seminar room, professionally and properly equipped: projector, a local machine. And they’ve acquired a great many learning devices — robots, everything you can learn and grow wiser on.
But the seminar. I was nervous, of course. Professor Kato greeted me and introduced me to the audience with very kind words: he invited a great many of his students to hear my talk all the way through.
As it happens, I didn’t just grind through the talk; rather — like the pattern back home — whenever some meaningful explanation was needed, I drew and explained further. Although it got a bit long by the end (I’d put together 40 slides), I finished in 50 minutes. Afterwards Professor Kato and his students asked a lot of questions — overall with useful insights:
- Will there be TensorFlow integration for the system?
- What’s the advantage of using hypergraphs, and what might the disadvantage be?
- How can hypergraphs be optimised, or the written models be used for optimisation? (This is a very good question, and it matters for camera placement, for instance.)
- When will the first robot model be described with HyMeKo, starting from the geometry?
Afterwards the students invited me to a Welcome Party and started organising it. They were very kind: they asked whether I had any commitments, and I said that apart from research I have no specially prescribed schedule. They were glad to hear it. Then we chatted about a few more topics: on one hand, what an average Japanese student eats (yakitori, for example), and on the other, we delved a little into the mysteries of Japanese and Hungarian history. After that I handled a couple more home-project things, then went back to the dorm so I could still catch a restaurant where I could eat.
Evening
Heading toward the dorm, I met a new resident on the floor: a French girl who had just arrived and came straight from the gym. It had already been a long day for me, so I simply took her for American. She didn’t take it to heart, but she objected so much that she asked what on earth I’d based it on (I said I managed to make such a mistake because it had been a long day). It was a good mood throughout, really; she seems very friendly, which also matches my experience so far. When I was around the École Polytechnique last October, the people there were decidedly kind too.
In the end I just went to Saizeriya: I ate shrimp tails, a caviar-and-shrimp spaghetti, and a shrimp salad. All for 2,000 yen. This time I could decide to eat my fill a little — after all, I’m through a hard day.
And now I decide to sleep toward evening and do laundry, but maybe before that I’ll finally watch Radics Peti’s solo show on YouTube.
Photos
