Weather: warm, 29°C · Lunch: ground chicken with rice · Dinner: Saizeriya · Sleep: short — I want to reset my body clock
Today was a slightly shorter day. Unfortunately there won’t be much of a long account of everything I saw today. I’m trying to reset my body clock, because I’ve drifted quite far out of the normal routine.
Still, I can tell a few things today. For one, it seems I’m managing to make progress with the science. Unfortunately, though, my adapter (100–220 volt) is starting to go bad, so I’ll need to get at least a cable from somewhere for the 100-volt socket. I only met Kato briefly today; unfortunately we didn’t manage to talk at length. But he did look at the shared thing Zoli and I are working on. I went into the lab and unloaded my stuff.
Rent and the sweets
Today, though, I got to the point of paying the rent. I managed to settle it for two months — I happened to have just enough on me (60 thousand yen, by the way). I quickly paid and went back to the international office. I should add that I was dripping with sweat. Because even though it’s only relatively warm, the humidity is roughly 100% and the water just runs off me.
I went to tell Mitsuko that I’d managed to sort everything out. And I was already very insistent that I could hand over the Hungarian (well, European) okashi (sweets), since I’ve been promising it for weeks. She asked whether I could give it now, but unfortunately I wasn’t prepared for that. So I quickly went back to the dorm.
By the time I got back, the head of the international office was already there, so I handed it to her and to the whole office. Before that, though, I talked with Mitsuko and got to tell her that Hungarian food is very similar to Japanese, and that I personally have no problem at all with Japanese food. In fact, the blog might actually reveal how much I love it. Although there are some differences between Hungarian and Japanese food (though I think there’s quite a lot of similarity), it isn’t entirely foreign to me. In fact, I particularly like udon noodles, since back home Grandma also kneaded out a similar dough and cooked it as csusza.
Good news: an expanding partnership
After that, though, I got to hear decidedly good news, once I’d handed over the European sweets. The Nagoya side was interested in expanding the partnership, and in light of this they’ve already made contact with Széchenyi István University. Since Professor Kato is satisfied with the perspectives reached so far, and I also mentioned that I’d already forwarded one of his students’ research topics to a colleague of mine. So it seems a success so far. And for that matter, I’m happy to take on being a liaison, even on the professional front, between the two institutions. I hope this really will be the start of some fine collaboration.
Science: three directions and a synthesizer
In the end I thought the day through after that. I ate quickly — ground chicken breast with rice — then back, so the research results could keep moving. There are three main points that have suddenly come up on the table, based on the hypergraph models:
- Computer-vision models based on the hypergraph structure
- The reinforcement-learning models
- The extension to language models
As an aside, by the way, I even quickly made a demo for synthesizers using the new Chebyshev–Catmull–Rom curves, so I could hear how it interpolates sound waves. Quite a nice little synthesizer came out of it.
By evening, not much was left to do. Sakuma left earlier than me, exceptionally, so I locked up the office. After that I didn’t do much: I just went to Saizeriya, ate a spaghetti, then at the konbini bought the usual detergent (this time I also bought scent/fabric softener), tea, and water. I also bought a kind of cooler bag now — I have a feeling it’ll come in handy.
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