AAAI Spring Symposium 2018

I was awarded a Kaken C Grant Contextual Knowledge Acquisition for Large-scale Inverse Reinforcement Learning and currently I experiment with accumulating / combining concepts in longer story-like knowledge entries. The idea was presented for the first time.

Holiday and work combined

How do you define "Well-being"?

I just made a break in my holidays in California to give a talk at the AAAI Spring Symposium on on AI and Society: Ethics, Safety and Trustworthiness in Intelligent Agents.

I was surprised that the topic of my previous paper presented at the Wellbeing symposium (cognitive biases) became a new theme of the same series. Surprising because I was pretty sure I wasn't invited to the post-symposium JSAI special issue because my topic was to "far away" from the topic of AI and Wellbeing... Apparently it wasn't.

But there is something else I wanted to write about this time. Foreign friends who are researchers often tell me that they wouldn't work in Japan because nobody goes on holiday. Actually it is not true. More and more people here notice long working hours don't mean better results. Actually it is quite on the contrary. Neurology research shows that breaks and idleness is more effective but it always take time before research findings soften and finally change our cultural customs which are obsolete. Foreign researchers play a very important role to become living examples that you can take your paid vacation and still keep top publications scores. Practically you have 40 days of paid vacation and March / August are most flexible and safe (no lectures then). If you are already in Japan or plan to come, please take longer rests, reset and don't neglect your family. Don't give up to the pressure, it's your mission to bring improvement to the Japanese society.