Visiting Kitami Institute of Technology

As one of the most famous Polish NLPer gave his talk in Hokkaido, I visited KIT to also talk about possible co-research. The main topic was political NLP (one of our PhD candidates si currently working on analyzing political polarization in Polish media) but I learned about many other things related to academia as a whole. For example, I have found out that after four-year battle, Polish computer scientists managed to force an update of publication scoring system in Poland which was not fair for fields like NLP where conferences are valued higher than journals. Unfortunately, this is still the case in Japan, at least at our university. Examples of new technologies appearing monthly show that over a year-long wait for a journal (to be reviewed, conditionally accepted, accepted and finally published) is simply a relic of old times. I have mentioned the problem to our professors, but probably for a university it is better if there is a single rule for everyone and unless rules of international university rankings arent updated, universities wont be eager to change much. However, this may lead to having researchers who do not compete with the fast-changing AI world. Instead they will concentrate on refining old ideas to fit journal requirements