立命館大学グローバルCOE　ラック研究室

2009年8月21日

DH09 & Course at MIT: Two great experiences in USA.

I was filled with emotions during the months of June and July. Recently, I visited two remarkable institutions:  the University of Maryland and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in the cities of Maryland and Cambridge respectively.

In the last week of June, I participated in the edition 2009 of the Digital Humanities International Conference, where I presented the paper Interactive Visual Analysis of Personal Names in Japanese Historical Diary.  That was my first experience in three aspects:  my first visit to USA, my first accepted paper, and my first participation as a presenter in an international conference. Although I was a nervous wreck, fortunately everything was going well. See some personal comment s here.

More recently, I made an extraordinary journey to the MIT. This time, I aimed to attend a course titled Data and Models in Engineering, Sciences and Business, where we were taught how to fit data to models using formal methods; particularly, the method of Least Square.   After a long trip, I was again stepping on American soil.  At that time, I could not imagine how wonderful would be the new tour. The MIT is great; I used to be in an area which looked like a factory because there were machines everywhere. The courses were also very interesting in spite of were full of mathematical terms. I was especially satisfied with the way instructors were able to balance the course between the fundamentals and concrete applications. Additionally, Boston and Cambridge are very beautiful cities and I would also consider them as very rich cities in literature because of the great bookstores you can find there.

Both journeys were great, but I would consider even better the pleasure of meeting wonderful people. During my staying in the city of Maryland, I met professors and colleagues. In general, people with similar interests. Also, that was a good opportunity to share great moments with my Japanese colleagues. The MIT was not the exception, the academics and especially the administrators were all very kind and they were always willing to make our staying more enjoyable.

 

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Alejandro Toledo Nolasco
Research Assistant/PhD Student, Global COE Program
Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures
Intelligent Computer Entertainment Laboratory
Graduate School of Science and Engineering
Ritsumeikan University, Japan
alex@ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp
http://ice.ci.ritsumei.ac.jp/~alex/
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