Guest blog by David Rowlands
Off to Japan! I was looking forward to catching up with my colleagues and friends in Japan once again.
Recently Hugo Espinosa and I presented at the Sports and Human Dynamics Conference 2016 in Yamagata Japan. Whilst it was 38C and humid at home in Brisbane, we were experiencing the cold … with a bit of snow thrown in. This made the mountains around the venue spectacular. Sabel Labs has a great relationship with the Japanese sports science community ever since Danny first met Yuji and became a frequent visitor a decade ago. We frequently have Japanese visitors to our lab. Yuji Ohgi (Keio) is a frequent visitor and Tomohito Wada (Kanoya Institute of Sport) has spent the last year with us having a Sabbatical at our lab.
I arrived in Tokyo to visit ARS where two past students were working – Craig Lyndon, and Mitchell McCarthy (how’s the thesis coming on?). It was great to catch up with them and get a tour of ARS. They are certainly doing a wide range of interesting projects: mesh networks, sensors and embedded systems to name a few.
After travelling to Yamagata, I met up with Yuji, Tomohito, and Hugo. We had many a good meal and sake together along with a number of others from the conference. The conference was well run and very friendly. It was Hugo’s first time in Japan and he was absolutely captivated. The conference presentations were interesting even though Hugo and I have limited command of the Japanese language. It is amazing what you can understand from the English language abstract and well-crafted slides. It gave us an idea of the wide variety of top quality research happening in Japan.
We had an opportunity to present about the upcoming ISEA 2018 conference in Brisbane at the conference dinner and at the closing event. Unfortunately, we ran out of Koalas, but the Brisbane video captured everyone’s imagination. Even mine and I live there!
Hugo continued with Yuji for a 3D printer conference and I flew back to Brisbane. One thing is for sure, the conference was friendly and informative and one week is definitely way too short a time in spend in Japan.
Hope to see you all at ISEA 2018 in Brisbane.
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