As a first year PhDs, and following the recommendation of our elders we decided to go to a summer school (ss). The deadline for other summer schools in the Europe was already passed and the first one was the machine learning summer school (MLSS) in Japan. We were lucky enough to get accepted for poster presentation and we were granted a part of our travel expenses by the MLSS. The speakers were very well known in the field of statistical pattern recognition and machine learning and they delivered well. There were about 400 attendants from all over the world e.g. Argentina, Peru, US, Brazil, Belgium, Iran, Igor from Russia and our neighbour universities such as UCL, university of Cambridge. We received a very useful badge with the timetable of the summer school printed on its back, in the first day. It was sharp enough to cut fruit and solid enough to be used as ruler, big enough to be used as a coaster.
Japanese English:
People in Japan added an ‘o’ to the English words, instead of friend they said friendo, another examples that were entertaining for us at the first days were, cyclo, almosto, receipto. Another thing that we observed was that 90 percent of Japanese people, who spoke English well, end up be Chinese!
Poster session:
There were 4 poster sessions were spread over four days, more than 50 posters per day. The topics spans from optimization techniques to image processing and all different types of learning. Our posters caught attention of many attendants and we have got lots of questions and also some recommendations.
Places that we visited:
We visited 4 temples , the golden, silver, Ryoanji, Tenrioji temples. They were magnificently charming and beautiful. Despite the fact that the first 3 days were all complete food disasters and we starved but finally we found many good restaurants at the Gion area. We also visited the bamboo forest and also climbed the Fushimi Inari beautiful path.
