Feb 20, 2020

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A few months ago, when I was in Italy when participating in the SCACR19 conference which was held in Bari, I received an email from KURA office at Kyoto University, suggesting me as a presenter and panelist for a tri-lateral conference between Japan, Germany and France in Tokyo. We arrived in Tokyo the day before the conference. I had a meeting with my collaborators and then, headed to the hotel where the participants in the conference were gathered. A few hours later, we were out for dinner with the conference organizers from the embassy of France and the German Centre for Research and Innovation Tokyo (DWIH Tokyo). From the Japanese side, there were speakers from Tohoku Electric Power, and I, and we had a fruitful talk on the role of renewable energies in Japan, and especially ocean renewable energies.

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The next day (Oct 24th), we gathered to depart for the conference at the German Culture Center in Tokyo. We did not need any icebreakers as most of us had met the previous night for dinner and hence, the atmosphere was very friendly. The talks started and I could learn a lot about the different aspects of using AI. One of the chairpersons was also a former Hakubi researcher and I was glad to get to know her activities. One of the most interesting talks for me that I still remember was from Prof. Wolfgang Ketter about (R)evolutions in Mobility: A CASE for Using AI and Smart Markets to Create Sustainable Cities and he used a nice graphical presentation to simulate such an idea for the future of Köln, which can be watched Here. Based on that, I learned that being able to simulate and present any idea or horizon with clear examples that audiences can empathize with, is very important.

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The side issue that caught my attention was serving the lunch as sustainable catering, in which almost no food was wasted.

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              photo credit: Organizers

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Finally, we finished the conference, successfully with more than 150 participants from both the public and academia, and even continued discussion during the dinner.

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For me, participating in this conference from the Japan side was a great experience and made me even more interested in talking to the public audience. I think most people in academia can agree that talks for the public are much more difficult than for experts from the same background. When presenting to the public, we need to explain the whole background and make anything as simple as possible to be able to connect with the audiences who might be from different backgrounds and we can't use specialized terminology. In addition, talking to scientists from various disciplines who were gathered there under the same topic of AI for SDGs made me think about the possibility of interdisciplinary research and consider other aspects that I previously had not noticed.

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I am very glad that KURA office at Kyoto University published the report of this event and even my after-story, which can be read HERE. I was also surprised for being appeared in their annual review of 2019 which they kindly sent me the hard copies, too.

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By: B Kamranzad

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