Presentations, papers, Harajuku girls and stuff like that.

The really complicated part of writing posts to cover large intervals of time should be collecting all ideas and writing them in a well organized, interesting and easy to read way. Unless, of course, you have not done that lot of noticeable things, then the problem is what the geek to write the the post. I guess this time I fall in the second case. In the last month not that much have happened. Not saying that I have been at home doing nothing, but I have being doing the same things almost every day. The routine is a great enemy of the blog writers. Specially of the not so inspired ones. So, lets try to write things in chronological order and as painless (for the potential reader, i.e. you) as possible.

The final presentation of the SYSPRO 2007 project was on February 18th. I managed to finish and print the poster on time and I think that this year's presentation was much more interesting than last year's one. All project leaders were required to do a 2 minutes presentation of the project's goals, and after that there was a poster session.


If you want to check the other pictures of the event there is a showcase at the project's web site. If you go there you will see that I have even got a visitor. No, really, a person that was not obligated to be there went to see the posters and asked me questions. It was amazing!

About a week after the SYSPRO's presentation I received the answer for the TIME 2008 paper submission. And as you should have guessed by the lack of enthusiasm, my paper was rejected. Judging by the comments of the 3 reviewers, my feeling and also the feeling of my adviser is that it as a ``border line decision'', i.e. there were not strong arguments against accepting the paper, but there were not strong arguments toward accepting it either, and in the end somebody else's paper was selected. The bright side of it is that some of the reviewers' comments were really good and I will be able to improve the paper. The plan is to revise and improve it, and then submit it to a journal. This process will take about a month, them it will star the process of reviewing the paper by the journal reviewers. This can take up to five months, but with some luck it can be finished in two months or so. Then, being optimistic, in about three months I can have the paper accepted.

Since I have received the notification of the TIME 2008 program committee (and the reviews) I am working on improving the paper. For that I will net a new set of experimental data. Then, what I have being doing lately is to devise test cases for collecting this new data.

OK, I have done a few things that resemble a social life. I went to Tokyo to solve a problem with my new cellphone and since Adriana wanted to buy some souvenirs from Japan, we went together. The problem with the cellphone was that I bought a smartphone and needed a SIM chip. But the phone company did not want to sell me the chip only, they wanted me to buy another cellphone. Then I had to go to the only one store that was allowed to sell the chip by itself. (I don't get it, if one store can sell the chip, why the others can not?) Adriana went on a travel to USA and wanted to take some souvenirs of Japan with her, so we went to the Oriental Bazaar in Harajuku, what was very convenient because the store of SoftBank (the phone company) was in Shibuya, that is within a walking distance of Harajuku.

Takeshita Street, where you can find the most crazily dressed people you ever imagine.

Below is a taste of the kind of thing you can see in Harajuku. The music is "Harajuku Girls" by Gwen Stefani.

That's all, folks!!!

Still alive... and kicking.

Well, it has been a month since my last post, but note that this is an improvement. The average interval between posts used to be 6 months.

First, the obvious. I have not died! Yes, the deadline for the paper has come and gone and I didn't finished it, as expected. But, in an unexpected turn of events, the symposium's program committee decided to extend the deadline in 4 more days, from January 11th to 15th. And there went I to expend a few more nights without sleep. But it was worth. I could finish the paper for the new deadline and the final result was above my own expectations. (I'm not saying it was good, but I expected to do something much worst.) So, what was sure to be a complete failure ended up being just a partial failure, and maybe will still lead to a relative success if the paper get accepted for the symposium.

After that, a seminar to present, two progress reports to write, the final report for SYSPRO , Advanced Systems Development Research Project (in english), and a new research topic to find. The seminar was OK, the progress reports were finished on time, the final report for SYSPRO was also finished on time, but the new research topic is something that has not yet presented itself. Today my adviser send me an e-mail with a CFP (call for participation) on the "5th Workshop on Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence". That rouse my interest. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something about what I have been fascinated since the first time I read about the subject. I studied it during my undergraduate course and during my master course. My master thesis is somehow related to the subject and I have a reasonable knowledge about it. Maybe I can find some intersection between the two topics interesting enough to work with, and that can lead to some substantial result in the little time that I have left. (This is my last year on the Ph.D. and I must have published my papers by September, or risk not graduating on April next year.)

Right now, for the short term, I have three tasks at hand: (a) define my new research topic, something that is a continuation of my work up to here, but that add something new; (b) prepare the final presentation, something like a poster session, for SYSPRO, on next February 18th; (c) improve the system I have developed so far (the infamous multi-valued bounded model checker) to allow "normal" people to graphically see what the cryptic numeric result provided by the system means.

Besides that, it is still cold in Japan. Even snowed in Tsukuba yesterday. Not too much but enough to cover the cars with some 10cm o snow. And last Thursday I broke a tooth while eating, and received my black belt. I was very happy! (Because of the black belt, not for the broken tooth.)


There are more pictures on my web album.

Happy 2008!!!

Happy New Year!!!
(At least lets hope it will be a happy year.)

Another year has come and gone. 2007 is over and 2008 has just started. It has being my 3rd new year in Japan. The next one (2009) must be the last, at least for this time. (Who knows about the future?) Last year my family was here, so I could be with Karin and the kids on Christmas and new year. It was so good to be with them, to feel family at the holidays again. But this year they were not. I was with friends, but I felt alone. Don't take me wrong, I do like my friend and it was very good to be with them (don't even want to think how would I have felt if I haven't them around), but I still missed my family.

Anyway, I thought it would be better to go out on new years than stay alone at home. So, I went to Ageha with some friends (Adri, Lina, Kixpe e Zauder). Ageha is advertised as the biggest dance club in Asia, and the place is really big. On new years it was crowded. Really, really crowded. But it was worth. The music was good (except for the DJ at the pool site that expended more time talking that playing music -- but the other sites were OK), there was a fair amount of beautiful people, and there were special shows. On the entrance there were some 5 or 6 girls doing pole dancing, not like that we see in B movies, they was not naked, but using sexy clothes, and they was indeed giving a show, even the girls stopped to watch. 10 minutes before midnight a DJ/Drag Queen started his/her/its own show for the countdown. And it was a good show too. The guy knew how to do his/her/its show. At midnight every body hugged each other, there was balloons and colored paper falling and everybody was happy. It was a happy night.

Harumi, I, Kixpe and Lina at Kita-senju station, in our way to Ageha. Zauder joined us at Shin-kiba station.

The other remarkable event from this beginning of year is that yesterday was Kixpe's birthday. We should have joined for a small party at Robson's house, but for different reasons most of the people invited had to cancel at the last minute. So I, Kixpe, Adri, Robson and Nelia (Robson's girlfriend) went out for a dinner at TonQ.

Robson, Kixpe, Harumi and I waiting for a place at TonQ to celebrate Kixpe's birthday. Nelia is taking the picture.

Despite the new year's party at Ageha, and the atmosphere of celebration of this time of the year, I don't feel so good. Actually, after Christmas and my shodan exam, I am feeling pretty bad. I had a meeting with my adviser just before Christmas, he was very clear about the status of my research, and it is not good. I expended the last year trying to develop a new method for model checking multi-valued models. (Don't bother about what exactly is that, it's important just for me.) I finally have perfected the new method and I can handle very huge models now. I was excited about this, because I thought it would be the whole point of my Ph.D. research. My adviser thinks differently. He told me he is disappointed I have took so long to work on this method; that he suggested it just because he thought it would be good to work with it since nobody had done it before, but that this, alone, is in no way enough to justify a Ph.D. degree. That I will have to think about some new direction for my research, and it have to be something that gives solid results in the next 4 to 5 months, otherwise I will much probably not be able to graduate on March, 2009, as it is scheduled.

In less than 30 minutes of meeting I came from extreme excitement and happiness to the most complete frustration and despair. I have no idea of which new direction I can give to my research, I have no clue about where to look for inspiration, I have no idea at all of what I am gonna do.

Besides all that, I have to finish writing a paper with deadline on January 11th. The paper will be a revised version of the one I presented in November, on a workshop in Kyoto. It should be easy as a Sunday morning, but it's not. My sensei, said he doesn't like the way I organize my papers. To him they looks like a text book: much theory and fundamental concepts in the beginning and finally my conclusions. To him it's boring. There are no "catch phrases", or other exciting things to keep the attention and interest of the reader. He wants me to correct that. In the last days I have being crawling after examples of good papers, trying to identify some pattern of how to write an exciting theoretical paper about multi-valued temporal logics (for real, I almost laugh only to think about the contradiction in terms that this sentence is) . On top of that, he also wants me to provide some meaningful example that show that my method is not only applicable but also useful, in the sense that the example must be more easily or naturally solvable by my method than by the traditional one. It is probably not hard to grasp that up to now I have not being successful.

Karin, has tried to help me and looked for some references too. Two of the references she sent me gave some insights, but I don't know if these insights will be enough to finish the paper as my sensei expects. I have a meeting with him on Monday. I just wish I would die before that so I don't have to face him and tell him I failed on doing what he expected. I hate to fail! I really, really hate to fail. It hurts my self-esteem. Makes me feel unfit and unworthy. Just the thought that failure is unavoidable makes me loose control. I'm not being able to sleep well, or work well because I'm stressed.

When I was a project manager in ISH I keep track of the progress of all projects. I always was able to identify potential risks weeks before something actually happened and take measures to prevent it: renegotiate deadlines, allocate more resources, review the distribution of tasks and so on. No project I have managed ever failed. Now I have no flexibility at all. I can not allocate more resources. I can not negotiate deadlines. I may not do anything but work as hard as I can force myself to. And it's not being enough.

I don't know what to do.

P.S. I am probably being too much dramatic here, OK? I am stressed, frustrated, tired and I have not trained Aikido for a while (it's winter vacation until next week), so I could not alleviate my frustration throwing people in the floor. Don't take me too seriously. I will be better in a few weeks.

Shodan-shinsa

Este post está em inglês, porque eu quero que alguns amigos que não falam Português também possam lê-lo.

This post is in English, so my friends that can't read Portuguese will be able to understand it. By the way, my English is not that good, so there will be, most likely, mistakes. Sorry for that, and hope you don't mind.

小野先生、大城さん、宮田さん、合気道クラブの皆さん、まだ日本語で書けないですみません。

Since I can remember I always was fascinated by martial arts. Of course, some decades ago in a small town in Brazil's countryside, a boy did not have much opportunity to put this fascination to work. Specially a boy from a not so wealthy family. Even so, I convinced my parents to let me take a few classes in the only Karate dojo in the town. My grandmother made my karate-gi taking as model the gi of a colleague. (I love my grandmother. She is the closest thing to a guardian angel that I know.) I didn't train for long, before the first exam (that must be paid, of course) my parents said I would have to give up the classes. It was too expensive for them.

It was some 10 years until I could train any martial art again. After moving to Vitória, the capital of my state, I got to know Tae Kwon Do, a Korean martial art that I had never heard about before. I loved it. It was very dynamic and used kicks a lot. I was good at kicking. I trained with master Hong (a real Korean master, former army's captain) for one year. But he closed his dojo, and I changed to train in another gym. Tae Kwon Do has 10 grades (from 10 to 1, being 10^th the lowest) before black-belt. I trained hard for 3 years, and was 3^rd grade. Only 2 exams left before black-belt. I even participated in a contest. Not very successfully. I was heavy-weight, i.e. over 78 Kg. Thing is that my opponent was, of course, also heavy-weight. I was 80.5 Kg and he was 117 Kg. He stroked me with a punch and I lost a tooth and the fight. But even without a great performance in the contest I was happy and training hard. Maybe too hard. In one training session I hurt my right leg really bad. Bad enough to make me go through physiotherapy for 6 months, and even today, 14 years after that I still feel the muscle every single time I stretch. It was the end of my Tae Kwon Do days. For years after that I could not raise my leg enough for a decent kick. I always practice stretching, so today I can kick pretty well again, but it took me a decade to recover. (OK, maybe with more physiotherapy I had recovered faster.)

Then, I saw a demonstration of Aikido. There is a nikkei community center in Vitória, and a sensei of Aikido had moved to the city and started to teach a very few students. No more than 5 I think. The sensei was old, about 80 years old, and died about 4 years after he started teaching in Vitória. Now his former students were trying to keep his legacy alive opening dojos, and did a public presentation to promote it. Honestly, I did not thought, at the time, that the "throwing people flying in the air using their own power" would work for real, but decided to give it a try, since I could not do almost any other martial art due to my leg injury. To my own surprise I found myself being thrown in the tatami many times in the first class, and started to think that maybe that thing could really work. After 3 or 4 classes I had been hooked. I was loving the Aikido classes almost as much as I loved the Tae Kwon Do ones. I was luck. 3 former students of the old sensei opened dojos. I choose the one of Kabazawa sensei, a small Japanese guy that moved to Brazil some 15 years before. He had done judo since ever and learned Aikido with the old sensei after adult. He was the one with the more dynamic and energetic style from the 3 students that opened dojos.

In Brazil it takes much more time to get black-belt in Aikido than here in Japan. Usually you have to train seriously for 4½ to 5 years before you can be a shodan (black-belt 1st dan), so I trained for almost 3 years and was still 3^rd kyu (the grading is from 5^th kyu to 1^st kyu, being 5^th kyu the lowest), and preparing to do the 2^nd kyu exam. By that time I had already finished college and got married. I had a job (for some time 3 jobs, actually), and me and Karin (my wife) was both working a lot. I started skipping Aikido classes because of the work, then I got a teaching job in a private college and could not go to the training anymore. After that I still tried to go back training, this time early in the morning. Trained for about 6 months, but my work schedule changed and I quitted the training once again.

After that a lot of things happened and I end up here in Japan. Here they have a lot of clubs or circles in the university. For the most different things: singing, dancing, playing drums, and, of course, for many kinds of martial arts. I went looking for a club of Aikido. I found the biggest one first (I discovered later that there are 3 clubs of Aikido). It is a good club, but they train from Monday to Friday, from 17:50h to 19:00h. This is complicated for me because I usually have meeting with my adviser at this time. But, then I found out about some "Competition Aikido Club". That sounded strange at first because I always heard that there is no competition in Aikido. But the time of the training was excellent, Tuesday and Thursday from 19:30h to 21:00h. I went to watch a training class and the people at the club were so kind and friendly. And it was a very dynamic style as I like it. In the end of the training there is always randori-renshu, which is almost like the fight training I used to do in Tae Kwon Do. I felt really well at the training. That was a little more than 2 years ago. I have being training almost without interruption during this time, and the people in the Aikido club are basically the only Japanese friends I have. (I stay most of the time alone in my lab.)

Last Monday, December 24^th, 2007, I did my shodan-shinsa, the black-belt exam. And I passed the exam. I am black-belt now. Of course, a lot of people are black-belt. Of course, it is not that big deal, and it is just the beginning. After that there is 2^nd dan, 3^rd dan, etc. And a shodan is no more than a beginner that have mastered the basics. But to me this black-belt means a lot. More than I can explain by words. I know that may sound foolish, after all, as I said, it is not so big deal, and there are a dozen other black-belts on our club only. But I don't care if it sounds foolish. Having got this, having earned this black-belt, has a taste of accomplishment, of self-realization. I do feel great about it, and I have so many people to be thankful. For so many things. To Zé Carlos, my Tae Kwon Do instructor. To Kabazawa sensei, my first Aikido sensei. To Ono sensei for his support here in Japan. To Ôki-sempai that trained so many times with me and was my partner in the exam. To all the kind friends in the Kyogi Aikido Club. And to Karin that was my support, my sparring (poor Karin), that was always there for me.

Ôki-san, my sempai and partner in the exam, and me. Ono-sensei had to leave before the end of the exam, so he is not in the photo, but he was there too.

After the exam, as it was Christmas' eve, I had a dinner with some friends. I was so happy that I drank and ate a little too much. The next day my stomach and my head remembered me that moderation, even in happiness, is a virtue.

Clipe do Camping de Aikido

Descobri um site/programa novo na Web. Se chama Animoto.com e cria clipes com as suas fotos. Resolvi fazer um teste com algumas fotos do ``training camp'' de Aikido deste ano. O resultado tá aí:



Também tem uma opção de fazer filmes completos (full length) mas aí tem que pagar. Os clipes de 30seg. são de graça.