High tech, Human touch - 19/2/'14
Today was, very surprisingly, again a very busy day. The alarm rang at 7:00 after which I had to get in my suit. The program for today consisted of two companies, Panasonic before lunch and CiNet in the afternoon. When I went down into the hotel lobby there was no one to be found. This was a little bit weird because we only had 15 minutes left before we had to go to the metro station. Luckily soon after this surprise everyone began coming in for breakfast.
At the moment we had to assemble we were missing two persons. This was a little bit of a problem because everyone was staying in a separate room. As a group we did not precisely know in which room these persons where staying so we could not wake them. The train does not wait so we had to go without them, hoping they would find their way to the companies by themselves. But before we went to the train we had to sing a song for our birthday boy Jelmer. Erik handed over his present to him, a 4 l pet bottle of Nikka whisky. With all the formalities completed we could finally start our journey.
A short trip by train and metro and we arrived at Panasonic. The visit started with a short introduction about the founder and foundation of panasonic, followed by a museum tour. The museum featured products by panasonic throughout the history of the company. It was also very appealing to see the company's mission; good products for the masses at affordable prices. This is very typical for Japanese companies, we saw the same motto at a lot of other companies we visited. After the museum we got a showroom tour which displayed newly developed products by panasonic. All these products were from the specific branch of Panasonic we visited, the automotive & industrial division. But this was not all, after we visited the showroom we got two presentations by engineers. The first was about GaN devices and the second one showed a new type of non-volatile memory, resistive ram aka ReRAM.
The visit to panasonic had come to an end, we had a fast lunch and got on the Osaka monorail to the second company. I have never been on a monorail train before so this was a nice new experience, it was very smooth and quiet. It took a mere 15 minutes before we arrived at our destination.
It was time to visit CiNet, a Osaka university institute specialized in neural networks and brain research. We had an introduction to the institute and their groups, they are researching in the field of human machine interaction, neuroscience and MRI & MEG measurement and analysis technologies. Then we got a tour throughout the institute, first we went to see their medical measurement equipment, an 7T and 3T MRI and a state of the art MEG. Very impressive to see. Thereafter we got to see a brain probe setup, here research was done to the optical nerve and the response to stimuli.
Quite a macabre ending but no time to think about it a lot because it was time for dinner. We went to a nice restaurant with a small group. The cart was in Japanese so we just ordered some random things and something by pointing at pictures. This resulted in a nice seafood hot-pot and the opportunity for diy soup. A very pleasant dinner. After a 2nd dinner for some at Mc Donalds it was time to go back to the hotel. A good nights rest for another busy day.
By: Peter Oostewechel