Last week I received a call from the Embassy of Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science & Technology has granted my admission to the Monbukagakusho scholarship.

From October 2010 I will be studying Creative Informatics at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo.

“The department aims to educate leading researchers and engineers with high creativity for realizing new information technologies and systems based on novel ideas. To perform this mission effectively, the main base of the department is located in Akihabara, a new metropolitan IT R&D area in central Tokyo.” [IST]

Akihabara is The gadget area of Tokyo, where the first six month I will focus on the Japanese language, followed by a two year master degree programme.

Needless to say I cannot wait to get back to Tokyo!

[Picture by Sander Bockting]

Augmented reality is slowly getting available to the public, Pranav Mistry shows a different approach decreasing the gap between the digital and real-life world and allowing a more natural interaction. I am very much impressed by his ideas and looking forward to the release of the code sources.

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all. Ted.Com

“It brings up some key issues surrounding the future of touch input from both a hardware and software perspective. 10/GUI’s solution is to create a multi-touch pad that lays on your desk in the area that a keyboard or mouse would. You then use this pad to interact with the monitor in front of you, just as you would with the more traditional methods of input.” Tech Crunch

Rewrite Rules supporting Conditional Statements for Automatic Parallelization.

Abstract

Hurlin recently proposed a technique for automatic parallelization based on separation logic. This paper proposes an enhancement of the mechanism for situations where conditional statements are used in specifications of programs. With the proposed changes, specifications containing conditional statements are supported and programs can be automatically parallelized. Two approaches are identified and a preferable one is suggested. The proposed extension is illustrated by an exemplifying program and has been implemented.

Will be presented at The 11th Twente Student Conference on IT, to be held June 29, 2009

It was about time to upgrade my old phone to a next gen: Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1.

I love the combination of the bright screen, QWERTY keyboard and classy design. Downside is storage size of just 500MB. So I ordered a 16GB Micro SDHC (SanDisk)

For internet I will have to wait another two weeks to have my new Vodafone plan activated.