Lab seminar report by Augustin– November 17th, 2020.
Due to personal reasons, none of the presenters were able to attend the seminar. Consequently, there were only two parts in this meeting: discussion about everyone’s situations and future plans and the bonding session.
1- Discussion
Abe-sensei asked some of the lab members what they were up to recently:
In the scope of a course, Masaya has been looking at ideas for new medias, especially on the idea of cheaper tablets, compared to the current ones which can be very expensive.
Natasha plans on attending an international competition on how to reduce climate change. She is designing an app called Green Tomatoes, whose goal would be to rate the sustainability of restaurants and inform customers that plan to go there. It would work similarly to the movie rating website Rotten Tomatoes: customers would be able to rate subjectively the restaurant based on factors like use of electricity, use of disposable cutlery or paper based ads…. Experts would also be rating the restaurant through more objective factors like the waste production, energy consumption, if ingredients are local or not…. She plans on promoting her app using stickers and collaborating with NGOs or existing restaurant review websites.
Kazama has been attempting to decrypt what is a human being through the scope of communication by comparing it to AI and robots. He is trying to understand whether it is possible to prove if people met online are real through some factors, when it could be possible you are discussing with a robot in disguise ?
Peljee is preparing for job hunting for an internship.
2- Bonding time
For this seminar, people were asked to choose which would be their last meal if they knew they were going to die soon and they could ask for anything. I wanted to find out what lab members were fond of eating and I was not disappointed. The answers were very varied, but many people agreed that because it was their last meal they could eat without thinking about possible consequences: it was not a problem to eat Raclette or Nasi Padang
(a traditional Indonesian dish) even if it was not healthy, same for raw oysters even if it can be dangerous, or Osechi (Japanese traditional New Year foods) even though it can be very expensive. Some members chose to eat home-made food, because they miss their mother’s ability to cook (vegetable buns or buuz dumplings in this case), or to be able to share their last meal with their family or friends rather than choosing a specific meal. Finally, some members chose to pick meals at a specific restaurant they particularly enjoy: Stir fried beef in Kanbashokudo and Tendon in Ochanomizu.
Overall, it was a nice occasion to talk about everyone’s food tastes as well as good restaurants in Tokyo and the possibility to go to a restaurant together once the situation improves. Finally, we agreed that natto was a complicated subject.
Showcase of everyone’s choices
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