At the June Plenary Meeting, the Industry-academia collaboration Ideathon / Hackathon Program, reports on the Global Challenge II, and reports on the Follow-Up Visit were held.

Here is a summary of each topic discussed:

Industry-academia collaboration Ideathon / Hackathon Program

In the Industry-academia collaboration Ideathon/Hackathon program, affiliated enterprises provide AI-, IoT- or BigData-related problems and topics for groups of students to solve. Multiple ambitious groups of graduate students compete to brainstorm novel ideas and business models for conquering these issues.

This time, we will receive a general task from a company. The students, divided into four groups, introduced themselves. Afterwards, they discussed how to deal with the given task and what kind of approaches would be viable. After the group work, the results will be reported in the September Plenary Meeting.

Global Challenge Ⅱ

In Global Challenge II, students visit an international research facility, where they engage in cutting-edge research of their field. The goal is to focus on the interaction with other international researchers and join the world-wide research competition. This time, two students reported on their experiences and achievements in the Global Challenge II.

In addition to research activities at the visiting sites, students reported that they had gained insight into the local daily life and student activities at foreign universities.

Here is a summary of the Global Challenge II:

Follow Up Visit

In the Follow-Up Visit, students will re-visit a research institute they previously visited throughout the program. A visit is done in a group of students from different departments so that students can experience state-of-the-art research across different fields. This aims at broadening the students' horizon by allowing them to connect to people and organizations from other areas. This time, eight students paired up in five groups to do Follow-Up visits. They reported their experiences during the visit, and how it broadened their network, and how they could collaborate their research topics in in-depth discussions with other researchers.

The following shows students doing a Follow-Up Visit and their destination: