Aran's adventures continue... but where?
Hi!
![[IMG]](rainbow.gif)
I'm Aran Lunzer - until March 2011 a member of the site hosting this web page:
the Tanaka Laboratory
in Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.
This is therefore an out-of-date site. You can find more recent news at my new personal page.
However, in the interests of continuity you can - for now - continue below with the old contents of this site.
Motivations
Research
The bread-and-butter part of my life is based on research in the field of HCI: human-computer interaction. Although in computing it's often Artificial Intelligence that grabs the headlines, I belong to an opposing camp whose goal is to promote computers as really useful but entirely stupid machines. Researchers in this camp dislike the idea of making computers appear to understand human concepts; there is no real understanding, and this gives great scope for unexpected failures - which in some cases will just be frustrating, but might sometimes be expensive or even disastrous. My goal, instead, is to put humans in charge of powerful, complex tools whose facilities are rich and unambiguous. This theme is described in more detail here.
Japan
I greatly enjoy living in Japan, and getting to know the place. A lot of
my time in the early days went into learning to read Japanese, to give me access to the local
research work and - more challengingly - to some of the local literature. Along the way I
passed the 1st kyu (i.e., the highest) level of the national Japanese Language Proficiency
Test, which seems a worthwhile qualification to have.
ShorinjiKempo
I'm also keen on the Japanese philosophy and martial art called
Shorinji Kempo,
which I started learning at the
Glasgow University Dojo,
and have continued at other clubs within the
British Shorinji Kempo Federation
and in Japan.
Although I suspect that I'm not destined for heroic levels of fighting proficiency, having made it as far
as 2nd dan I feel at least that I have some knowledge to pass on to beginners. And it's a lot of fun.
One thing that I particularly enjoy about Shorinji Kempo is that the senior instructors are so friendly
and entertaining (as well as being good at what they teach), and that they seem to get kinder and more
humorous the higher their rank - one great example being my teacher at Hokkaido University, the 7th-dan
NOSAKA
Masashi
sensei. This isn't just happy coincidence; the spirit of
helping others while having fun yourself is a fundamental part of
Shorinji Kempo's brand of Buddhism.
The Webble World
As many people in Japan know, the Tanaka Laboratory is home to a media architecture project
known as IntelligentPad. The goal is to support communication and evolution of human ideas
among human communities, based on information- and function-carrying building blocks called `pads'.
The idea is that non-programmers can join pads together to express new ideas or tools, pull apart
other people's compositions to extract interesting pads that were acting as sub-components,
and reuse such extracted pads in different contexts.
The latest incarnation of Intelligent Pad, called Webble World, is
now being made available for general use. Try it out by going through the Webble World Gateway.
If you'd like to get in touch...
Mail me at:
aranlunzer at gmail dot com
[Tanaka Lab home]
Last updated: October 2010