Been trying out some examples of NLP sentiment analysis the last couple of days, ie CNN vs GRU vs bidirectional LSTM. I guess it’s not surprising but complex is not always best… I know it’s only running for 30 epochs but the dataset is the full GLUE/SST2 dataset so not too shabby. Plus not showing […]
Mobility has always fascinated me for its sheer depth and breadth, the way it touches all of us and can pave the way for improving social issues such as population changes, employment accessibility, and the climate crisis. Living in Japan for over 20 years, I’ve been fascinated by transportation here; the incredible technology that keeps […]
Just over 3 years ago, I convinced Toyota to co-sponsor the first Techcrunch event in the MENA region that was held in the Autumn of 2018 in Beirut. It was an eye-opener to the developing ecosystems of the Near and Middle East, with strong attendance from neighboring countries, and Middle Eastern and North Africa-based entrepreneurs. […]
Four years ago, I wrote on this blog that the impact of automated driving would be felt both in the metropolis but also outside the big city, where mobility is more challenging to run economically. Today I believe the same to be true. That more than ever we should be striving for automated driving in […]
The Nara region contains some of the earliest records and vestiges of Japan transitioning from prehistory into history. The 8th century Asuka and Nara eras, named after the cities where the imperial centers were based, witnessed the first time Japan was ruled nationally from a single region. It was also the beginning of recorded literature, […]
As noted in yesterday’s post, it is getting difficult to find examples of automated driving experimentation in every prefecture in Japan. However, the changing map of population movement at a macro level in a given prefecture can offer us insights less into what kind of experimentation is necessary but more into how future mobility should […]
Kagawa prefecture in the southern Japanese island of Shikoku is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking of a wholesale transformation of the transportation landscape. But as accelerated aging takes its toll, especially in rural regions with the younger population inexorably migrating into the bigger cities, the viability of the current transportation […]
My first connection with Gifu was in the autumn of 2015, having finished some meetings early and waiting for my pre-booked shinkansen train out of Nagoya and back to Tokyo. At the station shop, some interestingly-shaped traditional Japanese sweets called Kurikinton were in season and I duly snapped up a pack of 6 to try […]
A history of experimentation Since the Meiji restoration, and including Akira and Godzilla, Tokyo has always been the locus where the future fuses with the present and where one would expect the automated driving future to be well under construction. Indeed there are so many projects and experiments around vehicle automation it’s hard to keep […]
For someone who has supposedly travelled through much of Japan, it is rather embarrassing to say that I haven’t actually travelled extensively to any part of Chiba. Apart from shuttling to and from Narita Airport to fly abroad, and having friends in Funabashi, but that doesn’t really count. Adjacent to Tokyo, Chiba is one of […]