In a few hours we’ll start the World IA Day 2015 Tokyo. Believe me, it’s really awesome!

Till last year, we had held WIAD Tokyo at the Fukutake Hall, The University of Tokyo every year. We thank you guys, the 200 people who came to WIAD Tokyo for having interests in IA, we really appreciate it. Moreover, a fact that the tickets for WIAD Tokyo had been sold out in just two days made us consider that we should increase the scale of WIAD Tokyo. On the other hand, last year we had an accident, a serious snowfall. Because of it, we had to cancel the event. This made me realize that we have snow here in Tokyo sometimes in February.

Therefore, we decided that we should hold WIAD Tokyo as a broadcast style: we stream our program on the internet and you can attend it through the browsers and Twitter. This year’s program includes two keynotes, one panel discussion, and open discussion with the audience. And our sponsors support us to translate all discussion into English to share it with the global IA community.

The first keynote is held by Dr. Koichiro Eto of AIST who is known as a media artist and the organizer of Nico-nico Gakkai beta (Nico-nico conference beta), which is a new challenge of academic conference. He has been studied on collective intelligence such as Wiki and the pattern languages. On the presentation, he’ll give us his journey on fighting with collective intelligence.

etolab@AIST
http://eto.com/lab/

The second keynote is held by Dr. Michio Okada who is a professor of Toyohashi University of Technology. He is known as the father of the “weak robot” concept. He’ll illustrate that concept on his presentation and we’ll find that we should consider our new “weak IA” way of thinking.

Dr. Michio Okada
http://www.icd.cs.tut.ac.jp/~okada/index.html

We’ll have a panel discussion after the keynote. We invited a guest panel, Mr. Kei Wakabayashi who is the editor in chief of the WIRED Japan edition. Through the discussion between the keynote speakers and Mr. Wakabayashi, we’d like to develop a new IA and an approach to it.

Our program will broadcast on February 21st, 2015 13:00 – 18:00 JST (4:00 – 9:00 GMT / 0:00 – 5:00 EDT), stay tuned.

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Atsushi Hasegawa, Ph. D.
WIAD Tokyo