[No. 146] Yutaka Arakawa

I enrolled at Keio University in 1997 and spent 12 years there until 2009, through my undergraduate, master's, and doctoral studies, and then as an assistant professor. In 2017, a milestone year marking the 20th anniversary of my enrollment, I was given this opportunity to look back, and I am enjoying writing this piece. I believe that I, a once-poor student, am able to contribute this article thanks to the blessings of wonderful mentors, classmates, and senior colleagues. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude.

I chose the Department of Information and Computer Science in my second year of university simply because it seemed fun. The department was newly established, and I felt a vague sense of the future there. When choosing a laboratory in my fourth year, mobile phones were just becoming widespread, so I thought research in communications would be interesting. I visited the Sasase Lab and found it to be a very lively place with many doctoral students, so I decided on the spot. Seventeen years have passed since then, but the time I spent at Yagami, blessed with not only Professor Sasase and Professor Yamanaka, who took care of me since my doctoral studies, but also senior and junior colleagues and classmates, remains a precious memory in my life. Since leaving Keio in 2009, I have lived in Fukuoka, France, Germany, and Nara, and I currently reside in Los Angeles, USA. My main position is an associate professor at the Ubiquitous Computing Systems Laboratory at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, where we handle IoT and AI, but I am currently on a long-term stay at UCLA for international joint research.

However, I think Professor Sasase, Professor Yamanaka, and my senior colleagues who knew me during my university and graduate school days would find everything about my current self—being a researcher, my field of research, and being overseas—surprising (laughs).

This is because, as a student, I was more interested in starting a business than in research. I did just enough research and spent most of my time at the company of Mr. Nishino (contributor to the 68th Keio University alumni Relay Column). With the support of my professors, I managed to get my papers published and obtain my doctorate, but I never even considered an academic path, and even if I had, I probably would not have succeeded.

At that time, I was juggling two things: working on optical networks for my research while developing software for a startup as a hobby. I was selected for the IPA's Mitou Software Project, but my efforts were divided. I wanted to make what I was doing as a hobby my research subject, so at the age of 32, I made the bold decision to change universities and research fields. It was frightening to abandon what I had been doing for nine years through my undergraduate, master's, doctoral, and assistant professorship, but Professor Sasase's "Operation 555" became my emotional support. "Operation 555" is the idea that if you work 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 5 months, you can write a paper even in a different field.

And, as the saying goes, "what one likes, one will do well," I soon began to produce research results in my new field. I was researching applications on smartphones, and just around that time, cloud integration was expanding. My knowledge of communications helped me come up with a flood of new software ideas. Papers that I had struggled so much with were accepted one after another, I received numerous awards, and I was able to integrate into a new community. After that, I was able to study abroad in France and Germany, and before I knew it, I had become an associate professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and was walking an academic path.

I never imagined I would lead such a life, but now I am glad that I followed my intuition and decided to change my research field.

It has been 10 years since I moved away from entrepreneurship, but the flame still burns in a corner of my heart. As a student, Professor Yamanaka would often challenge me, asking, "What is your core competence?" Now, I understand the meaning of those words well and am conducting research in pursuit of that core competence. The term "ubiquitous computing" is already outdated, but we are on the verge of an era where AI will permeate society. Within this context, I hope to contribute to society through cutting-edge research. Last year, we developed a sensor board called SenStick to accelerate IoT research, which won the Best Demo Award at the prestigious ACM UbiComp/ISWC conference, and we even managed to bring it to general sale. Through such outputs, I hope to support the next generation of talent who are chasing their dreams, just as Professor Yamanaka did for me.

You only live once, so please try to challenge yourself with things that your intuition tells you are interesting! And remember Operation 555. This is summed up by Steve Jobs's phrase "connecting the dots"; everything you work hard on will connect somewhere and be useful someday. I, too, felt that I had taken a detour in academia by chasing the dream of starting a business, but I have recently come to realize that it is precisely because of that experience that I am able to do the research and teaching I do today.