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Apr 2005 INDEX Reports ・ Yumi, President's monthly note ・ Toshi, CTO's monthly note ・ What's up in Pangaea's Playground? (Activity report) ・ What's up in Research group? (Study group report) *Yumi's monthly note Yumi's April note Last week in April, I visited beautiful Kyoto where fresh green scents can be felt everywhere. Pangaea Activity staffs and I are all in maximum gear preparing for new Pangaea activity season starting in May at Shibuya and Suginami. This year is especially important as Activity team has a big task to package Pangaea activities so that people like you who have been patient and waiting for Pangaea to take a place in your country will be able to start after packaging is done. This month, I'd like to introduce Pangaea from academic side briefly. As most of you know, I had been worked in developing children's toys. I was fortunate to connect with place such as MIT Media Lab, yet many of you know, I am rather analogue than being in digital. I make use of convenient gadgets, but never read instructions, always learns through trial and error hands on. (Well, Toshi will disagree, 'cause when I have error, I usually call my Help Desk Toshi!) I love thinking about what if we have this or that. One day in winter, I have met Ishida san of Kyoto University after Alan Kay's reception party. He knew a little about Pangaea as he knew Toshi through his project. He asked me if I can give a talk at ICE workshop (Intercultural exchange and collaboration project) at Kyoto University in spring. He wanted me to talk about what Pangaea is doing and what Pangaea needs to move forward in terms of tools, systems, etc. So I went. Except myself, all other participants were researchers, from Malaysia, China, Korea, Thailand, all from Asian countries. They are studying to create ways for Asian countries to communicate and collaborate by thinking of machine translation, multilingual chat system, on-line multilingual conference system, and so on. I have found many bits and pieces there which I love to try in Pangaea activities. This ICE was also started by Ishida san after 911. I discovered many people around the world have started their own efforts to do something to make things little better. Pangaea is developing various softwares which children will use at their activities. But we also intend to use already available software if we find that it is good and usable by children. For example, Harada san at NTT research lab, created this wonderful software called Viscuit. This is the easiest and most exciting animation ware I have seen. Pangaea decided to test and use Viscuit in our fields this year as Harada san has given us permission to do so kindly. In April, he visited Pangaea office to teach Activity staffs how to use Viscuit. Oh, I must tell you that Pangaea now have new office in Kanda, very close to Tokyo station and also Hakozaki air terminal. Our office is in the same building with Kay Nishi, for those of you who know him from ML. I also like to mention that we now have two full time staffs and 3 part time staffs. So you see, Yumi and Toshi are making progress although I don't get to see you much lately. I am planning my visit to Boston, Europe, and Africa from the end of June to end of July. Hope to see you when I visit your city. Yumi Yumiko Mori, President NPO Pangaea *Toshi's monthly note Toshi's note With the start of the academic-year 2005, there was good news at NPO Pangaea in April. NPO Pangaea has got its new office in Kanda, Tokyo where is just one stop from Tokyo Station by train. There are lots of good restaurants around this neighborhood, and it is walking distance from Akihabara area ('the' electronics city), which makes me so much exciting! Also, starting from April, Mr. Kotaro Ito has joined NPO Pangaea as a fulltime Technology Development manager. He's just completed his undergrad last March with his strong software engineering background and energetic guts. He was a part-time engineer at Pangaea last year and now he looks so different from what he was last year with his hope and responsibility as a fulltime working person. Kotaro and I have been meeting on R&D frequently and started the development of Pangaea Network System and software for new activities. In April, I was in Boston, USA from 1st to 14th to visit mainly MIT Media Lab and others. At MIT Media Lab, I had meetings to update Pangaea stuff, exchange information and, sometimes, work together with more than twenty professors, students, or researchers who are especially Pangaea advisors and fellows. They gave me so much precious information and inspirations. For example, I've got so interested in "Computer Clubhouse Village (a kind of social network system for children)" by Prof. Mitchel Resnick group, "d-touch (open source development environment to create games with USB camera very easily)" by Enrico Costanza at Prof. Walter Bender's group (Enrico was my officemate this time, actually), and RFID Tag reader's case design by Leonardo Bonanni. Also, Prof. Roz Picard introduced me lots of her friends around the world to help "Pangaea Online Pictogram Survey" and Prof. Chris Csikszentmihalyi introduced me to his grad students, Ayah, who had been interested in Pangaea. I had so much fruitful meetings there in the Media Lab and I really appreciated their supports and advices. Thank you so much and please keep in touch! After spending two weeks in Boston, I visited Kyoto University in Japan and gave a talk about Pictogram Communication software development at "IPA Exploratory Software Project Interim Symposium." At my presentation, I think I had good questions, advices, and discussions among audiences and advisors. After this symposium event, I've been working hard especially on GUI application of this project because database structure of Pictogram dictionary has almost done. I'm going to give a talk on this topic again at Shanghai Jiao Tong University at the end of this month and I hope I can show more progress then. From this month (May 2005), we are going to have Pangaea activities every weekend at four public schools in Shibuya, Tokyo and one children house in Suginami, Tokyo. I can't wait to join these activities as it's really fun to play with children and learn from children. From R&D side, I'm going to start an implementation of Pangaea Intranet activity using RFID Tag system. *What's up in Pangaea's Playground? (Activity report by Seiji) April was a month for preparing. We hope more people could try each Pangaea activity. So we've tried our best for it as doing implementation and inspection. Our goal in this year is to package Pangaea activities. We held a briefing for volunteer workers on April 19th and met eight new people. We'll kick off this year's Pangaea activity from one junior high school in Shibuya on May 14th and go for the Pangaea worldwide event, "Universal Children's Day" on November 20th. We could say Pangaea is still a baby and has been growing with your friendly & warm eyes. All the children and adults are the same researchers. Let's create & develop our "universal playground" where everybody meets naturally. Thanks up to now and from now on. seji ****************************************************** Please check for details at Pangaea homepage. Non Profit Organization PANGAEA: http://www.pangaean.org/ For inquiries, E-mail: info*pangaean.org (Please change "*" to "@".) [Registration/Termination of Subscription] This e-newsletter is delivered to *Registered Pangaea activity supporting members *Pangaea advisors *Pangaea fellows *Registered Pangaea volunteer staff *Anyone who supports Pangaea activity and has contacted to Pangaea President Ms. Mori/Vice-President Mr. Takasaki If you wish to change your e-mail address or to terminate, please contact us from the following site: http://www.pangaean.org/common/english/newsletter/change.html ****************************************************** Non Profit Organization PANGAEA TS building 4F, 2-14-3 Uchikanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0047, Japan TEL: +81-3-5298-1551 / FAX: +81-3-5298-1552 E-mail: info*pangaean.org (Please change "*" to "@".) Copyright (c) 2003-2004 NPO PANGAEA. All Rights Reserved. ****************************************************** |