MIRAI 2.0 R&I Week 2021

On June 7-11, 2021 The University of Gothenburg hosted MIRAI 2.0 Research and Innovation week. The theme for the conference was International collaboration in a digital era – Fostering innovative minds for the future.

This digital event gathered researchers from all member universities in Sweden and Japan as well as university leadership representatives, industry and research funding agencies. MIRAI 2.0 TEG/IEAG groups organized scientific sessions within MIRAI 2.0 themes: Ageing, Artificial Intelligence, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Materials Science and Sustainability.

This event focused on connecting researchers with similar interests as well as discussing and sharing collaboration ideas.  A matchmaking event with researchers, companies and organizations was arranged to support cross sector exchange of expertise and ideas.

In this article, published by The University of Gothenburg, more information about the outcome of the Research and innovation week can be found:
https://www.gu.se/en/news/many-participants-in-the-japanese-swedish-research-innovation-week

The overall program with links to programs for all scientific sessions is presented below.

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SPEAKERS
Opening Ceremony

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Eva Wiberg is President of the University of Gothenburg since July 2017. She is a Professor of Italian and has previously served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Lund University. Eva Wiberg actively participates in several national and international university networks.

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Seiichi Matsuo is the President of Nagoya University (2015- ), where he received his PhD in Nephrology in 1981. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (1981-1982) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (1982-1984), and eventually became a professor at the Graduate School of Medicine (2004-2015). After becoming a professor, he became actively involved in the executive functions of the university, serving as the Vice President of Nagoya University (2009-2015) and as the Director of various Nagoya University affiliated institutes such as the Nagoya University Hospital (2007-2013), the Headquarters for Industry-Academia-Government Collaboration (2012-2015). Professor Matsuo was also appointed as the Chancellor of Tokai National Higher Education and Research System on April 1, 2020.

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Ibrahim Baylan is the Minister of Business, Industry and Innovation of Sweden. He was Minister of Energy 2014–2019 and Minister of Coordination 2016–2019 and Minister of Education 2004–2006. Baylan has been a member of the Swedish Parliament since 2006. As Minister of Business, Industry and Innovation he is responsible for the Government’s Innovation Partnership Programmes, a strategic initiative where different sectors join forces to tackle societal challenges.

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Takuya Hirai was born in Takamatsu City, Kagawa in 1958. After graduating from Takamatsu Daiichi High School, he studied in the Department of English Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Sophia University. Upon graduation, he joined Dentsu Inc. After serving as President of Nishinippon Broadcasting Co., Ltd. and Director of Takamatsu Chuo High School in his earlier career, he was first elected to the House of Representatives in the 42nd general election in 2000. Ever since, he has been elected for 7 consecutive terms and has held such positions as Director, of Economy, Trade and Industry Division and Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Division of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP); Deputy Chairperson of Policy Research Council, LDP; Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Cabinet Office; Vice Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism; Chairperson of Committee on Cabinet; Director-General of Information Research Bureau, LDP; Chairperson of Public Relations Headquarters, LDP; and Director of Internet Media Division, LDP. As the Chairperson of Special Mission Committee on IT Strategy, he compiled Digital Nippon (policy proposal) and leads other aspects of the IT policies of LDP. In October 2018, he was appointed Minister in charge of Information Technology Policy, Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy, Intellectual Property Strategy, “Cool Japan” Strategy and for Space Policy for the 4th Abe Cabinet. In October 2019, he was appointed Chairperson of Digital Nation Special Committee, LDP. In September 2020, he was appointed Minister for Digital Transformation, Minister in charge of Information Technology Policy and Minister of State for the Social Security and Tax Number System.

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Amy Loutfi is a Professor in Information Technology and Pro-Vice Chancellor for AI at Örebro University and leads the research group AASS Machine Perception and Interaction Lab. In 2020, Amy was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. She has a long experience working with industry and the public sector on research projects dealing with AI, robotics and human-robot interaction. Additionally, Amy has worked with a strong engagement in strategic issues in AI for all of Sweden. In addition to her role in WASP-AI, she is involved in AI Sweden, AI Competence for Sweden, Omstartskommissionen and the Swedish government’s strategic collaboration programme on digitalisation.

Semantics of Robotics
As humans and robots start to cohabit the same environment and interact deeper with each other, the need for robots and other artificial agents to truly understand human instruction increases. This understanding not only involves the ability for robots to decode human speech, but also the ability to ground words that refer to physical objects, actions, and concepts – to the perceptual information coming from the sensors embedded on the agent. This challenge in part deals with the symbol grounding problem, that is, how to ground symbols into something other than symbols. Further with the advent of advances within AI, due to many of the advances within machine learning, there has been an opportunity to examine how the grounding can be learned using large (and simulated) datasets. This talk will highlight the research where semantics are learned, integrated and used for the next generation of robotic systems.

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Professor Junichi Tsujii is a Japanese computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and text mining, particularly in the field of biology and bioinformatics. He graduated from Kyoto University Graduate School in 1973, obtaining a PhD in engineering. He became Associate Professor at Kyoto University in 1973, Professor at Manchester University in 1988, Professor at Tokyo University Graduate School in 1995, and Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing) in 2011 before taking on his current position as Director of AIRC in 2015 and Fellow of AIST in 2017. He still holds a Professorship at Manchester University. Former President of ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), IAMT (International Association for Machine Translation), AFNLP (Asian Federation of Natl. Language Procession),and Association for Natural Language Processing. Present President of ICCL (the International Committee on Computational Linguistics).

The Next Stage of AI Innovation – AIRC Perspectives 
The AIRC (Artificial Intelligence Research Centers) was established six years ago as one of the three hub AI research centers in Japan. As a research center under the METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), we have focused on solving challenges encountered in deployment of AI technology in society. While the data-oriented AI (Machine Learning and in particular, Deep Learning) has become dominant and achieved many remarkable results, the approach has its own limit. In order to resolve many challenges in real-world AI applications, techniques which deal with symbolic and more structured pieces of knowledge have to be integrated with the data-oriented approach. In real-world AI applications, it is also crucial to combine AI techniques with other expertise and knowledge which experts of target domains have. In this talk, I will present two five years projects started in 2020 which focus on integration of symbolic AI with data-oriented AI and re-configurable AI. 

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Fredrika Lagergren Wahlin holds a PhD in political science and has a position as senior lecturer at University of Gothenburg. Since 2018, Fredrika Lagergren Wahlin has been Deputy Vice Chancellor with responsibility for collaboration. Within the framework of the assignment as Vice-Chancellor, Fredrika Lagergren Wahlin has formed an interdisciplinary coordination group (SAID) which aims to create an interdisciplinary platform for education and research in AI and Digitization at the University of Gothenburg. Since 2019, Fredrika Lagergren Wahlin has been chairman of the Swedish University and College Association’s working group for digitization. Fredrika Lagergren Wahlin has extensive experience of teaching and research in both political science and teacher education with special focus in political philosophy and social studies. 

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SPEAKERS
Closing Ceremony

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Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn is professor in Information Systems at Luleå University of Technology. In the end of 2017 she accepted the position as Vice-Chancellor at the same university. She is a member of numerous boards and academic networks. She is also a member of the Government’s strategic collaboration program what brings together business, academia, civil society and public actors in order to jointly contribute in finding innovative solutions that meet the major societal challenges and contribute to Swedish competitiveness.

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Professor Hideo Ohno is the 22nd President of Tohoku University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1982 and has held a number of leadership positions at Tohoku University, including Director of the Research Institute of Electrical Communication. Before coming to Tohoku University, he was a Visiting Scientist at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center and Associate Professor at Hokkaido University’s Department of Electrical Engineering. His research interests include physics and applications of spin phenomena in semiconductors and metal-based nanostructures. He has won many awards including the Japan Academy Prize (2005), the Leo Esaki Prize (2016) and the ISCS Welker Award (2019). He has been an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow since 2018.

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Peter Lindblad is the Academic coordinator of Uppsala University´s participation in MIRAI 2.0. As Professor in Chemistry (2009 – ), and previously in Biology (2000-2008), at Uppsala University his research is in the interphase between biochemistry, synthetic biology and genetic engineering. The overall aim is to develop green cell factories, microbial cells converting solar energy and CO₂into chemicals and fuels, new technologies to phase out the use fossil resources as well as to address global warming. In addition, he is an experienced project coordinator.