October monthly recap

I wanted to write some more relaxed things about whatever that doesn't deserve it's own article and figured a monthly summary would be a nice format for that.

Research

I was given the option to choose my research project from three different ones. Two involved reinforcement learning in the form of a game and a speech robot. The third was a more recent project concerning machine learning and big data. I chose the one with big data since it sounded the most challenging and interesting. My task currently is to reformat the data and research ways to apply it to learning tools and technologies. I will write a more detailed article about the project at the end of my exchange.

Cold rainy days

When I arrived in the end of September the first week or so the weather was very nice with sunny days with temperatures of around 25 degrees Celsius. I was enjoying myself and everything was great until suddenly it started raining. And it kept raining. And the rain did not stop for weeks. Actually there was some days here and there that the rain stopped but only two of them were sunny. I heard it was an exceptionally cold October because of these rains with some days peak temperatures hovering barely over 10 degrees.

Speaking of the rain the culture festival was a bit disappointing because there was heavy rain and the second day was canceled because of a typhoon. Despite the cold and rainy weather there was quite some visitors enjoying the event. I walked around the booths with my friend and tried different kind of snacks and foods but we didn't go see any performances. Since the day was so cold we decided to go to a Japanese hot spring bath. It was a nice place with many inside and outside pools. We heard the saunas would be like Finnish ones where you throw water on the rocks but to our disappointment it was just a warm room. Maybe one day we will find a Finnish sauna.

Tokyo motor show

We were invited to a car convention that was held on October 31st in Tokyo big sight convention center. I'm not a huge car freak but I think it was still cool. Here is some pictures from there.

Halloween in Shibuya

After the car show we went out to Shibuya since it is the most popular place to celebrate Halloween in Tokyo. The amount of people there was really insane. We went to a pub called The hub which is famous among foreigners and Japanese who want to meet them. It was nice and quiet around six but filled up a few hours later to an absurd point where it was almost impossible to move around. The train rides back were even more packed with absolutely no personal space.