Japan Trip 2023 Part IV: back to Tokyo and the ICIAM conference

It was then back to Tokyo on the fast train. We had a few days of shopping. I bought a yukata and found the gin that the Kyoto bartender had recommended at the Global Gin Gallery (it makes me happy just to say that name). The owner there also recommended the same one, and also The Herbalist Yaso Gin, which I also bought. I will try and resurrect my Gin Friends group (that lost momentum during COVID) and get them together for a tasting party. 

The hotel we were staying at (the Richmond, in the Mejiro district) provided breakfast, with food delivered by a robot. My friend with children says this is old news, but it was our first time and kind of interesting. 

Then my wife went back home and I stayed on for the meeting.The conference was ICIAM (International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics), the major conference in the field, held every four years. I call it the "Olympics of Applied Math" (but no-one else does). I attended a number of machine learning sessions as I want to learn more of the field. The most interesting one was by Rachel Ward, who was exploring the behaviour of stochastic gradient descent with variable steps sizes and "momentum". These are the ingredients in some of the most successful training algorithms for deep learning systems, but are not well understood. I also enjoyed the prize lectures of Weinan E and Leslie Greengard. I spoke in a session on Lithium Ion battery modelling, which had a number of interesting talks. Overall, it was worth going, but I probably will not attend another big meeting. They are more useful when you are trying to make contacts early in your career, not so useful at my stage. 

Some last notes about Japan:

• my feet are too big for the stairs there, had to be pretty careful
• there are few public garbage cans, so you end up carrying your garbage around with you most of the day
• August is not the best time to visit, it is very hot and humid. I had mild heat stroke a couple of times
• the train system is amazing: fast, frequent, comfortable (but not cheap, the tourist rail pass really pays off). 
• Seven Eleven there has also sorts of interesting things. I liked these triangular rice things covered in seaweed