The Toyoaki Foundation in commemoration of the late Akiji Nishikawa, who was born in Toyohashi and supported Sakichi Toyota in the eraly 20th Century, chose Prof. Aono as one of the recipients of research fund of this year. The ceremony was conducted at Toyota Techno-Museum in Nagoya (photo). We are very grateful to their heartful support for our research activities.

At last, our Anchor-Flood algorhtm has achieved World No.1 Running Time with “Anatomy” ontology alignment in OAEI2008 held in ISWC2008 in Germany. It is outstanding achievement that dotoral student who is attending international conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, has got No.1 running time among all the participants in OAEI2008 (OAEI stands for Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative) in Anatomy track.

We are proud to announce that as of October 16th, the journal paper titled “3D Shape Retrieval Using Manifold Ranking” has been published in IPSJ Journal, Volume 49, No.10. It is utterly amazing that we have seen the third journal paper this year publised. If the paper is written by someone who is currently in doctoral course, there is no wonder. However, what makes us surprising is that all three journal papers publised this year are from our alumni who got only ME degrees. I really hope these sequential efforts do make other students of our laboratory stimulate/inspire in seeking further investigation of the academic field of their interests. I could not resist my temptation to weep for joy.

After two years breaks, we invited National College students for summer interns. This year we had two guest students from Toyama National College of Maritime Technology and Ishikawa National College of Technology. It lasted only for a week, but they were very efficient to implement fundamental methods for 3D shape retrieval with Java programming language. This is why I had to add an extra material of Web application GUI interface with Tomcat (version 6.0.18). I wish this experience will brighten their spirits.