rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (06/11/91)
Richard D. Schlichting (rick@cs.arizona.edu)
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 86721, USA
[This report represents the personal opinion of the author, who was on
sabbatical in Japan from Dec. 1989 through July 1990. The sabbatical
was supported in part by grant INT-8910818 from the NSF U.S.-Japan
Cooperative Science Program.]
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I arrived at Nagoya Station from Kyoto a little after 9:00pm
and immediately took a taxi to my hotel, which turned out to be
a place that catered primarily used by traveling government employees.
I had a room on the top floor with a wonderful view of the
famous Nagoya castle, which was a quite spectacularly illuminated by
floodlights.
The next morning I was picked up by one of my hosts, Prof. Toshiku
Sakabe, who is an associate professor in the laboratory of Prof,
Yasuyoshi Inagaki. (Prof. Inagaki was out of the country at
the time.) We drove the 20 minutes or so to the campus on
the other side of town, making conversation as we went. Once
we arrived, we went directly to his office in one of the engineering
buildings. My other co-host was Prof. Tomio Hirata, who is also
an associate professor in the Inagaki lab. Interestingly enough,
however, his appointment is actually in a different department
(Information Engineering) than Sakabe's (Electrical Enginnering.)
They commented that this is actually not that unusual, and that
one problem with Japanese computer science is that the people
doing this type of research can be scattered throughout a
university.
Fairly soon after arriving, we went into the conference room for
an overview of the work underway in the lab. The basic flavor
of research is theoretical, and concentrated primarily on various
topics related to formal semantics. Three presentations were given
on the work. The first was on algebraic semantics and the complexity
of term rewriting systems, the second on modelling monitors using
Milner's CCS, and the third on extensions to non-monotonic logic to
solve the so-called "multiple extension problem." All three were
interesting, although because of my background, I was really only able
to follow the CCS work in any detail. In addition to myself and
Sakabe, the talks were attended by a goodly number of students.
Afterwards, I got into a very wide-ranging discussion with
Sakabe and his colleagues about the structural and funding differences
between U.S. and Japanese universities. For example, a typical
yearly budget from their university for one lab is on the order of
6 or 7 million yen (~$40,000 - $50,000), with a grant from the Ministry
of Education adding about an additional 5 million yen (~$35,000) per year.
Out of this comes travel, supplies, etc., but not salaries. We also
talked some about the "chair system", called the koza system in
Japanese, and about the equivalences of various ranks. According
to Sakabe, the standard progression is joshu (5 years), jokyoju
(10 years), and then kyoju until retirement at 60, 63 or 65, depending
on the university. The latter two are typically translated as
Associate Professor and Professor, respectively, although it's not
clear that those ranks are equivalent to the American ranks, especially
since there is an intermediate rank, junkyoju, that is sometimes
used as well. After some discussion, we left it with the speculation
that the most accurate equivalences might be the following:
joshu == postdoctoral fellow
jokyoju == assistant professor
junkyoju == associate professor
kyoju == professor
We also talked some about the way departmental financing is done in
the U.S. and about the grant system. One thing that amazed them
was the high percentage of grant funds that are taken out by the
university for overhead.
After lunch, I was given a tour of their lab's computational facilites.
There were a number of Suns of various varieties and configurations
(including some OEMed by Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Omcron), some Sony News
machines, some Macs and a few PC-class machines. Some of the machines
are in individual offices (for example, Sakabe had a Sun and a PC-class
machine), with the others in shared facilites. Nationwide network access
is somewhat limited at the current time, although there are plans to
upgrade soon.
Following a nice dinner, I spent the night at my hotel, returning
to Tokyo the next morning.
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Dr. Toshiki Sakabe
Associate Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
Nagoya University
Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku
Nagoya 464, Japan
Dr. Tomio Hirata
Associate Professor
Dept. of Information Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
Nagoya University
Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku
Nagoya 464, Japan