I was invited to Yonezawa for the conference above (program). I came to Yonezawa last week as well, and such frequent trip to Yonezawa is rare. This time, the event was hosted by GMAP center headed by Prof. Ito who is famous for polymer processing, and by LPIC headed by Prof. Furukawa who is well-known for 3D printing of polymers. They have had huge fundings, and owing to such financial situations they have organized the series of conferences in these years. To me, the event was real international one, in a sense that there were many researchers participated from outside. (In some cases, international conferences in Japan are not really internationalized. For example, I saw a situation in which all the people in the room were Japanese, even though they were supposed to speak in English ;-> )
The city was fully covered with snow as shown in the photo above, just as of the last week, although the weather was not that freezing.
The conference was for 2days from Jan 27th to 28th. But I had the class for polymer physics in 27th morning, I could not attend the sessions in Day1. Skipping sessions in conferences is not a correct way, in particular if you are paid. But I have to put my priority to the class rather than the conference outside. After the class I rushed into subway and take trains to attend the banquet, which is important for networking. (Even more important than the sessions, sometimes.)
Day2 morning I made my talk which was for 1 hour. As I mentioned earlier, 1 hour talk is difficult in general to hold attention from the attendee. Actually, I think I did not fully succeeded, in particular for the later half of my talk dedicated to some detailed discussions for extensional rheology. But I think it succeeded at least partly, because some foreign professors who do not make rheology made questions after the talk.
A good thing for me was to see Prof. Atarashi, Okayama University, who graduated from Prof. Keiji Tanaka’s laboraotry, and who is a friend of Prof. Amamoto. He told me that he is interested in my blog-posts(!) That is a sort of happy pressure to me, and I should make more posts on funny stories on rheology…
(As usual) I appreciate the kind invitation from the organizers.