Computer Vision News - January 2017

code duplication. It’s very small and very efficient. It has less than a million lines of code, which is still a lot for one person, but it has similar functionalities to software with 5-6 million lines. Of all the technologies that do not exist today, what do you wish would be discovered soon? Faster computers - whether it’s quantum computing or optical computing. I have a saying that there is no such thing as too much computing power. If you give me a computer that is a billion-billion times faster than the top supercomputer that we have today, in a week I will be complaining that it’s too slow! [ we laugh ] Just a few years ago, I quietly celebrated the fact that a computer that I had just put together had exactly a million times more memory than my first computer’s 64 KB of RAM. Can you share with us a story that happened while working in Japan? I guess one of the funny stories was that I was shocked at how prevalent smoking is in Japan. My friend and I would walk around and carry a little fan. I made a very powerful fan so in a restaurant when people were smoking and blowing the smoke toward us, I would put the fan down and kind of blow it back to them. It was funny to watch their reactions… [ laughs ] I loved living in Japan. I had a couple of motorcycles, so I never had to put up with the trains which, as you know, are a nightmare: they have people push you in the train, they literally squeeze you in. I was lucky enough to avoid that. I guess another story would be that they paid overtime pretty well at SEGA in Tokyo. I went crazy. I loved the job. I was a total nerd and at some point, I had like 150 hours of overtime a month. My boss came to me and said I work too much. I was told by my Japanese boss that I work too much... Now that you know that culture better than many people, which aspect of Japanese culture do you think the West could learn from the most? What I admired the most is their dedication to work and having pride in getting a job done well. That whole culture is based on that, and this is what brought them out from practically nothing after World War II into one of the top superpowers in the world. What do you think is the source of that kind of dedication? I think it’s deeply based in their belief in honor. Honor is also doing the best you can in whatever you do. You see people in Tokyo who drive around a van carrying bakery products. They wear this headband that shows: “ Look at me, I’m working. I’m being honorable ”. I appreciate that because I’m kind of like that. If I don’t do the best that I possibly can with EQUINOX, my robot, or anything, I just don’t feel good about releasing it. The other thing is the honesty. You just don’t see it pretty much anywhere else. In Japan, they raise kids to be so honest that if you lose your wallet on a train, people will pick it up and return it to a lost and found. You can leave cash on a train, and they will return it. Do people tell lies there? Not so much - They have kind of a different take on that. You have to be careful though because saving face and honor can be more important than truth sometimes. If you ask someone for directions, and they don’t know where the place is, they will just point somewhere because they don’t want to look like they don’t know! [ laughs ] 8 Computer Vision News Guest Guest