2016 8th Monthly Tutorial

The 8th monthly tutorial was held at Komaba Research Campus, the University of Tokyo, on January 15th. In total, 32 people participated the tutorial.

We invited a guest speaker from SLUSH TOKYO, an event that celebrates and supports entrepreneurship, so that students could get an idea of starting a new business. After the explanation of the event followed the introduction of the actual startup community “DRONE BIRD” lead by Professor Taichi Furuhashi of Aoyamagakuin University. He also demonstrated the use of “GitHub”, a repository that is useful for managing projects’ final artifacts. In the end, faculties and students discussed and prepared for the final research presentation scheduled on February.

First, we had Yurika Tanikawa, student volunteer leader of SLUSH TOKYO, introduce the event “SLUSH TOKYO” which would be held from March 29th (WED) to 30th(THUR), 2017. She explained last year’s event “SLUSH ASIA” and spoke about 3 values that the festival emphasizes: (1) Global from Day One, (2) An Open, Inclusive Community and (3) Celebrating Entrepreneurship. The introduction became good opportunity for G-SPASE participants to enhance their motivation of giving back their research results to the society.

Second, Professor Taichi Furuhashi of Aoyamagakuin University lectured on the startup community “DRONE BIRD: Disaster Rescue Drones”. The purpose of DRONE BIRD is to realize crisis mapping in times of disasters by having citizens input damage information on the internet real-time. The group’s goal is to gather 1,000 crisis mappers and 100 UAV pilots. Professor Furuhashi shared stories about the flight experiment in Yamato City/Kanagawa prefecture, collaboration with sponsor companies, optimizations of regulations and business models of the activity. The Q&A session heated up on the topic regarding rival teams, regulations in foreign countries, suitable timing of starting new business and custom clearance of UAVs.

G-SPASE’s annual meeting of the fiscal year 2016 is scheduled on February 23rd. We are excited to announce our achievement.

Q&A

Project Discussion 1

Project Discussion 2