Data Mining’s Paradise
Liu Shan, 2nd grade, Master program
Iwaihara Lab is a passionate place with strong academic atmosphere. Our research area involves data mining on social network service (SNS), like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia. We mainly focus on text mining, including micro-blogs, product labels and advertisement, and user patterns. We usually use machine learning’s methods, like logistic regression, SVM, LDA, deep learning etc, which are very popular in recent years. We are looking for the most effective method to solve problems and also interested in trying new methods. Everyone’s research subject is also different. Some of us are doing text summarization, entity linking, topic extraction, key phrase extraction, and advertisement detection etc. We ahve rigorous attitude for the researches in which we can learn more. There are also many online competitions that are suitable for us, like Kaggle, Ali, which help us to obtain current knowledge quickly.
Professor Iwaihara is a really nice tutor. The research directions are basically chosen by ourselves. When we feel confused, professor usually directs a bright way for us. Also the members in the laboratory are enthusiastic. Currently, there are 14 members including 3 Ph.D candidates and 11 master course students. Members of our laboratory came from different countries, so both English and Japanese are freely used in communication. We discuss difficult problems together, help each other. We have seminars twice a week, and we present our research progress or present latest papers. Then Professor makes comments and we communicate about it. The academic atmosphere is strong, and even after the seminar, we’ll communicate the details for a long time. While there is a suitable conference for us, Professor will encourage us to present work. Also, Professor will introduce the latest research papers or slides to us.
Every year in September, our laboratory has a seminar trip. Last time, we went to Hiroshima for two days, where we spent a happy time. During this trip, Professor introduced us the Japanese culture, and guided us to the local famous view spots and restaurants. The relationship among students is also very harmonious. We became good friends here, and we usually hold parties while we all free, and find a near place for a short trip. When there are new students entered our laboratory, we’ll hold a welcome party. Sometimes, we have BBQ on the beach, which normally last for one day.
As long as you are interested in our laboratory, want to learn frontier knowledge of data engineering, or machine learning, look for a “home” atmosphere laboratory, please don’t hesitate to join us!
