Testimonial Essay _  Yusuke Kojima from Tokyo Institute of Technology

I wanted to study abroad to make an opportunity to speak English and to communicate with non-Japanese people. This was the first time of my studying abroad, so it was good that a period was about one-month and that the country I studied abroad is close to Japan. In addition to that, I like watching soccer and one of my favorite soccer players is Son Heung-min. That was the reason why I chose KAIST CAMPUS Asia.

What is the program about?  What did you learn from the program?

I’m glad that I took part in the program. I mainly learned two things at KAIST.

The first one is how to do Face Recognition by programing. Main theme of my research is Periocular and Face Recognition through Transfer Learning. Periocular is around eyes, and transfer Learning is a technique in machine learning that focuses on storing knowledge gained while solving one problem and applying it to a different but related problem. Generally, it is difficult to make good model if dataset is small because computer can’t learn general knowledge and can learn only biased knowledge. Transfer learning can solve that problem, so transfer learning is important. In my research, I applied a pre-learned model that learned image recognition through one million images (big dataset) to my task, face and periocular recognition. This is overview of my research.

I learned how to implement the technique by doing programing. Lab members taught what I don’t understand regarding the idea of transfer learning and coding. Thanks to them, I was able to understand an essence of my research and proceed.

The second one is differences in culture. I got along with Muslim who came from Indonesia as an intern student. Muslim can’t eat All products from pork. I felt it in myself when we eat something. That was one of my experiences that I hard to experience, so that was valuable for me.

What did you like most about the program?

I could get involved in interesting project. That was what I like most about the program. There were various kind of interesting projects that doesn’t exist in Tokyo Tech. In addition to that, lab members are familiar with CS and have great experience like working with Microsoft. It was a very valuable experience to learn programing through that project.

How do you think your experience in this program will affect your future studies and career?

I learned how to make good model to recognize images, what I wanted to learn in the program. Indeed, there are possibilities to change my interest, but I want to become more familiar with this field after returning Japan because the experience at my lab was so intersting. I haven’t thought that before taking part in the program.