The international open-access academic journal “Journal of Digital Life” hosted its first full-scale conference, “The Conference of Digital Life vol.1,” on September 16 in Fukuoka City at Kyushu Sangyo University. During the short pitch competition “Digital INSPIRE” held on that day, Mr. Shinobu Yamamoto, a first-year doctoral student at Hosei University Graduate School, was awarded the top prize, “Sankei Digital Prize”.
“Digital INSPIRE” is a competition designed to spark innovation and create new collaborative research and business opportunities. In this competition, presenters have five minutes to express their ideas and the support they seek to an audience both in-person and online. Mr. Yamamoto advocated for the use of “point cloud data,” a type of big data that constructs real terrains and cities on computers, which he believes could serve as the infrastructure for Smart Cities optimizing urban infrastructure and the highly integrated real and virtual worlds of Society 5.0.
Regarding Mr. Yamamoto’s presentation, the judges—including Professor Noboru Sonehara from Chulalongkorn University, Science Faculty, and Mr. Tatsushi Doi, CEO of Sankei Digital—commented that “the message was very clear” and “the content matches the upcoming evolution of AI,” leading all the judges to highly recommend him for the “Sankei Digital Prize”.
The short pitch competition also featured presentations by Tomohiro Tashiro from Kyushu Sangyo University (“About the Relationship between Non-Cognitive Skills (Grit) and Biometric Data in College Students”), Takayuki Yamada from Cross Sensing Co., Ltd. (“The Revolution of Performance Measurement and Analysis in Sports Athletes – The xG-1 Opens up Data Analytics”), Hayato Sasaki of the University of Tokyo Graduate School and Hiroshi Akashi of Kyoto University Graduate School (“Faculty Lab: An Online Community Supporting Career and Teaching Skills for Graduate Students”), and Tomoyuki Sugiura from EcoCentre Japan Co., Ltd. (“Plastic AI Robots: The Future Platform Thinking About the Environment”), which attracted considerable attention from many attendees, although not winning any awards.
■Journal of Digital Life
https://journal-digitallife.com
■Introducing cutting-edge academic information clearly in the context of social trends
https://www.iza.ne.jp/digital-life/