Professor Alexander Waibel (Director, interACT) of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) visited NAIST on December 12, 2017.

In 2012, NAIST became a member of the interACT Project*. Since then, NAIST has been actively engaged in student and faculty exchanges led by Professor Satoshi Nakamura (Graduate School of Information Science).

In this visit, Professor Waibel, Professor Nakamura and Junko Iwatsuki (DGE International Activities Coordinator) reviewed past activities, their results and possible developments, and this was then followed by discussions on expanding collaboration. This visit was a great opportunity to reaffirm NAIST’s active participation in the next consortium agreement and gain a deeper understanding of the consortium’s current goals and movements. Over the years, NAIST has sent and received approximately 25 students and faculty members (as of July 2017) with KIT. With the increase from its current eight consortium parties to a total of 10 in the near future, we are looking to having even more prosperous exchanges between the institutions for student exchange and research activities.

* interACT (the international center for Advanced Communication Technologies) program was established in 2004, initially to support collaborations between Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Since then, it has expanded to include eight leading research universities within the EU, US and Asian regions (as of December 2017), specifically in computer and information sciences (i.e. speech translation, robotics, language processing, and speech processing). The next development for the consortium is the further expansion of partners, 10 in total.