Happy New Year, my friends! I wish you good health and prosperity in 2012. Please continue visiting my blog and sharing your constructive comments. I greatly enjoy them.

I know some of you might have been thinking that I have abandoned this blog. No, I haven’t. My absence from the blogosphere was due to several important reasons.

I have been very busy with PhD defense presentations (I had to do 4 presentations), thesis write-up, and searching for a post-doctoral position.

I did not want want to go back home as soon as possible. I am of the view that doing a postdoc in Japan would help me to gain new technical and research skills, extend my PhD research to new areas, gain expertise in a completely new areas, and develop many professional links with both the academia and industry, which would come in handy when I go back home.

I am glad to report that I honorably fufilled all the requirements prescribed by Tokyo Tech for the award of the PhD degree. My graduation ceremony took place on 26 September, 2011 at Tokyo Tech‘s Oookayama campus. Here are some shots from that memorable occasion:

Singing the Tokyo Tech song

With Dr. Dan Jingpei, my former lab mate, before the award of the degrees

With Dr. Adam Pedrcyz, my former lab mate, before the award of the degrees. There were three of us from Hirota Lab.

With my wife, Felistas. Thank you for your support and understanding more especially when I spent some nights in the lab doing experiments.

The Hirota Lab trio

Finally, this is how it looks.

My search for a postgraduate researcher position was also successful. I am now with Keio University, where I am doing postgraduate research under the Keio-MEBIOS program in the Ohtsuki Lab in the Department of Information and Computer Science at Yagami Campus .

Officially,  my position is called Specially Appointed Assistant Professor.  I am working on the development of Reservoir Computing based Event Detection and Localization algorithms in collaboration with Sumitomo Electric Company.