Several of the group members commented that they appreciated the opportunity to spend time talking to me, and also listening over my shoulder while their colleagues described their own research work. In fact, they felt that such interactions were very uncommon. This was extremely surprising to me, as typically Japanese, the group works in a large airy room with modest partitions between desks, and I expected that very free interchange would be the rule rather than the exception. I was told that there is plenty of joint work, but very little free time for researchers who are not working directly together on a project to sit around and talk about their work informally. An internal seminar was started last year, but hasn't succeeded too well.
Work hours are for working.
I remarked that I didn't find it troublesome to have seminars late in the day, and that to a large extent lack of time to talk to colleagues was self imposed. While there was general agreement, the scientists also felt that seminar times were symbolic, and the atmosphere discouraged the kind of cross-group interaction that is typical at Western research labs or at universities. The neural net group is mostly doing algorithm development and simulation of different learning models. Some of this is clearly motivated by the parallel work on the optical neural chip described above. The focus of this work has been to try and solve the performance degregation problem that is usually associated with weight quantization.