EVENT

Thursday, 13 March, 2025, 16:00-18:00

The Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), established in June 2020, is an international initiative for the responsible development and use of AI based on the concept of “human-centered.” The GPAI has several working groups, one of which discusses the “Future of Work.” As part of this group’s project, an international interview survey is being conducted around the world to find out how our work will change as AI is introduced into the workplace. One of the unique methods of this survey is that the students who will be responsible for the future are interviewing companies and organizations.
At this event, following the survey report last year, we will introduce an overview of the survey conducted this year. Inviting students and faculty members who joined in this year’s project to share their observations on the “future of work” through the survey, we also discuss the possibilities and challenges of its methodological aspects. We would like to discuss future developments of the survey with companies, organizations, and students who are interested in this work.

Monday, 17 March 2025, 3:00 - 4:30 pm (Doors open: 2:00 pm)

Today, digital networks provide us with an abundance of information. We invest more than ever in education and science. Despite these achievements our mental, socio-economic and political conditions have not improved. They seem to be even deteriorating. Why? What is going wrong? What can we do better? What can the first information revolution 600 years ago teach us? Two leading Japanese scholars in the field of media and AI governance will discuss these questions with Yuval Harari, the world-famous thinker and best-selling author, who explores the risks and opportunities of the information age in his new book Nexus.

Wednesday, 19 March 2025, 12:00-13:00 JST

At the University of Tokyo, a webinar was held on December 11, 2024 and January 15, 2025, to explain the EU AI Act and the first draft of the CoP. In this webinar, we will provide an overview of the third draft released at the end of February and highlight important points that Japanese companies should particularly pay attention to.

Friday, 4 April, 13:00–14:30 JST

In this richly-illustrated lecture, I discuss two collaborative partnerships in which I have been involved with historically marginalized, Indigenous communities in both the Himalayan region and in Native North America who are working to preserve and revitalize their languages. Through the presentation, I explore these three words: Collect, Protect, Connect.

Wednesday, April 9, 2025 JST 15:00-16:30 JST

Despite the enthusiasm they generate, it is difficult to satisfactorily identify what humanoid robots could do that a human or a non-humanoid robot could not do better and more cheaply, and this observation constitutes a major challenge for the philosopher. Using the example of Sophia, the first humanoid robot to be granted citizenship in 2017, I will suggest that these strange machines occupy a sensitive place in our societies by taking on the role of messianic machines (machines that announce the coming of other machines), metaphysical machines (machines that force us to ask fundamental metaphysical questions such as knowing who is human or who is alive) and conjuring machines (machines that help to fight against the fear of dangerous machines).

Wednesday, 16 April, 10:00–11:30 JST

The “Black Death” refers to the peak of the second plague pandemic, which spread across Europe from 1347. It remains the greatest demographic catastrophe in history. Today, interdisciplinary research—combining funerary archaeology, anthropology, microbiology, and environmental sciences—has transformed our approaches to it. Advances from DNA analysis to climate studies have contributed to a new understanding. Yet, the challenge remains: how to write a global history of a long-term event on a global scale? Though its precise geography is unclear, the plague’s routes trace the lines of force of connected worlds, mapping out a space that is discontinuous and global, like an archipelago.

Thursday, 8 May, 10:30–12:00 JST

World literature has been a reality since at least the nineteenth century. Texts travel across continents and cultures, translated from every language, taught in universities worldwide, and forming an emerging global canon. Never before have we been so free to read whatever we wish, from anywhere. Or so it seems. But is this true freedom, or merely a comforting illusion? What are the boundaries of this seemingly limitless literary exchange? This talk aims to explore those limits and propose a new approach to literature—a different way of reading texts, one that is either entirely new or, perhaps, simply old and forgotten. Welcome to the world library!

Tuesday, 18 July 2023, 16:00-17:00 JST

In this talk, Prof. IMAI Mutsumi discusses how language, culture, perception, and cognition interact with one another across different domains, speculating how cultural identity might emerge though this process.

Tuesday, 11 July 2023, 15:00-16:30 JST

That we face a massive environmental crisis is widely accepted, but most people will agree that little has been done to avert it. To the extent that a solution is mooted, it is almost always techno-scientific in nature. In this lecture I suggest limitations of techno-scientific knowledge: first, in offering a belated understanding of the crisis; and, second, in vitiating non-scientific discussions and solutions.

Monday, 3 July 2023, 3:00-4:30 pm

Songbirds use learned vocal signals to communicate information about their species, their identity, and even their emotional state. We study how the songbird brain decodes this information to allow songbirds to use song for recognition, mate selection, and forming long-lasting social bonds. By doing so, we gain broad insight into the neural basis of vocal communication across animal species, including in humans.

Thursday, 29 June 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

The world is on the brink of genuinely fundamental reform of the century-old arrangements for taxing multinationals. The aims are to reduce the scope for tax avoidance by companies and put a brake on international tax competition between governments. But what exactly will change? And will the proposed reforms achieve their objectives?

Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 9:00 am - 10:00 am (JST)

By framing the Economic Partnership Agreement as a form of language policy, Dr. OTOMO Ruriko demonstrates that the trade policy represents contemporary language issues that have important consequences for language (education) policies and for discourses about the state, language, migration, and healthcare.

Friday, 16 June 2023, 4:00 pm -5:30 pm

This lecture will present a neural model of two of humans’ most fundamental cognitive feats, i.e., the ability to interpret linguistic instructions in order to perform novel tasks with no training, and the ability to describe solutions to new tasks with full sentences.

Tuesday, 13 June 2023, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Climate change, industrial development, and population growth continuously increase the need for freshwater worldwide. Unconventional wastewater and saline sources must be tapped to reduce the stress on natural resources. However, producing freshwater from unconventional streams requires significantly more energy than traditional ways. While energy needs will always be high, innovative methods will rely on renewable energy, reduce the process complexity, and increase the socio-economic feasibility of desalination. This lecture discusses challenges and opportunities of these methods and the water-energy nexus.

Monday, 5 June 2023, 5:00 - 7:00pm JST

Plastic is essential for so many of the things we value in today’s world. But excessive and unplanned use of plastic worsens the conditions driving climate change and threatens the land, the seas and the lives of animals and humans.

Speakers on this panel will highlight issues including the chemical challenges plastic poses for the environment; the lives of waste-pickers who minimize the harm caused by discarded plastic; the science and economics confronting small-scale, local reuse of plastic; government mechanisms to coordinate the containment of plastic; and the dangers to animals and humans of micro-plastics in diverse forms.

Friday, 2 June 2023, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm JST

The Anthropocene—the geological era dominated by human activities—is often associated with the climate change, ecological crisis, the sixth extinction, etc., or in brief, with an apocalyptic end. The recent acceleration of digital technology added more strength to the eschatological imagination which underlines the philosophy of history in the past centuries. In this sense, the Anthropocene is posed as a problem of modernity and it consequently calls for a new movement of overcoming modernity, which we can identify with the recent efforts of anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Bruno Latour among others, who want to undo the modern concept of nature. This talk will address this impasse of modernity and introduce what I call technodiversity as a response.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 4:00-5:30PM

The use of language in public space is an important indicator of identity, which shows how languages are valued in a given community in both practical and symbolic manners. In this workshop, we will explore how identity is visually manifested in the physical and digital landscapes through the examination of the language of public signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, and so on.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 3:00 - 4:00 pm (JST)

This talk deals with two interrelated phenomena in Japanese writing practices: (1) the integration of loanwords and (2) the romanization of Japanese vocabulary. I will argue that the two phenomena are in fact complementary, resulting in a high degree of hybridity between what is native and what is foreign.

Thursday, 25 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

International human rights law guarantees a ‘right to participate in and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications’. The lecture will explain why the so-called ‘right to science’ has largely stayed inactive, and what its recently-rekindled participatory dimension implies for its right-holders and duty-bearers. It proposes to interpret the right to science as a public good to help revise the predominant approach to science as an individual, ahistorical and acultural enterprise, and reverse the trend towards its privatization and commodification.