[:en]2019 Mei Fukuda[:]

[:en]Mei Fukuda
Hometown in Japan: Saitama
University in Japan: Tokyo Institute of Technology
Major & School Year: Mathematical and Computing Science, B3: Junior
Host Advisor: Prof. Akane Sano, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Host Lab: Computational Wellbeing Group

Research Poster (PDF): “Predicting Medical Professionals’ Wellbeing Using Wearable and Survey Data”

Why TOMODACHI STEM @ Rice University?
I am excited to participate in this program because I am considering to study, research, and work abroad in the future. I have spent a lot of time studying  English. However, I found that I have not had much experience to speak in English, especially technical and specialized conversations. I was introduced to the TOMODACHI STEM @ Rice University program by some former teachers who have supported me in past programs. I thought that this program will definitely be a good fit for me and my future goals.

Through this program, I would like to learn as much as possible about research methods and ideas. I am sure that my research experience in U.S., the country at the forefront of computer science, will be indispensable for my future and I will be able to apply this experience to my future studies in Japan upon my return home. I am also excited to build relationships with people at Rice and my other participants. Moreover, I think understanding the cultures of foreign countries is quite important to be a person who can show leadership in the world. Therefore, I am really looking forward to visit Texas and communicating with local people.

Goals

  • Learn how researchers work, think, and communicate with colleagues in America
  • Enhance my specialized knowledge in English
  • Make excellent female friends from Japan and build connections with top-level researchers and students
  • Find other aspects of American culture beyond what I have known
  • Enjoy all the experiences in the U.S.

Excerpts from Mei’s Weekly Reports

Week 01: Arrival in the U.S.

This is my second time visiting U.S. and first time in Houston! I was simply surprised by its weather; I expected warm and nice weather in Houston but it is freezing cold. I could not wear the short-sleeved T-shirts that I brought from Japan this week.

Wall art encouraging to vote for Beto O’Rourke ~ Mei Fukuda

The day after we arrived in Texas we had a Houston Mural Tour. I really like photography so I was happy to be able to see a lot of cute street art. Here is my favorite one. Beto is a Texan politician who also known as Obama 2.0. In Japan, we can hardly see such political art, so it was interesting for me.

 

 

Some things I learned about Texas this week are

  1. “y’all”: this means “you all”, in the South.
  2. “the size of Texas” and everything is big.
  3. The lunchbox provided at first day was too big to eat for one meal. I also saw big pencils being sold in gift shop.

ML Lunch talk with Pizza! ~ Mei Fukuda

At Rice University, during lunch on my second day in the lab I attended the Machine Learning (ML) Lunch. This is held every Wednesday, and researchers talk about how their research relates to machine learning while eating pizza. This week, Chris Tunnell, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, gave a presentation on how machine learning helps research about Dark Matter. Many students attended and though lecture was little difficult for me, it was so interesting. I got a little jealous of this type of lunch event and would like my home university also to start something like this because students can study even while eating lunch. The pizza was also delicious! I have already been looking forward to the ML lunch next week.

Friday was Go Texan Day, the kickoff of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. I saw some people wearing Western attire. Even some dogs were wearing cowboy hats. It made me realize that I am in Texas now. On Saturday, we visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The exhibition on the petroleum gas industry was unique to Houston and so interesting for me as we cannot see this in Japan. There were also some attractions to learn about the process of oil drilling. Furthermore, Kyoko gave us a tour of the fossil and dinosaur exhibition. I got a lot information of creatures and finally we were allowed to enter the laboratory in the museum. I had an even more wonderful experience than I expected.

Overall throughout this week, I could enjoy both research and cultural experiences. I am so excited to have more 3 weeks in Houston.

Initial Reflections on Intercultural Experiences in the U.S.
After learning more about Core Values of both Japan and U.S., I can see how having High ‘Emotional Resilience’ is feature of Japan. We, Japanese, tend to believe that not expressing emotions directly is a virtue; 美徳. I like this culture but the U.S. culture of ‘Speaking-Up’ also looks easier and more comfortable. When I am in a foreign country, I feel comfortable to communicate with others. People express their emotions directly; being happy, sad, speaking loudly when angry, using their body to express. I always feel that it is allowed, I am free.

I think that to adjust to foreign cultures, values are significant for my personal goal. The American efficient-first thinking is really important for conducting research, proceeding in business, and creating new ideas earlier than others. Both in academic institutions and startups, we have to consider “speed”. We have to defeat others. The Japanese culture has a lot of great aspects that I love, but some of them don’t fit with the current era. Therfore, I will continue to learn about and experience other cultures and try to bring and mix them to home country / environment.

Question of the Week
Why do Americans set the temperature on the AC so low? The student room is so cold that I cannot take off my jacket and no one complains about that.

Preparing for Research & First Few Days in the Lab

With Prof. Akane Sano and my mentor Cheng ~ Mei Fukuda

I am working in Prof. Akane Sano’s laboratory whose research focuses on data analytics and application development for health and wellbeing. My mentor is Cheng, a first year Ph.D. student.

Before coming to U.S., I was told to get used to Python (one of the programming languages) so I focused on this to prepare for my research.

 

My research project is analyzing physical data from Fitbits, a wearable device that tracks activity such as heartrate, the number of steps, calories, and survey responses like the scales how you feel right now. We will use this feature to measure the saddnes/happiness of medical professionals. The aim of this project is to detect relationships between features and answers of questionnaire. Also, similarities and/or differences between this project and previous research using college student data would like to be discovered as well. Therefore, during the first week, I downloaded the Fitbit data using an API and read a paper on prior research conducted in the MIT Media Lab. I was struggling with building the environment and running a code to take them, but it was fun for me. I have been getting familiar with the new application this week.

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Week 02: First Week at Research Host Lab

This week, I have started my data analysis research in earnest. My mentor has a desk next to me so I can speak to him whenever I would like to ask questions. Though I still have some difficulty explaining what I am uncertain about my research in English, he always answers kindly. After the past week, I have realized that universities in U.S. have a great deal of diversity. I have met so many people from abroad at Rice University that it is difficult to find people who are originally from America. Therefore, I feel comfortable even though my English skills are not perfect. I learned that the important thing to conduct research abroad is not your language skill, but an enthusiasm, curiosity, and positiveness for your field.

As for my daily routine in lab, I got to my office at around 10a.m. then open my MacBook and start to write Python scripts for analyzing data. For lunch, I typically eat a sandwich that I brought from home and continue coding in the afternoon; returning home around 4p.m. Every Thursday we have a group meeting and some members of the lab present about their research or what they are studying. I am supposed to make my own presentation next week! It seems like it will be so hard but it will be good preparation for the poster session during our final week in Houston.

Outside of laboratory, I have literally enjoyed tons of activities at Rice and in Houston. Monday evening we visited the Asia Society Texas Center to attend an event about Dr. Shibata, the PARO developer, who is also a teacher at Tokyo Tech. I have really been interested in mental health problems and using computer technology to develop solutions so it was exciting for me to talk with him. Moreover, on Friday Prof. Akane Sano, my host, gave us a seminar about her research field and career opportunities. I feel like this week’s schedule was made especially for me! 🙂

Free pies at Duncan Hall; a building at Rice where my laboratory is in ~ Mei Fukuda

I also attended a Pi Day event organized by Rice University Association for Women in Math and enjoyed free pie! I cannot get free pie at my home university. I also joined the Rice Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Mentorship Coffee and Cookie Chat this week. I was surprised there are so many student activities at Rice. Even the campus coffeehouse and bars are run by students.

 

This weekend, I went to the Houston Premium Outlets and had a wonderful shopping time and also enjoyed shopping at the supermarket as well. I now feel totally refreshed.

We all enjoyed Premium Outlets! ~ Mei Fukuda

Cheese in Houston is various, delicious and cheap! ~ Mei Fukuda

Research Project Update 
As I mentioned in last week’s report, my research project is analyzing physical data to learn more about relationship between these features and a happiness scale. This week I worked hard on writing programs to calculate their correlation coefficient and some indexes using application and programing languages called Jupyter Notebook and Python. My only research equipment is my MacBook.

I like coding and the things I did this week were fun for me. However, I couldn’t get as good of values as I had expected. Consequently, I didn’t know how I should wrap up my project. I talked with Prof. Sano and she advised that I should change the way to calculate correlation using a method called “linear mixed effect model”. I’ll continue to work on this and hopefully solve this issue by next week through more discussions with my professor and mentor.

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Week 03: Interview With a Female Researchers

Interview with Student
A student that I met at the Japanese Language Table kindly accepted to be interviewed by me. She is a freshman undergraduate (B1) majoring in math and physics at Rice. Since I am also studying mathematics (with a focus computer science) and I have thought that there must be just a few female students in the mathematics field, I was curious to learn more about her experience.

She said she chose Rice not only because of the great academic STEM programs here but also for the culture. Students at Rice care about and help each other pursue their passions. Although she has not had research experiences yet, she really wants to do research during college and after she graduates. She is also planning to a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program this summer at a different university. She is very interested in discovering new things about math and physics, especially fields like multi-dimensional calculus and mechanical physics. She told me that at Rice there are international students and female students in the mathematics program but at her high school she was the only girl in the advanced math classes.

I simply admire her interests and the passion she shared with me. At the same time, I sympathized with her high school’s situation. When I entered my university, I learned that there are only 9 female freshmen in a department that has 191 students. I was shocked and it was so hard to adjust to the new environment at the beginning. Still now, my laboratory at home university has only one female student (me!). Before applying for this program, I learned that over 30% computer science majors are women at Rice which made me so jealous.

She thinks the what we need to work on is making women feel comfortable in their workplaces. I totally agree with her opinion. Though I don’t want women in STEM to get some “super special treatments”, there needs to be campaigns/societies for women. Diversity is really significant for every field and I would like more women to become interested in STEM and not give up their dreams only because they are in the minority.

What’s more, she will come to Japan this summer so she is excited to see the culture and what education and work is like in different countries. I am looking forward to welcoming her in Japan. I was so glad to be able to share thoughts each other beyond the border. We wished each other the best luck for our futures. I definitely had a wonderful interview with her!

Interview with Professor
I asked my host professor, Prof. Akane Sano, to talk about her career experiences and opinions. Though we got a seminar about her experiences and career path on the Friday of last week, I really enjoyed talking more one-on-one with her about a non-technical conversation.

She is from Tokyo and got a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Keio University in Japan. After she graduated, she worked at SONY, a Japanese company. She has been interested in “human”, especially mental health, because human mind is very complicated. Before she applied to Keio University, she also wanted to be a doctor. I the end, she entered a department where she could study biology and chemistry and she realized that she is interested in computer and mechanical fields. She then chose to conduct research about biomedical engineering. After some years had passed working in the company, she decided to apply for a Ph.D. in the affective computing group at the MIT Media Lab. Now she is working as an assistant professor here, at Rice.

As for the women in STEM, we talked a lot about our situations, opinions, and what we should do and keep in mind. She said she had heard that there are some papers about the differences of evaluation between men and women; if both did the same things, women were often evaluated less than men. There is also a problem about the way we express what we have accomplished. I learned that I should acquire the skills of expression myself. I would like to go after my passion as a woman in STEM and enjoy even the difficulties. I think it’s a perk of being a woman!

We also talked about other interesting things a lot. For example, because she has no experience in academia in Japan, she was curious to know what the situation is in Japan. She has heard that the paperwork culture in Japan is awful. Of course, I am really interested in studying and working abroad in the future, but I also would like to stay in Japan and contribute to improving Japanese environment. Accumulating experiences abroad, I would like to apply my knowledge to make STEM fields in Japan better.

It was so nice to be talking with her deeply, and I am honored to be a member of her laboratory! Thank you for your time and valuable opinions!

Other Activities
On Tuesday, we totally enjoyed the Houston Rodeo Show! Before the show started, I ate a Turkey Leg and a Fried Mac ’n Cheese. It was delicious and I was so happy. For me personally, taking photos of the Rodeo was most enjoyable. We watched both powerful and cute Rodeo games.After Rodeo Show, there was a concert by Camila Cabello. Everyone got excited and I had a blast! It was my first time to go to a concert abroad so it was very fresh and new to me.

Real Cowboy at Rodeo! ~ Mei Fukuda

Bareback Riding looked so dangerous ~ Mei Fukuda

Research Project Update
This week, I have started to sum up my project in preparation for making my poster. I also made a presentation about my project at group meeting on Thursday. Though it was not very good yet, it was good practice poster session next week! And it was the last laboratory meeting for me, so I took a group photo with my wonderful team members. This lab is relatively new, as it only started last summer, so this is the very first group photo!

Group Photo of Computational Wellbeing Group ~ Mei Fukuda

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Week 04: Research in the U.S. vs. Research in Japan

Finally, the last week in Houston has come! My last week in Texas started with short trip for Galveston. It was my first time to see Gulf of Mexico. I enjoyed walking beside the sea and eating seafood. I also visited Moody Gardens which duplicates rain forest. Ayaka knows a lot about plants and animals so when we were there she told me tons of information.

In front of Gulf of Mexico with Ayaka ~ Mei Fukuda

On Monday night, I went out in Downtown Houston in order to watch NBA game! The basketball game was so cool and I was surprised that there was a DJ and we could enjoy watching the game with fun music. And the Houston Rockets won the game!! So exciting!

Rockets Win! – NBA ~ Mei Fukuda

As for my research, this week I worked hard on making my poster and practicing my presentation with my friends. I wrote codes and took data right up until the very day the poster was due. I had a lot of discussions in person with my mentor and professor and they gave me good comments. They are so helpful and I cannot thank them enough. I really enjoyed doing research in my lab until the very last day, and I have done what I wanted to do.

On the day of poster session, before it started, I had a farewell ice cream with my host professor and members in my lab. It was so delicious but at the same time I was getting nervous about my upcoming presentation. However, once it started, I found that I enjoyed talking about my research with other people. Now I am confident about what I did at Rice and I am looking forward to conducting other research in Japan as well.

At final poster session ~ Mei Fukuda

 

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Final Research Poster Presentation

The title of my research project is “Predicting Medical Professionals’ Wellbeing Using Wearable and Survey Data” (PDF). My host lab was the Computational Wellbeing Group and I worked under the advisement of Prof. Akane Sano and my mentor is Cheng Wan, a Ph.D. student.

In my project, I attempted to detect relationship between humans’ wellbeing and their physiological data such as sleep duration, heart rate, steps taken, and so on. I then made a machine learning model to predict humans’ wellbeing. This time, I focused on the wellbeing of medical professionals who are especially required to remain alert and be accurate while working. Ultimately, we aim to develop technologies to support them. This was the preliminary project using pilot experimental data.

At first, I was supposed to simply analyze the data and compare it to a previous paper, but I told professor that I also would like to try making a machine learning model to predict wellbeing. She kindly accepted this idea and I managed to include the prediction methods into the final poster!

Sometimes I couldn’t get the expected result and I struggled with this. I realized the difficulty of data analysis and statistics through this research experience. I think that trying to change methods to analyze data is required as future research. I would like to compare this research field with one I am supposed to do at my home university after going back to Japan. What I did at Rice is difficult to do in Japan because it is a relatively new and interdisciplinary field. Then if I still want to do this field, I would like to apply for Ph.D. in the U.S. in the future. I am really grateful for such a valuable experience in Houston. Thank you all!

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Week 05: Final Week on the East Coast

Ice Cream at the Oldest Shop! ~ Mei Fukuda

Last week, we visited 3 cities; Philadelphia, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. In Philadelphia, I learned about U.S. history; we visited Independence Hall and other historical buildings. Also, there’s the oldest ice cream shop in America; Bassett’s Ice Cream in Reading Terminal Market and it was so delicious! Though it was short stay in Philly, I had a wonderful time!

We also visited and had some activities at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. The seminar that was the most fun for me was the Clifton Strengths Finder Assessment. During this seminar, we looked over our strengths report based on the Clifton Strengths and were able to better understand what our strengths were and how to express them. I am still learning about myself, but I would like to evaluate my strengths fully and make use of them properly. In addition, while were in DC all 10 of us did a kind of “compliment game” during our free time. I was so glad to hear some of the compliments from the wonderful friends I’ve made these past five weeks. I found that we have got to know each other so well and build strong relationships!

Group Photo at Factory ~ Mei Fukuda

Our final morning in Bethlehem, we visited Factory, an entrepreneurship incubator. The facilities were so fascinating and I thought I would like to work in such an environment in the future. We talked with the founder of Factory, Mr. Rich Thompson, a lot and my desire to be entrepreneur in the future was greatly encouraged by this visit. Finally, in Washington D.C., we visited some facilities, went sightseeing and prepared for our return home. I was so glad to meet and talk with one of the alumni of Tokyo Tech at the JAXA Washington D.C. office. I also enjoyed visiting the Smithsonian Museums and National Gallery of Art there.

Through this program, I found that I am very Japanese. Although I have had some experiences abroad, I strongly recognized this about myself this time. It was my longest trip abroad and I found tons of nice things in both U.S. and Japan. When I arrived at Narita Airport, I couldn’t believe that five weeks had passed so fast! I am already missing my friends, the nine other participants who always shared our thoughts with each other this past month. All the experiences on TOMODACHI Program were valuable, precious, and wonderful for me. My friends and relationships with researchers in U.S. became my treasure. I would like to make my future brighter than I can imagine now!

Last Sunset in U.S. – Thank you America! ~ Mei Fukuda

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Final Report

Through this wonderful five week program in U.S., this experience has made me completely grow up. Before coming to U.S., I set my personal goals for this program to learn about the research methods and ideas. Now I am confident about what I have learnt and done at Rice, and really looking forward to my future research experiences. My fellow participants became my best friends and it was so exciting to share our thoughts, dreams, and motivations with each other. I strongly recognized that it is not special to make the world our stage, not stay only in our local area, and it would benefit the world if we choose to live without abandoning our possibilities. This program surely made me realize that there are no limitations.

Through experiencing research in the global field, even though I had not yet had research experience in Japan, I became able to realize that the Japanese environment is not the only one, and then compare the U.S. and Japanese systems with a critical attitude. Moreover, this experience has enlarged my future options where I can perform at my full potential. From the application process of this program, I learned how to express myself. I have also learned a lot about myself through life abroad.

Especially, before participating in this program, I didn’t have enough confidence to speak up in English. Actually I tended to avoid speaking in English in front of many people. However, I tried to bring myself to speak up and I learned it is not necessary to hesitate. I think this was big progress for me. Also, for me personally, it was almost first time to live on my own and cook myself. Thus, it was opportunity to stand on my own two feet! Fortunately, all the experiences including cooking-failure were enjoyable 🙂

I can confidently say that all the things I did in U.S. are really valuable, irreplaceable, and wonderful! Although it is not enough, here I would like to express my gratitude to all the people who supported me in this program. I will return them the favor with my being successful someday in the future! Thank you.

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Tips for Future Participants

 

  • It is drier than you may expect, please be careful to keep hydrated!
  • If you would like to cook yourself while in Texas, it is better to bring a kitchen knife from Japan. (If possible)
  • Reading papers is of course important, but I think there are lot more important things to do while in U.S.; talk and discuss with your professor and mentor, and experience what you can only do now.
  • Writing up the terms you learned through this program will be helpful for your future study.
  • Practice your poster presentation with fellow participants a lot because we will not have time hear about others’ research on the day of poster session.
  • Talk as much as possible and do the “Compliment Game” with your fellow participants. They can be your lifelong friends!
  • If you have enough time, prepare a “Thank You Card” for people who you would like to convey a sense of gratitude to at the end of the program.
  • Pour everything you have into all the experiences and enjoy! I hope you have wonderful five weeks in U.S.!

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