International Exchange Activities between the Japanese National Institute of Informatics (NII) and the University of Bristol (UOB)

News

• The next call for internship applications is expected in April 2023 (with a deadline in May 2023).
• See PREVIOUS call.
• More details will be posted below in due course.

1. NII Internships conducted under the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) on Collaborative Research in Computer Science and Information Systems

Background

• Under this agreement, MSc, MEng, and PhD students at UoB may apply for a fully funded 2-6 month internship at NII.
• NII has a very successful intern programme which currently hosts about 120 interns per year.
• UOB has a very good success rate with a couple of students winning internships each year.
• NII is a very multi-cultural institution where most people speak English and where many of the students are European.
• Interns receive sojourn (living) expenses of roughly 170,000 Yen per month (certainly enough to live in Tokyo).
• They are also given a desk and computer at NII (along with the option to attend Japanese language lessons).
• Travel expenses are, in principle, not included under this agreement but may be (partially) covered by external budgets at the discretion of the NII/UoB supervisors.
• No familiarity with the Japanese language is necessary (on the contrary, this is a good opportunity to learn some Japanese and most researchers in NII speak English).
• The aims of the internship are (i) to strengthen research links between NII and UOB, (ii) to contribute to the chosen research field, and (iii) to enhance the student's research and social skills.

Projects

• All interns will work on a project chosen from a list of about 90 available projects (which you can see by foloowing the link on the current call).
• Candidates will shortlist three projects in ther application and, if successful, will be allocated one of them.
• Applicants are strongly advised to contact potential NII supervisors before finalising the (top three) projects they wish to apply for.
• These intenships are competitive so you need to write a strong argument (case for support) explaining why you would be the best candidate for your chosen projects (which should ideally involve some collaboration with a UOB staff member).
• Successful candidates are expected to write a technical report at the end of thier internship, which should ideally be co-authored by the NII and UOB supervisors.
• Upon completion of this report, NII will issue a certificate to NII internship students.

Eligibility

• The number of applications (accross the entire university) is limited to just three in response to each call for internship applications.
• It is the responsibility of the UoB liaison to preselect the best three applications to submit to NII on each round.
• At present, these internships are only being actively advertised to doctoral, postgraduate, and masters students in the Department of Computer Science (as our research activities are closely aligned with those of NII).
• Note: Those who have obtained the Doctor of Philosophy degree before the start of internship program are not qualified as internship students.
• Note: Those who are not registered students at UOB at the time of their internship are also not eligible.
• Note: Interns accepted for this program will participate the duration from 60 days to 180 days including traveling time.

Related Information

• The British Council and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) also offer funding for students to carry out research in Japan.
• For details see http://www.britishcouncil.jp/en/programmes/higher-education/support-researchers and http://www.jsps.org/funding/
.

Applications

• Application forms should be obtained from the current call.
• Completed application forms should be emailed to Dr. Oliver Ray.
• Applicants should send exactly one XLS form along with any mandatory supporting files (CV, etc) specifically requested in the current call (unnecessary attachments are strongly discouraged).
• Ideally your form should be proof read by a native English speaker and approved by your UoB supervisor and your proposed NII supervisor.
• All communication should be directed to Dr. Oliver Ray.

Previous Interns

NOTE: If you are accepted for an internship please closely follow the acceptance guidelines. In particular make sure to start your application for the Certificate of Eligibility as soon as possible from you Embassy, as this can take many weeks to obtain and is needed to apply for a Visa.

2. Research visits conducted under Annex A on Logical Reasoning and Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics

• Under this agreement, staff at UoB may apply for grants for short research visits to NII, where they will receive travel and sojourn expenses
• Note that such grants can only be applied for once a suitable research project has been drawn up and established as a formal annex the MOU
• In addition, each applicatation must be accompanied by a detailed day-to-day breakdown of the activities that will be carried out in Japan
• All communication should be directed to Dr. Oliver Ray

Publications

• J. Valvoda, O. Ray and K. Satoh. Using agreement statements to identify majority opinion in UKHL case law, Proc. 31st Int. Conf. on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX), IOS, 2018
• J. Valvoda and O. Ray. From Case Law to Ratio Decidendi, New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Revised selected papers from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence 2017 Workshops. LNAI 10838:20-34, Springer, 2018.
• S. Hulkkonen and O. Ray. An End-to-End PDF Toolchain for Marking Up Scientific Documents, Proc. 11th Int. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), ELRA, 2018
• O. Aboluwarin, P. Andriotis, A. Takasu and T. Tryfonas. Optimizing Short Message Text Sentiment Analysis for Mobile Device Forensics, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Advances in Digital Forensics XII (484) 69-87, 2016
• P. Andriotis, A. Takasu and T. Tryfonas. Smartphone Message Sentiment Analysis IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 253-265, 2014.
• O. Ray, T. Soh and K. Inoue. Analysing Pathways using ASP-based Approaches. Proc. 2010 Conference on Algebraic and Numeric Biology, LNCS 6479:167-183, 2011.
• H. Nabeshima, K. Iwanuma, K. Inoue and O. Ray. SOLAR: An Automated Deduction System for Consequence Finding. AI Communications 23(2-3): 188-203, 2010.
• Y. Yamamoto, O. Ray, K. Inoue. Towards a Logical Reconstruction of CF-Induction. New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 330-343, 2008.
• O. Ray and K. Inoue. Mode-Directed Inverse Entailment for Full Clausal Theories. Proc. 17th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, LNAI 4894:225-238, 2007.

Workshops

• ECML/PKDD 2012 Workshop on Learning and Discovery in Symbolic Systems Biology (LDSSB'12) Oliver Ray and Katsumi Inoue (organisers)
• 2011 International Symposium on Symbolic Systems Biology (ISSSB'11) Oliver Ray, Katsumi Inoue, and Katsuhisa Horimoto (organisers)