A conference in Singapore

From this week, I have been in Singapore for participating a conference — International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies (ICMAT) organized by the Materials Research Society of Singapore. I left Germany on Saturday afternoon, and by the time when I reached Singapore, it was already close to the midnight just before the start of Monday. My first impression of the country was, which might sound funny, it’s so humid and hot at the same time, and the airconditioning is so powerful everywhere! And everything is so concentrated but works very well due to amazing infrastructure; Public transportation was so punctual, and electronic payment is common in all shops and restaurants. Also people are so polite here.

Talking about the conference, I spent most of the time in the session about Magnetic and Spintronics Materials and Devices, and I got a chance to give a talk in this session thanks to the invitation by Prem (SN Piramanayagam from NTU). I think it’s been quite long time since I have been to a conference that covers wide range of topics in magnetism; I haven’t been to MMM, Intermag, nor ICM in recent years. Because there were quite many topics that I do not know much about and I was suffering from the jetlag throughout the day, it was not always easy to concentrate. But I tried to figure out what are the important questions in other areas and see if they are relatable to my work. Overall, I think the session had quite a lot of original works and covered ongoing research topics in magnetism well. Especially, I got nicely impressed by new ideas and technological progress in SOT devices.

My talk was on the last day toward the end of the session. I think it went quite well, and I could feel the atmosphere in the room that people are interested. Importantly, there were many questions by students! (It is usually a good sign that I was able to “explain things” as a teacher) I try to spend enough time than I actually planned because understanding the seeds of ideas is the most important, I think. Sure, I skipped many slides on the most recent works, but I think it doesn’t really matter — anyone who’s interested will look up anyway, but if not understood nobody will even think of searching.

During the conference week, I went out with the organizers and other speakers of the session. It was extremely nice hospitality, and thanks to that, we were able to lots of “local stuffs” that I might be too afraid to try alone. Food was great all the time, but I learned quickly that they have lots of spicy food, from which I suffered because I did not expect this level of spicyness.

Once the conference program is over, I decided to go to the landmark of the country: area near Marina Bay. In so-called “Gardens by the Bay”, despite the hot and humid weather, it was so nice to walk around exotic trees. I actually went to the garden twice, on Monday as well as on Thursday, so in the second time, I took time to explore every corner of it to see how locals enjoy their leisure time in this busy city. I also went up to the famous hotel, Marina Bay Sands, only to the observatory on the roof (Staying there would be out of my budget). I was able to see both sunset behind the skyline of the city and the beautifully enlightened garden, whihc was literally amazing. Also, it was cool to see the F1 racing track.

Tomorrow, as my flight is near the minight, I plan to visit the Prem’s group in NTU, and I am excited about it!

And here’re some of the best pics;