Thanks for the helpful context! We had intuitions in this direction but its nice to substantiate it with these examples. Do you speak any Japanese / have you considered joining the Japan AI Alignment slack channel? You may have a useful perspective to deconfuse conversations there if/when ontology gaps arise.
Chris Scammell
Karma: 947
Thanks for the question. “Conference” might be the wrong word.
RIKEN, one of the top research institutions in Japan, held a (AFAIK) whole-company event that same weekend. My understanding is that ARAYA did a public sweep of events but didn’t learn about this conflict until a few weeks after the date had been set and we sent out invitations. While some RIKEN members attended our conference, others who expressed interest declined (“I would have attended but...”). Asking key participants ahead of the conference about the date probably could have avoided this.
It was held at a standard conference centre in Kudanshita. This one is completely on me/Katrina as the ops team! We bought our own equipment last minute and should have instead used the venue’s, or bought better equipment.