PostDoc student from Bangladesh:

Time flows like the currents of the ocean and more importantly it
carries us also with it. It is impractical to let it flow, because
then we will find ourselves stranded in the middle of nowhere in the
blink of an eye. When I join as a researcher and later as a PhD
student in the Hirose lab luckily I had the time and an immaculate
mentor with me. I utilised the assistance from both and now I can
proudly say that I am working in Ireland graduating from Kyushu
Institute of Technology and more specifically from Hirose lab. During
my time here I learned about the bridge between Statistics and Machine
Learning and the application of both these in various Data Mining
areas. Because of the research friendly environment of the lab I could
assimilate knowledge from diverse areas. I should also mention that
the other research areas covered by the lab includes item response
theory, pandemic disease simulation, difficult classification tasks,
machine learning methods and application to environmental science and
efficient subset selection for regression task (for example car
auction). It should be mentioned that all these areas are updated and
demanding research areas for computer scientists and statisticians.
The person who is interested in joining this lab is recommended to
have some knowledge on programming languages like Java/C++/C and
statistical/engineering software R/Matlab with background related to
Statistics and Computer science. 8/31/2012

Exchange student (MBA) from Taiwan:

I am an exchange student, when the first time I contact with the classmates of this laboratory, I think they are very serious to do their research. In fact, this is true.
In this laboratory, you will get many chances to share your learning experience with our colleagues in every week.
Hirose 先生 is a professor who works hard and willing to help students a lot, usually he gave me lot of very helpful suggestions, and those were very good ideas that I was never thinking about. Professor also hopes us to participate many conferences, it will push us to move forward and get academic recognition.
And those senior students, for example Sakumura san and Nakazono san are also working hard and responsible people, when I have any questions and need their help, they are all very willing to teach me.
If I can speak Japanese much more or was harder to learn it, I think I can obtain more expertise from this laboratory.
Finally, I would like to thanks everyone in this laboratory for helping me over the past few months. I feel lucky and happy to be able to enter this Laboratory. 9/13/2012