ISCAS 2005 and Japan

This year IEEE Symp. on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS'05) was held in Kobe, Japan. This was a good chance for me to visit Japan during conference and also present my paper. Tomorrow is the last day of my journey. During this week (I arrived Kobe, Sunday morning) I was somehow busy with conference. The conference was finished yesterday and today I got the chance to see Kobe city. It was very nice and modern. People are very polite and kind. Normally you can hardly find people who can speak English even in hotel reception! but they always try to help you by whatever they can do. On January 17, 1995 an earthquake measured at 7.2 on the Richter Scale occurred at 05:46am (JST) near the city. It killed 6,433, made 300,000 homeless and destroyed large parts of the port facilities and other parts of the city. It was one of the most costly natural disasters in modern history. The earthquake is known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake (or the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake). In the last 10 years, the city has recovered completely, but it lost some of its ship traffic. This year, after 10 years, Japanese people turned on the lights for 1.17 at the same time on Jan. 17 to remind the memory of people who have been killed at that night. I visited the memorial earthquake park to get more information about that. All I understand from this park was that how Japanese people are hard-working. They have made a completely destroyed city as one the most modern cities in the world. Also they have made all of the new buildings strong enough to keep them safe against any earthquake in the future.

ISCAS 2005 was finished. We have a chip measurement plan in July and hopefully some valuable publications for higher conferences. But anyway the next year ISCAS will be held in Kos island, Greece.