Welcoming Dr. Mario Tokoro at My Keio SFC Class

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On October 29th, we welcomed to my Keio SFC class (in Japanese)  Mr. Kohei Nishiyama. He came as a guest speaker to lecture about his very interesting story regarding his innovative business, Imaginative Space, Elephant Design.

Our guest for October 27 was Dr. Mario Tokoro (I like to call him Mario…). He is the founder and President of Sony Computer Science Laboratories as well as a Professor at Keio University.  Dr. Tokoro is conducting a course for graduate school at Keio’s Yagami Campus, where he had honored me by requesting that I participate..

The topic of his lecture was ‘Open Systems Science’, which is essentially the culminating result of his several years studying scientific issues of future generations. In its most simplest form, open systems science is the methodology used to manage and solve the problems in systems whose operation needs interaction with the outside world, as opposed to being closed and complete within themselves. This methodology can be used for systems like globalization and biomedical research, where the system is open and consists of many subsystems that might be dependent on other systems to operate. Dr. Tokoro’s book on this topic is titled, ‘Open Systems Science: From Understanding Principles to Solving Problems (The Future of Learning)’ both in English and Japanese.

 His other book, ‘Sony’s magic lab ? where geniuses and super-talents pop up’ (in Japanese), which describes about this unique lab and the talents they accommodate.  I strongly recommend reading this. 

 
Director, Dr. Hiroaki Kitano was awarded one of the two Mentor Awards from ‘Nature’ magazine last year that celebrate those individuals who promote youth to explore their independence in the world.  He is again a very original person, clearly one of the ‘Crazy Ones’ that I am very fond of.

The lecture that Dr. Tokoro gave in my class was also delivered to Stanford University about one month ago. It is about the future of science and of science education. It is about exploring in order to find the true direction for its development.

Dr. Tokoro does this by initially introducing an overview of the history of modern science and then goes into stimulating discussions about the future of science and how he thinks it should develop.  I made several supplementary comments, too.

Here it is in English.
And here it is on-line.