Ryan
White Works in Japan
Ryan
White graduated with a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Berkeley
with a concentration in control systems.
At Berkely, his research included developing
automated steering control algorithms for tractor-semitrailer
systems. He published two papers
regarding basic controls work on the tractor-trailer or the data association
work on the laser-radar system.
Ryan currently works at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space Operations division
in Sunnyvale, CA
.
He was hired to develop and test control systems for government space systems,
but is currently working on various satellites and the airborne laser program.
You can read about airborne laser at www.airbornelaser.com.
After graduating from Berkley,
I worked at Nissan Motor Company's Vehicle and Transportation Research
Laboratory in Yokosuka, Japan
(~40 miles south of Tokyo)
from January until the end of April.
I lived alone on the south edge of Tokyo.
At Nissan, I developed and tested automated steering algorithms for passenger
cars using GPS as the reference.
Quite simply put, we could drive a path around a test course, record and
store our GPS trajectory, and automatically drive around the course (without
driver interaction) to within approximately a hand's width of our previous
path. This affect would also
work if a preceding car communicated it's
GPS position back to our car.
In this case, we could follow any car that communicated it's
position from any distance (kinda eerie when
the first driver wiggles the steering wheel in his car, and our steering
wheel wiggles a few seconds).
Socially in Japan,
my first few weeks were pretty rough.
I had no Japanese skills, and there were no translators (or English speakers)
around to help. I quickly
learned the Kanji symbols for the major towns and cities on the main island
of Honshu,
so I could navigate by train independently.
I also wasn't too afraid of getting lost, so I would just hop a train for
an hour, get off, and find my way back home (my first weekend in Japan,
I visited a small, historic town about 50 miles south of Tokyo by myself
using the trains...guys at work seemed impressed).
Near the end of my time there, I took the bullet train ("shinkansen",
in Japanese, they don't know what a bullet train is) to the historic old
capitals of Kyoto
and Nara
for a three-day weekend. These
cities are near the western coast of Honshu,
and are considered the most historic and beautiful cities in Japan.
The experience in this area was great, and the train ride was awesome.
The food was also phenomenal (expensive, but very good).
The Japanese have a wide variety of foods (more than just raw fish), and
the quality of the food is very good.
Living in the Bay Area for two years introduced me to the basic Japanese
foods, so it wasn't too much of a shock eating in Japan
except portions were smaller and more expensive.
The strangest things I ate were....crickets/grasshoppers, whole fish lightly
browned on a stick(head,
tail, bones, organs, and all), live shrimp sushi, and unagi
(eel) dinners.Although unagi
(river eel) and anago (sea eel) are commonly
served in the US,
you don't get to see the live eel before it is prepared like you can in Japan.....very
interesting?You canalso
request to eat the eel organs (as we did with the liver).All
these foods were great, and I wouldn't hesitate to eat them again.The
experience was great!