On May 8, I went to SusHi Tech Tokyo. It was a great opportunity to talk with various other companies, share about tsuin.ai and learn about interesting new initiatives. I previously went to Takeoff Tokyo which was a similar event, so I had ideas of what I could expect there. I wrote about my experience at Takeoff Tokyo as well here.
When I arrived at SusHi Tech Tokyo, the first thing that stood out to me was the scale of the event. It was even larger than Takeoff Tokyo with more booths and people attending. The next thing I noticed was that the event was more international than I expected, which I found great. I could see booths for companies from Germany, Switzerland, France, Czech Republic, Malaysia and more.
The first person I talked to at the event was Yuki Shirato. I participated in his interactive presentation about the Techstars accelerator programs. The audience was about 4 people, and we all introduced ourselves. I was the only person representing a start-up, so I was glad to be able to introduce tsuin.ai to the people there. The Techstars accelerator program was very interesting to learn about, as it is an incredible opportunity for founders of 12 selected start-ups to gain experience, learn and launch there business further. This is done with a 3 months bootcamp for founders, and an investment. Tsuin.ai has also already applied for this program.
As tsuin.ai is a Malaysian start-up, I decided to first talk to other start-ups from Malaysia at the event. Thus I went to the Malaysia booth run by Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC). One of the companies I talked with there was Boostorder, where I found out about the possibilities of sales automation through our conversation.
Later on in the day, I went to the Switzerland booth to talk with a couple of companies that sparked my interest. One of them was CynLr, which researches and develops a robot capable of performing physical tasks such as picking up items. I approached the booth because it reminded me of a lecture I attended at another event previously, which discussed the developments and challenges of robots powered by AI that could recognise objects, fold towels and so on. I talked there with a researcher at CynLr, Dr. Michael Bombile. I learned that the concept of CynLr was slightly different from what I heard in the other lecture it initially reminded me of. This robot was not capable of recognising objects specifically, but it was could perform general operations on any objects such as picking it up and moving it. The concept therefore was to create a general purpose robot capable of performing those basic functions that can be adapted later on to various applications, through added "intelligence" such as the ability to differentiate objects or perform a pattern of the basic tasks. An analogy was made to developing personal computers which are capable of performing all kinds of basic tasks and operations so that it can be adapted to specific needs by installing applications. The robot is therefore like building such a computer. I thought this concept was very interesting.
Last but certainly not least, I had a great discussion with Cécile Maye, who is the CEO of AckTao. I wanted to find out more about AckTao because it seemed to be about technology for education, which is something I am interested in. After I introduced tsuin.ai, she explained AckTao to me, which is an educational program for raising awareness about cybersecurity. The educational philosophy is "learning by doing", so users get placed in various scenarios where they must answer questions on risks related to cybersecurity. It also has an AI that adjusts the level according to each user. I found this discussion inspiring, as I am thinking of making my own educational websites or applications as well, possibly one for learning languages. I thought that this kind of idea with interactive scenarios and AI powered level adaptation would be great to try to implement.