While humankind and its closely related primates (apes and monkeys in Asia and Africa) have been generally considered to have the well-developed sense of sight, their sense of smell has not been emphasized. Researchers are reviewing this idea in recent years. In this seminar, we focus on human senses. I will introduce research we have conducted in our laboratory on the color sensor opsin and genetic variability of smell receptors, and outline the diversity of these senses we found from research.

The Japanese government provided over an estimated $16 billion USD in official development assistance to developing countries in 2021. This seminar aims to facilitate critical discussions around "who" and "how" countries can benefit from ODA funding and projects, and how such public initiatives should be evaluated. Examples of research projects that aimed to produce ODA policy implications will also be introduced.

Machine learning technology is applied to machine translation, autonomous driving, voice recognition, etc. When a considerable amount of data and appropriate supervision are collected, the accuracy of machine learning can be improved. However, there are cases that data cannot be labeled or sufficient amount of data cannot be collected due to various kinds of limitations or cost problems. In this seminar, I will introduce research on how to enhance the accuracy of machine learning by weakly supervised data or a small piece of data.