My name is Mikuláš Dítě and I am an undergraduate student at Faculty of Information Technology of Czech Technical University in Prague.
Being an avid computer person (and technology-inclined individual in general), Japan has forever been engraved in my mind as a cradle of electronics. I would be visiting Japan for the following reasons:
One of my lifetime missions is improving education, both in my home country of the Czech republic and globally; a few years ago a fellow engineer from CTU and I founded a nonprofit organization aimed at providing world-class study materials in my native language for free to everybody. We have also produced numerous tools for managing educational content and video translations that helped many similar organizations throughout the world. Learning more about Japanese education system-which from what I learned differs greatly from ours-is an important goal of mine and visiting Japan would aid me greatly.
I find it very gratifying to learn new languages and Japanese language, in particular, intrigues me; originally for it's perceived intricacy, and now-after learning Japanese for roughly a year-for the way kanji describe concepts in a way a Latin script cannot. Looking at the ESOP timetable Hosei has for the fall semester of 2015/16, I found multiple especially appealing courses: Technical Japanese and Cultural diversity in Japan. Colleagues from my university that are currently studying at Hosei are also attending an Artificial Intelligence course, in which I would be very interested as well.
As a developer, I have a keen interest in human-computer interactions. I find it fascinating that while it's relatively simple to synthesize voice from Japanese text compared to other languages, Japanese is also known to be one of the hardest languages to tokenize programmatically, making full-text search systems quite complex. Given the chance, one day I would like to combine my knowledge of machine learning and natural languages to create an automatic Japanese to Czech translator.
In recent years, I strive to listen to and learn from the widest range of opinions and life views. I believe there is much to learn from any person, the more different the circumstances (gender, age, culture, ...) the better. During winter holidays, before my departure back to Europe, I would like to travel Japanese country and compare rural and urban Japanese culture. For this and all the above reasons, studying in Japan would be an invaluable experience for me.
Thank you very much for your consideration.