The last couple of weeks have been very vivid for our group, as we had the pleasure of welcoming two esteemed fellow researchers that visited us, Mr. Antoine Wehenkel from the University of Liège (Belgium) and Ms. Aicha Karite from the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
The collaboration with Mr. Antoine Wehenkel and his group at the University of Liège, dates back from NeurIPS 2021 where Antoine started a communication with Dr. Naoya Takeishi, regarding the code implementation of the work that Naoya presented in the conference. After a sequence of online exchanges of the two teams ever since, Prof. Alexandros Kalousis invited Antoine to visit our group for a more profound collaboration. During his two-day visit (6-7 October), we had the pleasure to discuss common research interests, mainly on the topic of simulation-based inference. Antoine gave a presentation entitled "The symbiosis between deep probabilistic and scientific models". Afterwards, we had the opportunity to discuss about open problems in simulation-based inference.
By the time these lines are written, Antoine has successfully defended his PhD Thesis, and so, Dr. Antoine Wehenkel, congratulations are in order!
Our second visitor was Ms. Aicha Karite from the Multimodal Navigation group of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The collaboration of the two groups was initiated in the IPIN 2021 (Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation) conference, where the Group Leader Multimodal Navigation, Dr. Estefanía Muñoz attended a presentation by Dr. Grigorios Anagnostopoulos. Estefania visited our group back in Spring 2022 to discuss over potential topics of collaboration that could initiate a sequence of research visits. As a fruit of that first exchange, we were delighted to host for a three week period in our group's premises Ms. Aicha Karite, a PhD student and a researcher in DLR. Aicha participated in the groups activities and had a close collaboration with Grigorios on the overlapping topic of interest that was transportation type detection using smartphone sensors.
The visit of and the exchange with of our fellow colleagues has been refreshing and stimulating. Our group aims to continue both incoming and outgoing mobility, as it has been the case in the past as well.
Antoine, Aicha, thank you for your visit!