Last week I visited the Machine Learning & Computational Biology group in Tuebingen. It’s difficult to summarize everything, but Tuebingen is a nice city, the institute is a great place to do research, and there are a lot of friendly people there! Therefore I am looking forward to my longer (few months) visit in the fall of 2013 🙂
At the group, I gave a presentation about my work, attended other talks, and discussed the project that I would be working on. The project is still being defined, but it is probably involve classifying brain data, and in particular, the connections in these brains. For instance, it could be the case that healthy people have different connections in their brains, than people suffering from neurological diseases. I hope to find out more about this very soon.
I also have to find out more about living in Tuebingen, and getting financial support to do so. So far, most grants seem to be for MSc students, PhD students who do not get any salary (but they are also supposed to be in the Netherlands, where PhD students DO get a salary… confusing), or more senior researchers. There are a few things I have to investigate further, so I hope something will come up :). It’s amazing (and unfortunate) how much time this search is costing me, though.
Another thing to think about is learning German. I don’t think it’s really necessary for a short visit, but I enjoy learning languages and I’m curious how quickly I could pick it up. There are no courses in Delft (they do have Chinese though, how awesome is that!), but there is a language exchange program. You pair up with somebody who can teach you a language, and who can learn a different language from you. I’m going to try that, and maybe also just start by myself. There must be an app for it!
Let me know if you have any experiences with exchange scholarships for PhD students, or with learning German 🙂