Isidor Maier, PhD student in Germany, used his mobility voucher for a trip to Finland to give a talk.
When I heard about Eunice poster competition « Le Mardi des Chercheurs » (Tuesday for Researchers) at UMONS, I straight decided to participate as I already had some experience in poster design. I had recently created a poster for the EURALI workshop in Marseille using the #BetterPoster approach. It gave me self-confidence to design good posters efficiently, as it made a good case for why the approach works and why it should even be recommended to anyone designing a conference poster. I recommend it because it is beneficial to the whole research community.
My poster entitled « Decomposing numerals » attempts to explain how computers could understand numerals. It was praised by the audience for its original presentation (like a text conversation) and clarity. With this, I beat the competitors in the poster contest on 6 September 2022 and won a mobility voucher to finance a research stay in one of the Alliance countries.
I immediately looked for some researchers in the EUNICE countries to carry out a small project. Since this project could not be realised so quickly, I decided to use the voucher for a research mobility in the near future. I used my contacts with the Sigma student guild at the University of Oulu for this. They invited me to give a talk on my research on 17 April 2023. The journey to Oulu by train took over 40 hours each way, but the night trains in northern Sweden were quite comfortable.
I even used the invitation as a challenge to give my first presentation in Suomi language. It went well and the discussions were even that productive that we found a new – unless I had forgotten about it – bug in the system.
I made new contacts with some institutes. Maybe the Sami people can use some of the numeral grammars, that my research produced. At least the Giellagas institute knows of them now.
I am glad that I got this chance by participating in the REUNICE Contest and that I was able to make new contacts with researchers from the Alliance. Also, on the trip I met old friends, could eat karjalanpiirakka, leipäjuusto and other dishes that are hard to get outside of Suomi, as well as play a little table hockey (Stiga) at Oulu League tournaments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
My name is Isidor Maier, I am a PhD at BTU (Germany) and student in the field of (natural) number grammars and (formal) minimalist grammars. I did my maths studies in Braunschweig and was able to experience an exchange in Oulu (Suomi). In my free time I like to play strategy games and develop variants of those. And I play football and table hockey.
