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.
