Summer 2016: Visiting the University of Bremen

In just a few short days, I’ll be traveling to Germany: land of lager, locomotives, and lederhosen, if American television is to be believed. Last year, our lab had the pleasure of hosting Fereshta Yazdani, a PhD student working with Michael Beetz at the University of Bremen. Now, I will be visiting their lab for one month, where I will work to integrate my natural language understanding system with their reasoning system. During my spare time, I’ll have my hands full writing papers, remotely supervising my undergraduate research assistants, and helping to organize a workshop for the AAAI Fall Symposium.

Being productive should be easy, given that my Linux laptop can’t run most games (e.g., Overwatch), and given that the best “beer bar” in Bremen appears to only have two beers on tap*. This isn’t to say I plan to spend all my time in lab, of course! I’ll be kicking off my trip with a two-day visit to Amsterdam (it turns out it’s rather expensive to fly into Bremen directly), and I hope to take a weekend at some point to visit elsewhere in Germany (Cologne, most likely). I’ve been dabbling in German on Duolingo, so hopefully I won’t have too much trouble getting around. (Knock on wood).

I’m looking forward to my trip, and I think it’ll be a really good experience for me. Auf Wiedersehen Amerika, Hallo Deutschland!

*Everyone’s first reaction to my travel announcement is to ask whether I’m excited for the beer in Germany. While I’m excited to live in a new city, in a country that has a rich brewing history, the simple truth is that the German beer scene is nowhere close to what we have here in the states.