A year with successful international exchanges is nearing its end.

This year, six of our SFB researchers were (or will be in the near future) between news, space and science. Amongst others, they were at Google, NASA, Stanford and the Wirtschaftswoche. While it was certainly not a walk in the park, it was definitely an experience and a great success.

Following the topical seminar visit by Luca Benini, Mojtaba Masoudinejad (A4) could visit his lab at the ETH Zurich complementing the SFB research on energy-efficient systems and energy harvesting. Already aroung the turn of the last year, Nils Kriege (A6) visited Universities at York and Nottingham covering graph mining topics. Kai Brügge (C3) will at the beginning of 2017 stay at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to port the concepts and algorithms of the project to the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).

Elena Erdmann (A6) received a Google News Lab Fellowship and worked two months at the Wirtschaftswoche. She has developed both journalistic know-how and technical skills to drive innovation in digital and data journalism. Nico Piatkowski (A1) visited Stefano Ermon at Stanford University. Together they worked on techniques for scalable and exact inference in graphical models. He also made a detour to NASA, Netflix and Google. Last but not least, Martin Mladenov (A6/B4) got an internship at Google. Some people say this is more difficult than getting admitted to Stanford or Harvard. Who knows? But this year they accepted about 2% of applicants (1,600 people). What did he work on? We do not know it, but he visited Craig Boutilier, so very likely something related to making decisions under uncertainty.