Prof. Raghu Nandan Sengupta from India reflects on his guest stay at the School of Science during May 2017 to June 2017 under a DAAD Fellowship:

"My visit to TU Dresden in Germany for one month, May’17 – June’17, under the aegis of DAAD Fellowship, was both academically fruitful and personally successful on several accounts. This is my second visit to TU Dresden, Germany, the first being in April 2016,when I was invited by Prof. Dr. Rene Schilling of the Institut für Mathematische Stochastik, TU Dresden, to deliver a seminar in my area of expertise. 

Since both our research interests matched, I immediately got in touch with Prof. Dr.Schilling and prepared my application for a DAAD fellowship, with an emphasis on a joint research proposal in the area of developing stochastic and sequential inference techniques for a variety of regression models under different loss functions, after returning to the Indian Institute of Technology, <http://www.iitk.ac.in>, where I am a full Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management.

Historically, the area of probability, statistics and related areas has been a forte of both INDIA and GERMANY. This has resulted in an active exchange of research scholars, enabling invigorating ideas and joint research work to fructify between these two countries, hence enabling a very healthy growth in academic joint work.

This inspired me to actively pursue my dream to visit Germany using the prestigious DAAD fellowship and what was a better place to visit than TU Dresden; considering its formidable reputation in my area of research. From day one, my academic work and interaction started in full earnest. Research work, attending seminars, visits to libraries kept me busy. Personally I also felt that the prestige and reputation of a DAAD scholar were enduring and enabling factors which facilitated me to interact very actively with faculty members and researchers from TU Munich (delivered a seminar on 29-May-17), TU Dresden (delivered seminars on 01-June-2017 and 13-June-17), University of Leipzig. In all these accounts the active support and an uninhibited academic environment made possible by Prof. Dr. Schilling and TU Dresden have been truly great for some good research work.

Fortunately I was also able to bring my wife and son during this visit. As a typical European summer was in full swing, hence, occasional visits to Zwinger, the Royal Palace, Frauenkirche, Dresden Zoo, Brühlsche Terrasse, Kunsthof-Passage, etc., made our stay here enriching and truly enjoyable. A walk down in Löbtau, where we were living, led to pleasant interactions with people of different strata of the society.

Germany as I had always visualized it to be, emerged as a well-mannered country yet again, full of energy and enthusiasm to work with an ingrained habit of discipline and punctuality. The technical progress of Germany  is mind-boggling, and I am sure as a responsible citizen of India, I will enthusiastically encourage and recommend students, professionals and academicians to take up the challenges of interacting with a country that has taught us the basics of engineering and machine tools. There is a lot for each one of us to take home from the country of Volkswagen, Bosch, Daimler Chrysler, Bayer and from the land of Beethoven, Brahms and Bach. To summarize, my visit was academically fulfilling, culturally enriching and mentally stimulating, the after taste of which will definitely linger in my mind leaving me pining for more."