24 years of international cooperation renewed (link to the German version)

Moscow April/May 2015. Scientific cooperation has a long tradition for researchers in Konstanz and Moscow. For nearly 24 years, HTWG and the Moscow Power Engineering Institute MEI (National Research University) are running a cooperation agreement for exchanging advanced students in Bachelor or Master degrees, PhD students or even on professors level but also executing applied research projects.  

Especially during the last years, study plans have changed and also the study content is continuously adapted to relevant future topics and needs in research and industry. During this exceptionally long cooperation runtime also the contacts points in the universities may change – mainly due to retirements or changes in high temporal election positions of the representatives. All these convinced HTWG representatives to travel to MEI and in order to update their relationship and exchange knowledge about scientific work.

At the beginning of the year, Prof. Dr. Seepold took over the contact point and coordination at HTWG together with Dr. Kirjuchin, who is the long-term pioneer and who has proved a recipe for of this agreement. Besides the cooperation field of power electronics running for decades, the new research domain of ubiquitous computing has been incorporated. “In a good working cooperation the ‘chemistry’ in our relationship with our partners must be right.”, said Seepold. So the first activity to renew the cooperation was to visit the partners and to find new partners in Moscow. Thus Prof. Dr. Seepold and Dr. Kirjuchin presented their research labs in order intensify running cooperation and to find new cooperation partners in very dedicated fields like mobile biomedical computing, smart home & living and smart driving.

A cooperation that is beyond well-established programs like ERASMUS+ always needs experienced support when an exchange should take place. Therefore, Klemens Blass Director of the International Office at HTWG is part of the leading team. He incorporates his experience in setting up the agreement, arranging many exchanges and supporting with uncountable recommendations and contributions so that this agreement could be maintained over all years.

As one of the first steps, Prof. Dr. Rogalev (third on the left) the rector of MEI welcomed the HTWG team. Prof. Dr. Rogalev outlined the importance of this long-term cooperation for MEI also during a period of time with substantial changes in science and politics. Nowadays, MEI is member of the well-positioned group of National Research University in the Russian Federation. Even some lectures are offered in English language and double degrees are running together with central European universities for the Master level. The latter case has been also part of the discussion with Prof. Dr. Dr. E.h. Zhelbakov (second on the right) head of the German Engineering Facility at MEI.

Technical discussions for future cooperation took place between the group of Prof. Dr. Kramm and Prof. Dr. Seepold on the research of cartographic studies, simulation and visualization that matches very good to the mobile biomedical computing research on stress detection and prevention.

Further discussion took place with the group of Prof. Dr. Sergey V. Vishnyakov. This group is very strong in sensor development and pattern recognition. Also here is an excellent potential to cooperate on Prof Dr. Seepold’s smart home & living scenarios but also on pushing the sensor development for biomedical data capturing beyond the state of the art.

Dr. Kiruchin intensified the discussion with Prof. Dr. Kurbatov and Prof. Dr. Rumjantsev about possible projects in the field of Power Engineering and autonomous energy supply as well as in the field of magnetic materials.

Some more impressions from Moscow