The second round of OpenSense Short-Term Scientific Missions (STSMs) has started! 

STSMs are institutional exchanges allowing researchers and innovators to visit an institution or laboratory in another COST member country. The STSM   gives the opportunity to scientists of gaining new knowledge or access to equipment or  techniques  not  available  in  the  home  institution, as well as to establish new long-term international collaborations. 

You can find all the information on how to apply and eligibility criteria here.

Discover below the stories of the first round of STSMs in 2022.

Sergey Timinsky, Tel Aviv University (Israel)

My name is Sergey Timinsky. I’m a master’s student at Tel Aviv University. My thesis focuses on cross-domain environmental monitoring using generative adversarial networks and cycle consistency regularization, supervised by Prof. Hagit Messer-Yaron and Dr. Jonathan Ostrometzky.

During my time in STMS at Delft, I participated in weekly meetings, colloquiums, and worked on a main project, Rain Estimation Using Loosely Matched Stations. The project involved creating datasets, training models and evaluating results on data from the Netherlands. The results showed low RMSE values.

I highly recommend participating in STSM as it provides a valuable opportunity for collaboration on what I worked on and involvement in other projects in the field.

Andrijana Todorovic, Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Belgrade (Serbia)

My name is Andrijana, and I am an assistant professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Belgrade Serbia. I obtained my PhD in Hydrology, and my research is primarily focused on development and application of rainfall-runoff models. I am especially interested in application of rainfall-runoff models with alternative datasets, such as opportunistically sensed rainfall obtained from CMLs. This is why I applied for a STSM at Politecnico di Milano.

During my STSM I had a great opportunity to work with CML rainfall datasets for the first time in my career! I enhanced a hydrological model to be able to run with the CML rainfall data and conducted numerous hydrological simulations for the Lambro catchment located north of Milan. The results are promising, and I continued pursuing this path of my research. Hopefully, these results will be presented in a peer-reviewed publication.  

I really liked the scientific part of my STSM, as well as its social part! During my STSM I met many brilliant people that I genuinely enjoyed working with, spending lunch breaks together, and cherish aperitivo!

After all these positive experiences I cannot do anything else but encourage other researchers to apply for a STMS within “OpenSense”. It is an ideal opportunity to meet new people, do some interesting research that you can continue working on in the long run, create or extend your research network, and learn about new working environments and cultures. 

Petr Musil and Milan Bubniak, Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic)

Enjoy their experience through the interview here.

Apply for a STSM, your turn has come!