LUT makes use of Erasmus+ staff visits

The Department of Computational Engineering at Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) specializes in deterministic modeling of industrial problems as well as soft computing methods for modeling uncertainty and process optimization. We have used Erasmus+ Staff exchange in seeking collaboration and for advertising our profile to the other ECMI partners. Examples are visits to/from Wroclaw University of Technology (WrUT) and University of Las Palmas Grand Canaria (ULPGC).

The role of the visits between LUT and WrUT had many dimensions. The visiting lecturers taught courses which are normally not offered in Partner universities, in order to extend students’ knowledge scope and broaden their interest and possibilities in other areas. In particular, guests from WrUT presented advanced courses in stochastic processes and time series analysis which are not included in LUT’s curriculum. Also, one of the visits included an advanced Matlab programming course.

On the other hand, the study program of Wroclaw’s applied mathematics focuses on stochastic methods and their applications in modeling especially financial time series. Therefore, the visits of Lappeenranta staff gave the students a chance to hear about topics completely new to them, such as mathematical epidemiology and evolutionary computation. The visits gave also a chance for mutual advertisement of the universities as options for student exchange locations, where students get to study new things in a multicultural environment. Moreover, the visits were usually aligned with other events running at the hosting institutions (like Study Groups, conferences, etc). Discussion on research collaboration have resulted in a few joint publications.

Regarding the University of Las Palmas we introduced ECMI and gave lectures on industrial mathematics at ULPGC. During the visits the initiative for the collaborative Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships project MODCLIM was generated.