The PhD Retreat 2021 was held in-person at the Evangelische Tagungsstätte Löwenstein. For the first time, many of the PhD students of this funding period saw each other live. This is their report.
PhD Retreat 2021 – Back to Reality

The PhD Retreat 2021 was held in-person at the Evangelische Tagungsstätte Löwenstein. For the first time, many of the PhD students of this funding period saw each other live. This is their report.
Tobias Dürr, Marcel Werle, Philipp Häßler, and Dr. Ferran Giones Valls joined the SFB-TRR 161 lecture series and gave an overview of interesting transfer projects and entrepreneurship support opportunities for early stage researchers. For our blog, they summarize their central points.
This year the retreat of the SFB Graduate School had to take place as a video conference because of the pandemic restrictions of the COVID crisis.
Jeffrey Heer visited the SFB-TRR 161 at VISUS. Katrin Angerbauer and Cristina Morariu organized his stay. This is the report on how the visit went.
During this winter, I spent almost three months at the Multimedia Signal Processing Workgroup led by Prof. Dietmar Saupe at the University of Konstanz. During this stay I had the opportunity to meet many researchers who work in image and video quality assessment and pursue my research work.
Last summer, I went for a three month research stay at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, USA. I closely collaborated with the research group on Computing and Data Understanding at eXtreme Scale (CDUX) led by Hank Childs. Their work is closely related to my research within the SFB-TRR 161 at the Visualization Research Center at the University of Stuttgart. In the collaborative project, we worked on performance prediction in hybrid in situ environments.
I’m a PhD student at University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) in Canada, where I belong to the visualization for information analytics laboratory (vialab). In this past summer, I had the amazing opportunity to spend 3 months in the University of Konstanz working closely with the Data Analytics and the Computational Linguistic groups.
As in the previous years, the third instance of the SFB-TRR 161 doctoral retreat took place in the middle of the black forest, at the Waldhotel Zollernblick in Freudenstadt, from April 4 to 6, 2018. Besides the goal of getting in touch with each other, the focus in this retreat was on the exploration of possible collaborations for the second funding period.
In summer, I was at Facebook/Oculus in Redmond (USA). My internship was in the perceptual science group at Oculus Research. My work was closely related to my thesis topic as well as to my work in the SFB-TRR 161 at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems, University of Stuttgart (Germany). I was responsible for the development of a study design, the experimental apparatus, and conducting a user study in virtual reality to investigate the effect of virtual hands on tactile perception.
The second instance of the doctoral retreat took – again – place at the Waldhotel Zollernblick in the beautiful Black Forest from the 4th to 6th of September. The goal of the retreat was to discuss research and collaboration within the SFB-TRR 161 in a relaxed atmosphere.