Starting in spring 2023, Prof. Posegga in his role as Delegate for International Relations of the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics, visited Kenya on a fact-finding mission kindly organized by Ms. Schindler-Kovats, the Director of DAAD’s Nairobi office. This visit resulted in Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) established with the The Technical University of Kenya, University of Nairobi, and Kababii University.
In 2024, the University of Passau successfully secured its first Erasmus+ project for Kenya and has since provided funding for Kenyan students to spend one semester in Passau and enrole in one of the English-speaking Master programs at FIM (AI Engineering and Computational Mathematics).
In February 2026, a delegation of the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Passau, namely Prof. Dr. Annette Hautli-Janisz and the Dean, Prof. Dr. Gordon Fraser, visited Nairobi on Erasmus+ funds and started initial talks on how to cooperate on future calls for a strengthend collaboration in teaching and research with its Kenyan partners.
As part of their visit, they held a seminar on ‘Natural Language Processing: From Language to Information’ at The Technical Univeristy of Kenya, hosted by Prof. Salesio Kiura at the School of Computing and Information Technology.
The course was all about the recent technological advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing, a subfield of Artificial Intelligence dedicated to making computers understand and generate natural language. The workshop touched upon several questions, e.g., What are the challenges in human language that make it hard for machines to replicate it? What are the basics of current technology like Large Language Models? What are some of their linguistic capabilities? The underlying message was clear: The field has come a long way, but central aspects of human language processing still remain unsolved.
The interaction with academics and students of TUK showed that the impact of technology on society and academic life is felt around the globe, and in many ways to an even larger extent in a country with low-resource languages such as Kenya. The diversity of backgrounds in the classroom provided a unique platform to discuss the challenges and we are looking forward to continuing this fruitful exchange in the future!
More information on the Erasmus+ Mobility of FIM and other faculties of the university, see here: https://www.uni-passau.de/internationales/das-programm-erasmus/mobilitaet-mit-partnerlaendern-ka171
