Newsletter HEC-AIMS 2024/1
Dear colleagues of the AIMS network,
it is our pleasure to send you the link to the 5th edition of the DAAD-AIMS newsletter to inform all actors of our network about recent activities and research achievements.
We are especially delighted that several scholarship holders have defended their PhD thesis successfully last year, congratulations! One of them - Dr Rhoss Likibi Pellat - shares valuable insights in a short interview at the end of this newsletter.
We are happy to further present impressions of two workshops which have taken place in Rwanda and Germany. Numerous publications by former university cooperation partners and scholarship holders show that the joint research activities continue even after the funding has ended – this is really encouraging!
The cooperation between GRC Mouhamadou Sy and Bielefeld University just started recently but already they have held a joint workshop and published a paper, on both of which you will get a short overview in this newsletter.
Last but not least, we look forward to meeting most of you at the celebration of the 12th anniversary of the BMBF's AIMS programme during the German Research Days at the Siyakhula event at AIMS South Africa in March.
Enjoy reading, keep in touch and all the best for the upcoming challenges!
I. Latest information
II. Activities in 2023
III. Scholarship holders' experiences
Interview with Ross Likibi Pellat
Q: What is the title of your research paper?
A: Differentiability and Path regularity of for a class of quadratic Forward-Backward SDEs with rough coefficients.
Q: Why is this subject important in your research field?
A: The theory of Forward-Backward SDEs has received a lot of interest these last three decades, due to its various applications in the theory of PDEs, stochastic control, quantitative finance, etc.. Properties and mainly regularity of solutions to such equations have been so far only investigated for Lipschitz continuous drift coefficients.
However, many interesting problems in modeling market impact and price formation in finance, for instance, deal with forward-backward SDEs for which the coefficients are not smooth enough. Our thesis fills this gap, on well posedness of non-smooth type FBSDEs with quadratic drivers, by studying the existence, regularity, and numerical analysis of solutions to such equations.
Q: What was the most interesting insight or the greatest difficulty?
A: The most interesting thing was the daily suspense that the research provided since we were navigating in an area where little had been done in the literature and where the little that had been done was not easy to understand or implement.
Regarding the biggest difficulty, I could highlight the administrative side which was not always cooperative, the move from Biriwa (former AIMS-Ghana site) to Accra, the confinement during the Covid period and my first research visit to Germany (finding accommodation was not easy).
Q: Does it have practical applications in everyday life?
A: I can't tell that it has a direct application in everyday life. But, for sure it has the potential for being applied in many related fields like finance.
Q: Did the scholarship affect your professional ambitions?
A: In a positive way, yes definitely! It is possible to impact the world through high-quality research conducted in a developing country in Africa with decent support and funding.
I will be forever grateful to DAAD for this opportunity given to me.
Q: What do you plan next?
A: My plan for the next 6 years is as follows: Do another Postdoc for a maximum of two years then obtain a position as a junior researcher or, if possible, head of a research chair, preferably in one of the AIMS centres.
Q: Dear Rhoss, thank you very much! We wish you all the best for the future!
(Questions: DAAD - P24; Answers: Dr. Rhoss Likibi Pellat)
IV. Publications
