Robotics weekly meetings

Purpose of the meetings

The robotics meetings are organized to help all roboticists of the lab to accomplish their work, gain knowledge, share, brainstorm, and encourage creativity in general. Apart from technical questions, these meetings are also a good occasion to practice our soft-skills, such as presentation skills, to maintain/increase the quality of our work.

Format

1. Presentation: Between 15 and 45 minutes, depending on your needs
   • New experiment to come
   • Current work
   • Presention about a paper in robotics litterature on current-day topics
   • PhD presentations rehearsals
2. Discussion on the presentation: 20-30 minutes
3. Brainstorming time: list of research questions everyone can ask to the audience to get people's opinion, collaborate, etc.

About the presentations

Pay special attention to the support that you will use during your presentation:

• Avoid fancy powerpoints templates: they don't help to get to your point
• Less is more: ask yourself if everything in your presentation is mandatory for understanding your point of view. If the answer is no: delete it.
• 1 slide per minute is a good practice, unless really necessary (typically a slide with an equation will last longer: in this case, you can split it in multiple slides, make things appear one at a time, etc, to increase clarity)
• Try to keep your speech as clear as possible during your presentation

About the contents themselves

• Think about implications of what you are presenting for the research direction of the lab as a whole - methodologies, technologies etc. It is always nice for everyone to have a preliminary introduction on your work to understand the technical points.
• To keep things coherent, try to organize your slides having in mind a 'scenario' - a series of messages that you want people to recall after your presentation.

Timing

The bi-monthly meetings take place on

Fridays at 14.00.

beggining on Friday, February 14th 2014.

The frequency of the meetings can increase if needed.

Attendance

Everyone that subscribed to the robotics mailing list is invited to the meetings. Send an e-mail to the organizer of the meetings in case you cannot attend the meeting, at least 2 days before the meeting, for the others to know their audience. (Policy change: you won't be punished anymore in case you don't come, but you can buy the organizer a beer - he loves the Trappe Quadrupel)

Forthcoming Meetings

The schedule of the forthcoming robotics meetings can also be found in the IRIDIA calendar

Past Meetings

• February 14th, 2014: "Environmentally-driven collective construction with unconventional materials" - Presentation about Anthony's work