Lab Meetings

Lab meetings are held Fridays from 3:30-4:30. Each week one person will lead a 30 minute discussion about recent published work or (less often) results from his/her own work. The presenter should send an invitation to their audience at robotics@cs.umass.edu the Monday before their talk with the title, abstract, and if possible an electronic version of the paper that will be presented.

Every participant is encouraged to regularly seek out papers in the literature that warrant a thorough read. Scour the proceeding of conferences (the source of most of our lab meeting presentations). Evaluate papers by reading: (1) the title; (2) the abstract; and (3) by skimming the paper and the results in that order. In each step of this process, fewer papers should survive. Thoroughly read those papers that seem relevant to your research and have survived this vetting process. Add these papers to you personal bibliography with enough annotation so that you can search for keywords and quickly recover your own description of the paper's strengths and weaknesses for future reference. You may also want to keep electronic version of the paper in a personal library (with links from you bib file) so that you can pull them up and re-read them if need be.

Make time to do this every week. If you do, your personal bibliography will accumulate, you will have an archive of literature that will serve you throughout your career and you will always have a couple of papers from which to choose when your turn in the lab meeting rotation comes up. Try to select one of your favorites that you think may have broad appeal in the lab meeting.

Papers