Welcome!

Welcome to the VRL Lab manual! I am trying to keep this document up-to-date for sharing useful information on how our group operates. Please share your suggestions and experiences to make this document useful as possible.

Onboarding

There are couple of things that we request from all our members. You can find information and the instructions below.

Website

Students must have a website. I recommend using your institutional webspace as well with a simple redirection to point your own domain name.

There are several free options for hosting your own page. I prefer Github Pages. You can also look for academic website templates like this or this one. Google also has a platform (Google Sites) to build website with an simple draw and drop interface. You can also assign your own domain name easily on this platform.

Calendar

Our lab has a private event calendar where we schedule group meetings, seminars, social activities, etc. Please ask for access.

Update group website

This website contains information about our members, publications, resources etc. We share these content on a Github project. You can send me your information or make a pull-request for the changes. You should update the file for members and upload a picture of yours to include your profile on the website.

Join Github Organization

We are organizing the private and public repositories for our lab's projects on VRLLab github organization. Make sure to become a member of the team and create your repositories under this orgnization and invite me as a collaborator.

Meetings

Group meetings

We condict regular group meeting where everyone will have an opportunity to present their work and get feedback from their labmates. Please be active, share your opinions and give constructive feedback.

One on one meeting

If you would like to meet one-on-one to discuss about research, courses or career advice, we can schedule a time for this. Please don't hesitate sending an email.

Resources

Learning by doing

I prepared a small document that share my suggestions about the tools, books, softwares etc. You can follow this document to get a practical knowledge. However, the best way to learn is by doing.
Follow this link for the document.

Writing (paper, thesis, SOP, etc.)

There are several great resources on writing. I am listing couple of those below

Tips & Tricks

Creating accounts and collecting credentials for APIs

Most of our projects rely on public APIs for data collection. Some of these platforms unfortunutaly became more strict about providing access to their data. Make sure to apply early and be a good citizen when using those API keys.

It's always a good practice to keep credentials, email addresses associated with those credentials in a JSON file for easy access and never publish these on a public repository.