General onboarding information

Welcome to the Advanced Imaging and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI2Lab). We are at the Schulich School of Engineering of the University of Calgary. Our faculty members are from the Electrical and Software Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Departments.

Lab website, news, and student profile

Our lab website is www.ai2lab.ca. It contains general information about ongoing projects, student recruitment, and current and past trainees. If you have any news we did not include on the website, please contact us so we can update it.

If your student profile is not there yet, please send your profile picture and a short bio to Roberto ([email protected]) or Mariana ([email protected]). Companies have reached out to trainees through our website with exciting opportunities!

Compute resources

Most trainees in AI2Lab work with machine learning and image processing. Many of you may have a laptop or desktop equipped with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), but these are often insufficient for large-scale experiments. For large-scale experiments, we often recommend using the High-Performance Compute clusters available to us.

For more details about these, please see here for the University of Calgary clusters or here for the Digital Research Alliance of Canada resources.

Team communication

Our team communicates mostly by email or through our MS Teams channel. If you are not a member of the AI2Lab Teams channel yet, don't hesitate to contact us so we can add you.

Literature review and references manager

Several tools can help you do a good literature review for your research. Google Scholar is a good tool for searching papers. Connected Papers and Research Rabbit are good tools for finding related papers to your research.

For managing references, we recommend using Zotero, which is a free, easy-to-use tool to help collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research.

Tools for writing

Most of our research papers and thesis are written using latex. We use an online tool called Overleaf. Roberto ([email protected]) has a premium account and can help you get the premium features for your Overleaf document.

We also use MS Word for many things, especially when some of our collaborators prefer to write and share documents in Word.

Though Google Docs is a great tool, we often avoid it since our organization uses Microsoft products, and staff gets 5 TB of storage on OneDrive.

Slide templates

You can choose whichever slide template you want for your presentation, but sometimes "less is more." The University of Calgary has many slide templates that you can use when preparing a presentation (link).

File naming and collaborative writing

When working collaboratively on a document, we suggest sharing the Overleaf document if using Latex or the OneDrive folder if using Word or something else. This makes working simultaneously on the same document easier using track change features.

We don't have a file naming convention, but please use meaningful descriptions to name your files. Almost everyone in the lab will have an "abstract", "paper" or "thesis" document, but these descriptions are not very helpful when collaborators are searching for these documents.