Handbook for PhD Students
This PhD Handbook serves a dual purpose: it describes the research methodology of our group and gives general advice to students, and it sets out the standards and processes that all students in the group are expected to strive for.
Support roles in the group
direct link
We have several support roles to help with various aspects of managing our research group. Roles and responsibilities are listed below.
Code & Data admin: (current: Lukas (code), Max (data))
- Manage our group code repo (e.g. access to Github repo, creating new code repos for people)
- Manage our group data repo (e.g. creating new data repos for people)
- Ensure code and data repos uphold our reproducibility & transparency policy (e.g. code files include documentation, code/data repos include Readme files with usage instructions)
Server admin: (current: Trevor, Sabrina)
- Provide general tech support for our servers via the #compute channel on Discord (e.g. server problems, software installation, Slurm config, etc.)
- Help with physical installation of servers in server rooms
- Contact School IT support for issues with "school-managed" servers (e.g. ipab1)
Group meeting admin: (current: )
- Organise our biweekly research group meetings
- Find people to present project updates (two people per meeting, each ~15-20min + 10min discussion)
- Book meeting room (room booker), ideally IF 1.15/1.16 and for 1.5 hours
- Add group meeting in our Teams group calendar (tag the 'Agents group > General' channel when creating the meeting and add room location)
- Announce meeting and speakers in the #general channel on Discord
- Frequency: biweekly (check day/time with me for each meeting), alternating with the RL reading group meetings
Social media admin: (current: Elle)
- Post messages on our Twitter and LinkedIn channels
- E.g. about new papers, blog posts, events we're organising or attending, news about MARL book, other news, etc. - ping me or group on Discord (#social-media channel) to get ideas
- Help to increase social media following
- Before posting, send me a draft of the message to approve
- After posting, send emails to InfComms and ECR to ask them to share the posts (limit this to the more important posts about our own things, like papers and book).
- Frequency: weekly
RL reading group: (current: Samuel, Kale-ab)
- Organise biweekly RL reading group meetings (see here)
- Announce meetings on the RL reading mailing list
- Add meetings on the RL reading calendar
- Manage the paper voting list
- Frequency: biweekly, alternating with research group meetings
Socials admin: (current: Balint, Max)
- Organise group social events via the #social channel on Discord
- Frequency: aim for at least one event per year-quarter
- Organise weekly group lunches