New to the Group?

Welcome to Capra! Here are some things to do:

• Ask someone to invite you to the Capra Slack workspace.
  • Join #lunch, where we organize our weekly group meetings (see below)!
  • Join #overflow for asking & answering technical questions!
  • Join #radpapers for recommendations about cool papers to read!
  • During the ongoing global catastrophe, join #distancing for regular virtual hangouts!
• Use Slack to ask someone to add to you the Capra GitHub organization. (Any faculty or PhD student should be able to do it.)
• Get door access to 407 and CSL.
  • The lab in Gates is room 407. Shailja may be able to help get you access.
  • It can also be useful to access the CSL lab, Rhodes 471. Fill out the CoE door access form by selecting “Electrical and Computer Engineering” and requesting access to Rhodes 471.
• Create a personal webpage so that we can link you from our group webpage! You can add yourself to people.yaml in the public repository.

Lunch

We meet weekly for lunch and a short, informal topic about research. Check out the schedule for the current semester.

If you’re presenting next week, you’re on the hook to order food for the group. See our instructions and ideas for ordering lunch.

Calendar

The lab maintains a joint Google Calendar, which you can view here. By clicking the little plus icon near the bottom right, you can add this information to your own Google Calendar and your favorite native calendar app. You may not immediately have write access; please ask Adrian for access and he can share it with your Cornell Google account.

The broad philosophy is this: add to this calendar any events that you think might be useful for other people in the group to know about. Group-wide meetings, weekly research meetings, particularly relevant talks at Colloquium or other venues, A/B/M exams by Capra students, and practice talks are all fair game.

It perhaps goes without saying, but this is a maximalist approach designed to encourage drop-ins and cross-project engagement when it suits you. You are not expected to attend everything.

Travel

Want to go to a conference or some other academic thing? Here’s some advice about conference travel, including tips about registering, booking, and getting reimbursed.

Infrastructure

Gorgonzola, Havarti, & Parmigiano

Gorgonzola, Havarti, and Parmigiano are our general-purpose research servers. Gorgonzola has GPUs, Havarti has FPGAs, and Parmigiano has an Arm processor. Slack Adrian for access.

Graphite & Camembert

Graphite is a cluster of machines with lots of GPUs, which is particularly useful for machine learning work. Our machine in the cluster is called Camembert, and it has 8̶ 7 Nvidia RTX 2080Ti cards. The ML group has more instructions about how to use Graphite.

Waffle/Hooknook

We use Hooknook to deploy websites and such from GitHub repositories. For example, this private site and the public group site both get deployed using Hooknook. Hooknook runs on a Raspberry Pi in Adrian’s office named waffle. If you need to continuously build something whenever you push to master in a git repository, you can configure it to use Hooknook on waffle.

Ask Rachit or Adrian for access to waffle and help setting up Hooknook.

Amazon Web Services

We have a shared AWS account that uses direct billing.

Undergraduate Research

See some instructions for working with undergrads on research.

PhD Milestones

Advice on the various milestones of Cornell’s PhD program.

Buying Equipment

Need a new laptop or any other equipment for research? Our research funds can buy that for you. Pick what you want and send links (via Slack or email) to Shailja, cc’ing Adrian. If you need help choosing what to buy, Adrian recommends Wirecutter.