Guide for graduate students

Useful links

• Applying to UBC CS grad school

• Applying to UBC stats grad school

• Ten simple rules for scientists

• How to be a good graduate student, by Marie des Jardin.

Specific suggestions for UBC people

• Corrections to the UBC CS MSc style file, by Jordan Reynolds

• Using the beta/arrow clusters

• Use the UBC CS Wiki

General suggestions

• Learn and use Latex. (See my Latex tips page.) If you use windows, I recommend the free WinEdt package, which makes LaTeX compilation very easy.

• Learn and use BibTex, and start building a .bib file for all your references.

• Learn and use powerpoint. It is the currency of the realm, whether you like it or not. For equations, use the excellent TexPoint plugin.

• Use CVS for version control. Tortoise CVS is a nice windows interface to this, which is much easier to use than the command line. See also CVS tutorial by Jordan Reynolds. SVN is considered better than CVS. See SVN tutorial for murphyk group. Here is an example of a filename

  svn checkout file:///ubc/cs/research/lci/ai/murphyk/svnmurphy/root/students/emtiyazKhan/ 
  

• Remember the 80/20 rule (80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code). Hence 80% of your code should be in some high level language, like matlab or Ocaml or R or python. Your time is more valuable than the computer's time.

• Strive for the goal of reproducible research. This means you store all the code/ parameters you used to generate all the figures in your papers, and you make them publically available. This is not only scientifically honest, but it will help you re-generate old results, eg when it comes time to write a journal version of a conference paper. See Making scientific computations reproducible, by Matthias Schwab, Martin Karrenbach, and Jon Claerbout, Computing in Science & Engineering, Vol. 2, Issue6, Nov.-Dec. 2000, p.61-67. See also Wavelab and reproducible research, Jonathan Buckheit and David Donoho, 1995.

Specific suggestions for machine learning people

• Learn and use matlab.

• Join the following emails lists: connectionists and uai.

• For UBC people: Join the following email lists: lci-lab (ask LCI GA to subscribe you), robuddies (Little/Lowe), lm-rg (learning machines: de Freitas), fopi-rg (first-order probabilistic inference: Poole), ea-rg (experimental algorithms: Leyton-Brown/ Hoos). You can add yourself to a mailing list by sending an email to majordomo@cs.ubc.ca with the line "subscribe ListName" in the message body. Also, To be included on our seminars mailing list and notified of all seminars and talks related to Computer Science, please send e-mail to seminars-request@cs.ubc.ca and in the body of your message type: subscribe

• Recommended reading for machine learning people
  • "All of Statistics", Larry Wasserman, Springer 2004.
  • "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, 2nd ed, Prentice Hall 2003

Specific suggestions for Windows users

• wmf2eps lets you generate eps files from clipboard entries (eg from powerpoint)

• TeXpoint is a great way to do LaTeX math in powerpoint.

• WisePixel HandySnap is a free version of snagit for windows (for creating bit images of screen shots).

• SpaceMonger is a good program to visualize your disk usage.

• Pageant is a program to store your password (encrypted uisng a public/private key) and send it to PuTTy automatically, so you don't have to type it in everytime you check in/out code from Tortoise.