Platform Recommendations for Students

In this post I describe the platforms I use for working. These platforms facilitate collaboration and boost teamwork. I recommend all my students to familiarize themselves with these platforms and use them for their projects and in communication with me.

Communication

Slack

I preffer to use Slack for work communication. I need to invite you to my workspace using Slack Connect. I will let you know about it.

Materials

User Interfance/Experience (UI/UX) Design

Go through this part if your project includes a user interface design. If not, skip to the next section.

Prototyping

Figma (Recommended)

1. Create an account on Figma
2. Register for Figma Education using your KTH email

Version Control

Needless to say that we will need a version control for our programming materials

GitHub

1. Create an account on GitHub if you do not have one already
2. Register for GitHub Education and get verified as a student so that you can access the premium features for free and so many other benefits that I encourage you to use, such as GitHub Copilot
3. Activate your GitHub Copilot
4. Create a private repository for your degree project/thesis and add me as a collaborator using my GitHub username @horotat

Open Science Framework (OSF)

A healthy research ethics means not to be worried about sharing your work with others. If we are honest in all what we do, then we sholdn’t worry about sharing the details of our analsys, data, and methods with others. An open science attitude is a good way to give the other researchers the opportunity to reproduce your work and build on it. OSF is a platform that facilitates this process. If you are going to work on a scientific project with me, I recommend you to:

1. Create an account on OSF
2. Create a project for your degree project/thesis
3. Add me as a contributor using my KTH email
4. Keep the repository private for the time being
5. In our first meeting we will put the proposal on the OSF repo and build on top of that

Time Management

I am not strict about your preferred way of time management, but it is important that you have a framework and we follow up with the agreed method. You need to take care of the time management yourself but present your plan and updates, each time we meet. You can as well just use Slack Canvas or written text. But if you want some flaivour, here are some recommendations of the systems that I personally have used and liked:

• (Recommended) Notion(With free student subscription).
• (Recommended) Microsoft To Do
• Other platforms:
  • ClickUp
  • Trello
  • Todoist
  • Google Tasks

Literature

Search & Review

During your project with me, you will learn about how to search for literature and find relevant studies to shape your project in a proper academic way. We will discuss the techniques all together but before hand you can familiarize yourself with the following platforms:

If you are KTH student, review the KTH Library information about Literature search.

Here is a list of platforms to use for literature search and review:

• Search
  • Google Scholar
  • Scopus
  • Web of Science
• Evaluate
  • Elicit
  • Scite

Reference Management

You will need a way to keep track of the references and literature that you find so that later you can easily cite them. There are some softwares that can do that. You can find information about many of them on this page of KTH Library. My preffered software is Zotero.

Zotero

1. Install Zotero on your computer and browser
2. Create an account on Zotero
3. Create a group for your degree project/thesis, and add me as a member using my KTH email

Writing

LaTeX, on Overleaf

I recommend you to use LaTeX for writing your thesis and personally I am most comfortable with LaTeX for collaboration and commenting on your writings. For this purpose follow these steps:

1. Go to Overleaf. Sign in with your KTH account (SSO)
2. Create a project and add me as a collaborator using my KTH email
3. Go to the setting of your profile and connect your Overleaf account to your GitHub and Zotero accounts (included in the Overleaf premium with your KTH account)

Overleaf is pretty straight forward, but if you do not know LaTeX, the pages below provide very nice and quick tutorials:

• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes: Quick option
• Learn LaTeX: More comprehensive option

Apart from these there is a ton of resources online. Just google it!

Facilities for My Students

As long as you work with me I could try to provide you with the following facilities:

Computational Resources

I can give you SSH access to my server for the duration of your project to exclusively be used for your processes. The server configuration is as follows:

OS	Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
CPU	Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10850K @ 3.60GHz
GPU	GeForce RTX 3090, 24GB
RAM	DDR4 128GB
Storage	1TB SSD, 4TB HDD

If you need heavy computation in your project send me your SSH public key, mentioning your needs and demands, and I will give you access to the server.

If you are not familiar with SSH, you can find a tutorial in this post.

Office Space and Access to TMH

If you need it, I can provide you with office space within TMH division. This is not promised and depends on the availability of the space.

To get access to TMH facilities, send me your Personal Number (Personnummer) (or birthdate if you do not have a Swedish personal number.).

Computer

Depending on what you need to do, I might be able to get you a laptop for the duration of your project. This is not promised and depends on the availability of the laptops.