Guide

This page includes documentations that serve as a reference for current group members as well as for on-boarding new members.

AI use policies

The materials in this section were largely adopted from Dr. Jason Moore’s research group.

Critical thinking

We ask you to write reports/papers/thesis/dissertations in school so that you learn how to write. You may not see it yet, but writing is also a key to improving your critical thinking. The act of communicating each and every sentence, helps you think out the complexity of the work you are doing. If you let AI write for you, you remove a large amount of the thinking you need to be doing to become a researcher or engineer.

AI is a tool that you can use to help you in your work. But it should not be used to directly produce any content that we use and publish.

Permitted Non Permitted
Write a paragraph by yourself. Prompt AI to generate a paragraph and paste it into your writing.
Write a paragraph, provide it to AI and ask for adjustments and feedback, manually rewrite the paragraph based on the AI’s feedback. Write a paragraph, provide it to AI and ask it to improve the paragraph, paste the paragraph from AI into your writing.
Prompt AI to check the grammar in your writing, manually fix grammar that is suggested by AI. Pass your writing to AI and prompt it to fix the grammar and spelling, paste the result into your writing.

Statement On AI Use

If you make use of AI tools that can essentially generate texts, images, or code for you, you must make a statement in your document explaining how you used such tools. You should also be cautious when using such AI tools because the copyright of the AI content is ambiguous. The AI content is a derivative of other people’s (possibly copyrighted) work, and you do not want to laden your writing with possible copyright infringements. You are required to make a statement on AI use, for example:

During the preparation of this work the author(s) used Grammarly to improve the grammar in the writing. After using this tool/service, the author(s) manually reviewed and edited the content as needed. No contents, including texts, images, and source code, were directly generated by AI.

Software tools

To support efficient group collaboration, group members are expected to use the software tools listed below to generate research products. Check with Fred beforehand if you are considering using something else.

Programming language

The group primarily use Python for day-to-day work such as scientific computing, data manipulation, analysis, and visualization, and developing computational models.

Data cleaning/manipulation/analysis

  • The group primarily uses Polars for data cleaning, manipulation, and analysis.

Data visualization

  • The group primarily uses the Python library Vega-Altair for data visualization.
  • In rare cases in which Altair does not serve the needs, use D3.js for bespoke data visualization.

Scientific writing

  • For day-to-day work the group primarily uses Quarto and Markdown to write reports, slides, etc.
  • For manuscripts (journals, conferences, dissertations, thesis) in which Quarto is not fully capable yet, we use LaTeX.

Version control

The group has an organization account on GitHub for version control https://github.com/fenggroup

Group members are expected to use Git and GitHub for version control and collaboration. Create an account on GitHub if do not have one already, and request group membership.

Slides

Research poster

A research poster should be written in LaTeX using the group’s poster template.

PhD proposal & dissertation

PhD proposal and dissertation should be written in LaTeX using (unofficial) the University of Michigan dissertation template.

Masters’ thesis

Masters’ thesis should be written in LaTeX using (unofficial) the University of Michigan dissertation template.

Diagrams

In most cases use Mermaid for generating diagrams such as flowcharts. Note Mermaid diagrams can be directly created in a Quarto document.

Image editing

Use GIMP which is a free and open-source image editor.

Video editing

Use OpenShot which is a free and open-source video editor.

Group website

The research group website is created with Quarto website. GitHub Actions are set up to render and publish the site on Github Pages. The source code for the website is at https://github.com/fenggroup/fenggroup.github.io

Group members should use the GitHub pull request mechanism to submit changes for review. Fred reviews pull requests and approves/merges the changes.

Training

LaTeX

Version control

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