The student dialogue will be a half-day event where PhD students of different disciplines from universities in Stockholm and Uppsala are invited to discuss various aspects of sustainability. When signing up, you can state which subject area interests you the most and suggest specific questions for discussions. The day will offer opportunities to discuss with fellow PhD students, find research partners for new collaborations (as well as applying for seed money to get that project off ground), present a poster and enjoy a free lunch.

Read more about the event and sign up here. Registration is open until 7 October, or when places fill up if before, so hurry up to guarantee your participation!

Mendeley is a free program to manage your references and PDFs. It is multi-platform (like TeXworks). Once you have downloaded Mendeley and created an account, there are three ways to add references in Mendeley.

1. Using the web importer: This is useful when you want to add a reference from a paper on IEEE Xplore or a google scholar search. You can install the web importer from this page. It is a simple bookmark. For example, let’s say we perform a search on google scholar and get the following hits:
   

   
   

   Then, by clicking on the web importer, a popup window shows up, from which you can import single hits from the list or all of them.

   
   

   You can read more about the web importer on this page.

2. Adding PDFs in the desktop application: If you have a PDF file, for example a report, that you want to add to Mendeley, you can do that directly in the Desktop program. Mendeley should be able to extract most of the information from the PDF (title, author, year), but you can edit this yourself once the PDF is added to your library.
3. Manually adding a reference: If you want to add a reference manually, you can also do that by selecting “File -> Add Entry Manually”.

How are your references managed?

After you have created a Mendeley account, all your references will also be stored online. In addition, you can choose to also upload your PDF files associated with the references to Mendeley servers. In that way, you can have all your PDFs online and synced between different computers. Once your PDF files are added in Mendeley, you can let it automatically organize them in some folder (“Tools->Options->File Organizer”).

Exporting the citations

One important point is how to get your references out of Mendeley and use them when you write a paper. I will here assume that you use Latex and want to get some Bibtex file with your references in it.
There are plugins for Word and LibreOffice, too, but I haven’t tested them.

First, you need to give bibtex citation keys to your references. You can do it by hand, or let Mendeley do it, in which case the citation key are [AuthorYear], and “a”, “b”, “c”, … are appended if you have several references from the same author and same year.
I personally prefer [AuthorYearTitle], where “Title” is the first meaningful word in the title, for example “Hamon2012Stochastic”.

Then, to get your citations out of Mendeley in a bibtex file, there are several cases:

1. You want to get only some of your references out of Mendeley: select the references that you want to export, right-click on them and choose “Export”. Then save the Bibtex file where you want to have it.
   

   
   

2. You want to get all your references out of Mendeley. In this case, you go to “Tools->Options->BibTeX” and enable “BibTeX syncing”. This will create BibTeX files at the location that you choose in the field “Path”. These files will be automatically updated by Mendeley with all the references in your library. The update is made when you press “Sync” in Mendeley.
   

   
   

A possible workflow

When I run across an article that looks interesting, I add it to Mendeley and tag it with “to-read”. I also have created collections for different topics, e.g. “Wind power forecasting”, “Voltage stability”, and so on. When the reference is added to Mendeley, I download the PDF, rename it according to my bibtex citation key and add it to the reference in Mendeley, which then moves the PDF to a specific folder (in my case, a folder on my Skydrive account). Hence, all my papers in that folder are named after my bibtex citation keys, which is really convenient when I am looking for something (and also because I keep my notes in org-mode, using some workflow similar to what is explained here, there and there).

When I have some spare time to read, I search for “tag:to-read” in all my documents in Mendeley, which brings up a list of all articles waiting to be read.
Note that there is a “read” flag built-in in Mendeley, but I don’t use it.
I don’t use the built-in annotation feature, but put my notes in separate org-mode formatted text files.

Mendeley keeps a bibtex file updated with all my references.
When I am writing an article, I simply copy this file to Latex working directory.

Wrap-up

This was a succinct presentation of Mendeley. There many features that I don’t use (for example, you can create groups with other people and share papers inside these groups). Overall, I have found it to fit quite well in the rest of my workflow. There are some glitches, though. I had some problems with bibtex syncinc for example. Some fields were not properly formatted and displayed badly in the resulting bibliography in Latex, but these were special cases, and it works smoothly in most cases.

There is a comprehensive table which compares many LateX editors on Wikipedia, but I will talk more about my personal experience of using TeXworks.

TeXworks is inspired by another editor, TeXShop. I personally like the uncluttered environment that it offers. TeXShop is shipped with the main LateX distributions such as TeX Live and MiKTeX. It is multiplatform so that once you get used to it (which doesn’t require much time) you’ll be comfortable on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

TeXworks: the LateX editor and the PDF viewer side-by-side

One of the best things about TeXworks is its integrated PDF reader. On Windows, for example, many LateX editors rely on YAP for viewing DVI files. Just as a reminder, PDF files are usually what you would like to get (although IEEE requires you to upload PS files) and there are mainly two ways to get PDFs when using LateX: either you run latex + dvips + ps2pdf or you run pdflatex. Most of LateX editors on Windows use by default the first solution, and actually by default stop after the latex step, thus giving out a DVI file, which you can then preview with YAP. I think everybody has experienced frustrating glitches or lags in scrolling when using YAP. TeXworks, on the other hand, has chosen to be PDF centered, and thus gives out a PDF file by default. The PDF reader is integrated while other editors usually rely on an external PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. The nice thing about having an integrated PDF reader is that you don’t have to close your PDF file before running LateX. Indeed, if you view your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat and make some changes in the LateX source file, you need to close the PDF file before running LateX. Otherwise, having the file opened in Adobe Acrobat will prevent any other program, and in particular your LateX editor, from writing in the file (Edit: although apparently some LateX editors automatically control your PDF reader to close it, run LateX and open it again, more on that in another post). Nothing like that to worry about with TeXworks, and this is really a time saver.

The PDF reader integrates forward and reverse search so you can control-click (apple-click on Mac) somewhere in the source file and that’ll take you to the corresponding line of the PDF file, and vice versa.

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The new EE PHD council members for 2012 are presented here:

Chair Pia Grahn (Electric Power Systems)

Vice-Chair Kun Zhu (Industrial Control Systems)

Employment committee Camille Hamon (Electric Power Systems), Richard Scharff (Electric Power Systems) and Mariana Dalarsson (Electromagnetic Engineering)

Undergraduate education Camille Hamon (Electric Power Systems)

Graduate education Antonios Antonopoulos (Electrical Machines and Power Electronics) and Nicolas Schrammar (Communication Theory)

Member Andreas Krings (Electrical Machines and Power Electronics)

We thank Leefke for her efforts as chairwoman during last year, and wish her the best.

Kind regards,

Pia Grahn,

Chair of the EE PhD council 2012

http://www.kth.se/ees/utbildning/forskarutbildning/doctoral-program?l=en_UK

Including basic and advanced courses per track. Unfortunately there is still no course list for the general skills….

We play every Tuesday morning from 8:30 to 9:30 in KTH Hallen.

All PhD students are very welcome to join!

LH200V Grundläggande kommunikations- och undervisningslära (GKU) 3hp

Pedagogical course. Given in the fall. In Swedish. Doctoral students from the School of EE  can participate. For more information and how to apply see http://www.kth.se/ece/avdteach/ped/kurser/grundkurser/LH200V/HT11-1

(This course will be revised and given in English in the spring 2012. More details to follow later.)

Forskningsmetodik 3 hp – Hösten 2011

Starting date and course information to be announced later. Interested students should contact Kathy Hammar kathyh@kth.se

Let us decide a date:

http://www.doodle.com/aqki7w4s29g5snvs

Cheers

Kun ZHU
Vicechair of EE PhD council

zhuk@ics.kth.se