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How to Use the university Email, IMAP /SMTP Settings

Elmar Rueckert wiki_phds, wiki_technician

University Email Instructions

  • You got an email or letter with your university Email, a P-Number (e.g., mine is p2196256) and a pin-code or password.
  • Your email will be: firstname.lastname@unileoben.ac.at
 

Two Passwords

  1. MUOnline: https://online.unileoben.ac.at
  2. NMAIL / NOTES: https://nmail.unileoben.ac.at/
    This password is needed to setup your mail client!

Setup the Mail Client

Few important notes:

  • You can only send mails when connected to the university network.
  • Setup a VPN Client to send mails from outside the university network. Find the download links and instructions here.

Note that only the incoming connection to the host nmail.unileoben.ac.at is a secure connection.

  • Incoming Setup (IMAP):
    • User: p-number
    • Password: Your NMAIL / NOTES pw that is used to login at https://nmail.unileoben.ac.at/
    • Host: nmail.unileoben.ac.at
    • SSL, Port 993
  • Outgoing Setup (SMTP):
      • User: p-number
      • Password: Your NMAIL / NOTES pw that is used to login at https://nmail.unileoben.ac.at/
      • Host: nmail.unileoben.ac.at
      • pasword-only, no-encryption, Port 25

Nextcloud Mail-Client Setup

You can also setup your mail client in our nextcloud (https://cloud.cps.unileoben.ac.at).

Note that with this online client, you can always send mail, even when being not connected to the university network.

On the right, an example configuration is shown.

Latex Templates

Elmar Rueckert teaching_student_resources, wiki_phds, wiki_undergradsgrads

CPS Latex Templates

Find below Latex templates for student reports, B.Sc. theses, M.Sc. theses and doctoral theses.

You may use these templates also for other lectures, courses, seminars or doctoral theses at other chairs at the Montanuniversität Leoben. However, do not remove the acknowledgement or copyright statement.

If you never used Latex, watch our video on an introduction to Latex.

Student Report or Assignment

We provide a professional scientific student report template using double columns.

Get the latest CPS report template from our cloud.

Student Presentation

We provide a scientific student presentation template for project and thesis reports. Get the latest CPS presentation (latex beamer) template from our cloud.

B.Sc. Thesis

We provide a thesis template using minitocs in a standard report format.

Get the latest B.Sc. template from our cloud.

The latex template also provides basic instructions on the content and the structure of a thesis.

However, every thesis is unique and may be adapted acordingly.

M.Sc. Thesis

We provide a thesis template using minitocs in a standard report format.

Get the latest M.Sc. thesis template from our cloud.

Ph.D. Thesis

We provide a Ph.D. thesis template using minitocs in a standard report format.

Get the latest Ph.D. thesis template from our cloud.

In Introduction to Latex

If you have never used Latex, you find a brief intorduction in these slides on Latex.

You may also watch a recording of the exercise by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert on Latex.

How To fix the Robot Hand (Overheat Error)

Nikolaus Feith wiki_phds, wiki_technician

Signs of an Overheat Error

Two signs occur when the overheating error is present:

1) Only the red lamp on top of the robot hand is light up continuously.
2) The ROS Terminal (running the roslaunch rh8d start_rh8d.launch programm) displays “Overheat Error”. In the picture below the error message for servo #38 is displayed.

Needed Resources

  1.  Download the TSBAdvanced Loader binary from github.
  2.  Download the RH8D Fix folder (so far we have only the fixes for Servo #33, #35 and #38, if you need a different one please talk to Prof. Rückert).

How the fix works

  1. Connect the robot hand via the micro USB connector on the side of the hand to a Windows computer.
  2. Plug in the power supply of the robot hand.
  3. Open a Terminal on the Windows computer.
  4. Move to the directory were you unziped the “RH8D Fix.zip” files.
  5. Check the COM connection to the robot hand in the devices manager (i.e. COM4).
  6. Now enter the bridge mode with the terminal command : “tsbloader_adv.exe -port=[the Virtual Serial port number/id you determined in point 1] -seederos=bron” (replace the [the Virtual Serial port number/id you determined in point 1] with i.e. COM4.
  7.  Depending on the servo motor, the corresponding pwd must now be used. Servo #31 = A; Servo #32 = B; … Servo #38 = H.
  8. To reset the faulty temperature sensor of the corresponding servo motor use the following command: “tsbloader_adv.exe -port=[YOUR COMM PORT] -prewait=2000 -pwd=[SERVO-PWD] -eop=ewv -efile=[RESET FILE FOR THE SERVO] -baud=33333”
  9. If there are more than one errors, fix only one at a time!
  10.  After completion use the command: “tsbloader_adv.exe -port=[the Virtual Serial port number/id you determined in point 1] -seederos=broff” to leave the bridge mode.
  11. Afterwards reboot the hand (replug the power supply and disconnect the micro USB cable). After booting all three lamps should light again. Otherwise contact the support of seed robotics via email: support@seedrobotics.com

Sources

How to use Sensor Glove with Robot Hand

Vedant Dave wiki_phds, wiki_technician

Repository Clone

 

Additional Requirements

Connection with PC

First step is to make sure that the Sensor glove is connected to the USB0 and Robot Hand is connected to USB1. If this is not in order, we might have to change it inside the files and aslo in rosserial_python library. 

Connecting with ROS

  • Initiate Roscore with command: roscore
  • Run the Rosserial Python command to initiate the Serial connection between with the hand through Python:

          rosrun rosserial_python serial_node.py tcp

           You will see something like this:

  • After this, run the Arduino file to initiate the calibration. If the Serial connection is finished, you will see something like this:

Connecting with the Robot Hand

In order to connect with the hand, just run this file:

roslaunch rh8d start_rh8d.launch

GPU Cluster with eight A100

Elmar Rueckert wiki_phds

Getting started with Pytorch using Cuda acceleration

This tutorial gives an instruction on installing Cuda and enabling Cuda acceleration using Pytorch in Win10. Installation in Linux or Mac systems are all possible. An additional .py file will verify whether the current computer configuration uses the Cuda or not. The following instruction assumes that you have already installed Python IDE, e.g., Anaconda, Pycharm, Visual Studio…

Step 1: Check which Cuda version is supported by your current GPUs under this website. From the left figure, we can see that A100 supports Cuda 11.0. It is also reported from other blogs/ forums that A100 can support Cuda 11.1. In this post, we install Cuda 11.1.

Step 2: Download Nvidia Cuda Toolkit 11.1 (the same version as Cuda in Step 1) from the website. In Win10, for instance, we follow up the choice as shown right. The size of exe(local) is around 3.1GB. After downloading, run the .exe and perform installation. It may take some minutes to complete installation.

Step 3: On the homepage of Pytorch, choose the appropriate options as shown in the left figure. IMPORTANT: The cuda version must be the same as in Step 1. It is also recommended to use Stable version. After finishing the , copy the command into Anaconda Powershell Prompt or other command prompt where you install packages for Python. Waiting for the installation, which may require larger than 1GB disk space and takes some minutes for installation. You could also find historical version of Pytorch in that homepage.

Verify your installation with .py file

You could download a cuda-test.py file and run it. If the result shows ‘cuda’, then you can enjoy the Cuda acceleration for training neural networks!

Using Multiple GPUs for further acceleration

Running Pytorch with Multiple GPUs can further increase the efficiency. We have 8 GPU cards and can be used parallely for training. Please refer to (1) (2) (3) for details. 

Meeting Notes Template

Elmar Rueckert wiki_phds

As PhD you have to attach a meeting note to your personal profile post, e.g., Linus Nwankwo, M.Sc.. The notes have to be uploaded right after the meeting!

 

Clone this template and change the category to ‘notes_yourname’ (you may need to create this category first). You will need this category to display only your notes on your personal post. 

Make sure that the post you create is only accessible by the administrator and PhDs. In special case you may restrict the access only to you and your supervisor which is the administrator. 

 

The title of the meeting notes should contain the date and some keywords of the discussed topics. 

To attach the notes to your personal post, look at the example here. An image of the relevant section in your post is shown on top.

Meeting on the 13th of August 2021

Location: Chair of CPS

Date & Time: 13th Aug. 2021, 1pm to 2pm

Participants: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert, Linus Nwankwo, M.Sc.

 

Agenda

  1. Organisatorial progress update by Linus.
  2. Feedback to the research talk presentation by Elmar.
  3. Topics of promising future research direction.
  4. Next steps of Linus.
  5. Date of the next meeting.

Top 1: Organisational Update

add you text here. 

PhD Thesis Roadmap & Goals

Elmar Rueckert wiki_phds

Defining concrete measurable goals is of major importance for PhD students. 

These goals should be well crafted based on the research focus and the strengths of the student.

The goals form an agreement between the supervisor and the student. They can be used to evaluate the progress at any time. 

Your Thesis Topic in One Sentence

Every student should be able to explain their research topic and the scientific contribution in one sentence! 

Start thinking about it now. You will be asked dozens of times during your PhD at meetings or conferences.

What is your research about; and why is that important; and what is new; in one sentence. 

Thesis Topics

Ideally, your thesis consists of three parts or research topics. These parts might be adapted during the progress of the thesis. 

Each part should result an a journal publication and/or two conference publications. A good strategy is to first publish two short stories (= conference papers of 6-8 pages). Thereafter, the short stories are combined in a larger approach and published as journal paper. 

  1. Plan: planning future actions.
    Open research question: How can biologically inspired neural networks plan complex actions in few milliseconds?
  2. Act: Executing the actions. 
    Open research question: How can closed-loop controller be learned or generated from high-level plans?
  3. Sense: Sensing the environment and monitoring the execution. 
    Open research question: How to monitor the execution of neural closed-loop controller and to apply corrective actions in real-time?

Defining a Short Research Story

  1. Start by collecting the relevant related work to your research question. 
  2. Define an open unsolved problem and why it is relevant to the community. 
  3. Create measurable scores or goals how a solution to this open problem could be validated. 
  4. Also define 1-3 baseline algorithms or approaches which you will (re-)implement first. 
  5. Think about a toy task to demonstrate the principles. Typically, toy task simulations of point masses, simple 2D games or robot simulations in V-Rep are useful first case studies.
  6. Develop a relevant experimental setting to evaluate your approach. 
  7. Compute statistically significant statistics. Print Tables and Figures.
  8. Start by writing the results section of you paper. Describe the Tables and Figures first. Is your research question answered? 
  9. Continue with the methods section. Did you define a problem statement? Are your baseline approaches explained?
  10. Structure the collected related work and add it as subsection to the introduction.
  11. For the introduction, first write 1-3 sentences on the topic and the relevance. Next talk about the open problem and discuss the related work. Explicitly discuss your idea, own prior work and your contribution. 
  12. Write an abstract and a conclusion. 
 

Here are some examples.

PhD Thesis Goals and Achievements

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Item Goal Accepted or
Achieved		 Under review or
in Progress		 Note
Journal Paper 2 - 3 min 1 accepted & 1 submitted
Conference Paper 4 - 8 min 2 accepted & 2 submitted
Workshop Paper or
Abstracts		 2 - 4
Live Demo 1 - 2 min 1 own demo
Patents 0 - 2 a patent can replace a journal paper!
Conference Paper Review 8 - 24 number of reviewed papers, not conferences.
Journal Paper Review 2 - 6
B.Sc. Thesis 4 - 12
B.Sc. Project 4 - 12
M.Sc. Thesis / M.Sc. Project 3 - 6
Teaching assistant of exercises 2 semester. It can be the same exercise.
Guest lectures 0 - 4
Conference and Lab Talks 6 - 12
Research or
Industrial Collaborations		 1 - 3
Summer Schools 1 - 2
Lab Stays at other Universities
for 1 - 3 weeks		 0 - 2
Internship of 2 - 3 months 0 - 1
Soft Skill Training 2 - 6
Outreach (lab demos,
school events, fairs, etc.)		 4 - 12
Contribution to a research
grant proposal		 0 - 3 typically few paragraphs only.
Student or hiring committee
member		 0 - 2

Checklist New Employee

Elmar Rueckert wiki_phds

Congratulations! You are now part of the CPS team. 

This post will help you setting up your work environment, getting ready to start as scientist and provides helpful instructions at the beginning. 

Organisation Things to Do

If you have not looked at our organisational instructions, do it right now! 

These steps are of utter importance. Your official start and when you get your first salary depend on these steps.

First Technical Steps

  • Read the How to Add Posts Instructions.
  • Update your People Post on our CPS wordpress site.
  • Create a Gmail account if you do not have one already. Send your gmail email to the Chair.
  • Create a Google Calendar with the name: CPS First Name Last Name, e.g., CPS Elmar Rueckert

First Scientific Steps

Clone the PhD Roadmap post and add it as link to your people page post. Follow the instructions there, define topics and research questions. Remove unnecessary parts like the section on ‘Defining a Short Research Story’.