in the session because there are people coming late and they will arrive maybe one more time or in January. So it's nice to record it because then people can just set the video and at least have a little bit more information about the PC program. So that's why we are recording the session. So welcome everyone. I'm Emilia Vómez. I'm the academic coordinator of the PC program. Any question about academic procedures? You can contact me. Let me introduce a little bit of people here. I'm Nicolou Lévi, the director of our department. We would like to send a little bit of our department to you. Davinia Narmic is one of the vice directors of the department and she's also in charge of the teaching support unit. So if you have your teaching, we will also send something about that. Then Aurelio, who is in charge of the research seminars course, which is the only course, formal course, formal, we'll see later, that you will have in the PC program and Lydia, I guess you already know her. She will be the one that will solve all the problems and all the questions you may have related to administration and of the problem. So the goal of this session is just to give you a lot of information about the PC program and to let you know who you can contact, which other resources you have. And also later on we will have some copies so that you can interact with us, also between you and then if you want, we will also organize some tours for the campus in case you want to know a little bit more about it. It's raining but some things you can see inside. Okay, so first maybe you can start with that. Okay, thank you very much, Lydia, for the introduction. We'll come everybody. It's nice to see new faces at the department. Every year we have around 20 new students, new PhD students and for us it's a pleasure to welcome all of you. We see people from all over the world. That's quite common in our department. We have a structure with faculty from different places and it's quite common to share experiences and to have this added value of social relationships among us. I have a summer slide I think to share with you. The next hour we'll be very busy. We have a lot of information to share with you there are a lot of not only teaching staff how the research is going to be held even how the PhD proposal is going to be presented in the next month so there are a lot of information, very important information for you but my role here is just to introduce a little bit where you are. This is the department. We call it the department of information and communication technologies. This is the only technical department we have at the UPF. The UPF is a young university, mostly devoted to social sciences but 15 years ago we created that department and this is where the technologies and engineering are going around. We have our PhD program where you are enrolled so congratulations first of all for being admitted. You will see that this is a really broad PhD program so we cover a lot of topics we will see now in a minute which are the main research areas of the department. We have first of all this brochure. I have some of these brochures in my offices but there is the PDF link here in the bottom of the slide. In this brochure we have some of the information that we will share with you today but they are probably the buyers of the faculty in our department, the most interesting part. You can see just browsing that document which is the flavor of the department. We have people working in networking areas or multimedia content or machine learning or many other topics that we will see in a minute. Where are we? We are in one of the three main campuses of the UPF. We are in here, we call it the Campus Poblonau, Campus de la Comunicación. The area is called Llorias which is the biggest square we have now under construction close to our campus and this will be the center of Barcelona in 10 or 15 years. This is what Gaudí designed, Gaudí no Cerdà designed many years ago and this is going to happen soon. Hopefully we will see it soon. And this is the rest of the campus. Here we have mainly the technical department but we also have the visual communication people and linguistic and international people. So we have mainly engineering and contents here at this campus. In the rest of the campus we have the Ciutadella in the Ciutadella campus we have humanities, we have law, we have economics, we have political sciences, so it's a social sciences campus. And the small one in the bottom part of the map we have the Mar campus, the Ci campus where we have the bio people there. So these are the three main campuses at the UPF that probably you will have to move sometimes. I invite you to know the rest of the campus which are quite good and are quite close. Ten minutes riding you are there. Can we move? Okay, which are the tick values? We are a small department in a social sciences university but doing technical stuff, most of them applied in several areas but working at a global scale. As you may know, the UPF is very well situated in the different international rankings. We play that lick. It's one of the best universities, one of the best Spanish universities and according to our age we are one of the best international young universities. It is stated in different rankings. Why? Because we try to do our things in having an international scope, working with, you know, collaborating with other colleagues in different universities. The amount of collaboration we have are worldwide. The disciplines we do here are several. We try to do as many interdisciplinary phases as possible. For example, we have this Maria de Maes to program which is a research I would receive this year that tries to combine research among different research groups trying to do things in a different way and trying to improve our research and our impact in that way. Okay, I think we can go. We not only have the PhD program, we have also undergrads programs. Probably some of you will teach, will do some teaching stuff in some of these programs. We have Bachelors in biomedical engineering, computer engineering, telecommunications, and the last is mathematical engineering on data science that we will start in the next course. Okay. The post-graduate education is also abroad. It's directly linked to some of the research groups. So it's very well connected with the research. It's the first step towards our research. So we have here the list of masters that we offer right now. Sound and music computing, cognitive systems, cognitive systems, and so on. I have a question here. How many of you have been enrolled in one of these programs? Okay, that's good. Good news. The master is, according to our view, is the first step towards the PhD. So having some of you being with us apparently enrolled in one of these programs, these are good news sites. Can we move? Okay, going to the research area, the organization inside the department needs a little bit messy sometimes. But we try to present ourselves according to the areas. We have around 20 different research groups, which is a long list. But we try to organize these research groups among a few areas. Here we have the, for example, the result technologies where cognitive and intelligent systems, communication and networks, computational biology and biomedical systems, and brain and conditioning. There are the five main topics or areas all the research groups are located for. Some of them are in the middle of two areas, but this is part of the values of the department. Here you have the long list. I won't go through all of them. You can here probably easily locate the research group where you will be developing your research work, right? So this is, I guess, an updated list of research groups. The information is on the website. Which is some of the figures, key facts about the people. For example, we have tenured faculty, which is 44 different people. Some of them fully dedicated to research. So the research profile is really one of the trends, one of the most important facts of the department. A bunch of research staff involved in research projects or different collaborations we have. 40% of them are international from abroad. We have also around 900 undergraduate students enrolled in the bachelor's I presented some of them to go. And then, 340 masters and PhD students where you are, where the level of internationalization is a little bit higher. So coming from abroad, with a master's from a foreign university or even with a bachelor's from different countries. Then, here we have some of the previous positions of the faculty we have right now. There are some flashy names here, time for Cambridge. Not all of them are coming from the university, from the academia, some of them are coming from the industry which is just a summary of the research. The research is our key driver, I must say. By the way, we have here the vice-factor for research of the university which is one of our faculty is Angel Lozano. And here you have some figures so we have a bunch of resources for developing our research. We can mainly from Europe. Europe is the main source of funding for our research. Organized in different ways. The Horizon 2020, we have the ERC grants and so on. And here probably the last recognition we got is the Maria M.S. that I mentioned previously, which is a transversal program trying to connect people interested in doing research where the main path is the data-driven knowledge. We also have some people not from our department helping us. This is our advisory board. They were here right before the summer. They come here from time to time and they follow our project, the outcomes from our department and they assess us in different ways. How to improve, how to become excellent in research and these are really friends, friends of us trying to provide the best advice. And we also are very well connected with the industry, not only local but also global industry. Here we can see some logos from the main stakeholders of our department. We have long relationships with some of them. Entrepreneurship is also one of the things that have been rising a lot in the past. We have been creating several spin-offs. As a result of your research that's quite important. Not only from professional but also from students, especially for graduated students are having interesting ideas that can be connected with a spin-off with a new company and this is part of the university providing the tools, providing all the help that in these first stages, these type of projects are claiming. And we have a very busy agenda. We not only do classes at the Bachelor of Master's and so on, we also are organizing international events from time to time and this is the agenda for the next month. In November we have a workshop organized by Vanessa who is here, another faculty. She is working in cryptography and she is organizing this last week I guess, so it's not only one day, the whole week, right? Most of these events are open, so it's not fully open, some of the conferences are a good option to listen and to hear from the experts worldwide any of the current topics that we're working here at the department. So we are other things, other visual experts in language learning and other workshops and other topics. So this is part of the agenda for the department. Okay, these are some more things. For example, we have the Web Parenthesis Meetup. We are very happy because we the fact of being in Barcelona means that Barcelona attracts a lot of events, so we try to take some advantage of that and as soon as we have some interesting events connected to our research, to our work, we try to establish links with it and trying to do collaborations and so on. And these are some of the things that have been happening here. Probably one of the most important things is the Mobile World Congress that's this place in late February. And some of the things, for example, the Web Parenthesis this is one of the things that we are doing in connection with the Mobile World Congress but I asked about other things. Okay. Yes, maybe I can I can mention there's also some activities that we don't organize but you organize like students just so we are also open to any initiative or any kind of interest you may have. These are some examples. For instance, we have a deep learning study group which is coordinated by one of our students by Aurelio Ruiz and we have also some courses or some group working on 3D printing of medical images. We have also some interest in gender balance in ICT and we have a space that can be used for those kind of projects in the library you may visit later. So we are open to any initiative so we also support student initiatives as far as we can in that sense. Let me tell you a little bit about the PhD program now you are enrolled so you are starting now your journey into the PhD and I wanted to give you some ideas of what it will be like. So the PhD program we have many alumni now that are working in industry or in academia so there's no single path into the PhD program. You can still get some training you can still tailor it to your interest and also to what you think will do your future so the idea is that this PhD program is not a fixed profile but can be tailored to different interests and it's also nice to that you have a mix of profiles a mix of people that can benefit from synergies and from your project apart from their specific teaching. So in fact we are also supporting some people applying to fellowship outside of our PhD program for instance these are some examples of Google and Facebook fellowships that are now with closed deadlines and some of our students also got them in previous edition. So just to give you some ideas we our PhD program as you may know last for three years plus one possible extension so it will be a total of four years of PhD in the first years you need to follow our research seminars is our main training course and you can of course it's mandatory in first year but you may attend also some of those seminars when you are in second third year because some of them are also designed for people in third or fourth year and then in the first year you will probably have to prepare a PhD proposal so you may already have some ideas about your PhD topic maybe written something but this year is really the time you have to focus and do your state of the art and just get to know what you will be working and define what is your proposal for your PhD this year is crucial because as far as our experience people that have a clear idea after the first year and has already some contributions will be more successful in their PhD especially to finish in four years with the extension three years is maybe not very usual that people arrive but three and something will be mostly what you will be expected to finish your PhD and this of course in the first year you will have the support of your supervisor but you also have myself as an academic coordinator to have another person to talk to and you will also have to do it as a person coordinating the research seminar so it's a year where you will be more in contact maybe with your colleagues working in other groups or working in other topics and it will be important as a starting point to do this connection also and to have this contact then the second and third year will be mostly working with your supervisor in your project but as far of course we also have to evaluate in a yearly basis your achievements and the fact that you can you are advancing in your PhD and you will be able to finish at least and we can plan also for the end of your PhD and we have a possible extension of four years so now you have three years and if you want to ask for it and if you have to justify the work that has been done because we want to avoid there is people abandoning the PhD program after many years or there are people that they didn't focus on actually I mean there is no more formalities than that you have one course to attend you have to prepare your PhD proposal and then you have to submit your report of course the first year is kind of crucial because PhD proposal as I told before you have to show that you can do a PhD so that you are able to undertake original research at the PhD level and then we will help you to to end up showing that it's basically a report that you have to do where you show that you understand the state of the art you plan to make scientific contributions and you have a clear idea how to do that and of course the PhD proposal you have to write it and you have to present it in front of the U.S. so we will also provide some training for writing skills and presentation skills for you so this is basically your job from now to end of the year this PhD proposal is done in July but it can also be extended in September but we recommend this extension for people that started in January or February but you have started now in October you may think you have to do it in July or end of June or first of July and there will be a jury that is usually defined by or formed by your supervisor another faculty member of the department that is maybe recommended by your supervisor that might be maybe from closest area there is another member that we as a PC committee we define someone also to review your proposal and then of course you have to send a report before the presentation everything we will publish all these slides and this is also in our internet that we will give it also so that you have this information and of course in the first year you are not able to pass this stage you have some time to do it again so you have six months to repeat this PC proposal this is a very important step because as I said before it's like having pushed really in the first year it's also a way to be successful in your PC some administrative procedures that maybe I will summarize so maybe I can give more details we have a yearly enrollment from 1st to 10th of October but we have also people joining later that's why we recorded a session but also it's important that there is one committee in the department which is in charge of PC and first graduate that has to approve all the modifications you will do from your initial plan for instance if you want to change supervisor you have to ask the committee there is a formality to ask to inform that you will change supervisor or if you want to have two supervisors you also have to inform so it happens that people just change and they don't inform so as you may know that there is this procedure that you have to follow and also if you want an extra year or you have to deposit you will have also to do it in the normally and these are most limited you have to plan in advance we also have in this committee the possibility to ask for extra funding for traveling for conferences so we have some travel grants you can apply that maybe now but when you publish if there is no funding from your project you may also apply for that and then it's important that you have a tool for updating your research plan and all the activities related to the PhD that is in campus I don't know if there will be any specific training on that but yeah so it's nice that you have your own like blog of activities maybe one which is more scientific for your supervisor but we don't need so many details we just need to know if you went to a research visit to a place we need to know about that and if you went to a conference we also need to report because then we will assess based on this report so this is a document or application so the the only course we have for this PhD program is a research seminar so the coordinator is Aurelio maybe you want to say a few words about that Hi I'm Aurelio welcome to the PhD program and I'm going to talk very extensively about this because next Thursday at 3.30 we have the introduction to the course so we will go with details about the requirement the different courses but for those who are not with us so basically this course is a series of seminars there are research seminars and the seminars end at training you on non-research skills so that you can so that you can perform better when preparing your research proposal by the end of the year and you can start preparing yourself for being an independent researcher already during the third year so you can the type of topics that I am most co-ordinating are on the one hand things you need to know as a researcher which includes ethical issues with the management into a self property and your research life will be essential so we want you to start working on them since the beginning and working them already for your research proposal and on the contrary things that could support your career we plan to have some sessions on potential career paths as Emilia mentioned potential career paths are very broad like academia, industry, entrepreneurship whatever so we would like to have some specific seminars for you to start thinking about that giving the right steps in that direction already during the first year so important is that for the non-scientific research attendance is basically compulsory including the one next week and that you will be evaluated on some work related to this related to your research proposal so basically the parallel side on your research proposal which will deal with research topics it will be requested to elaborate on how all these topics affect this research proposal and see that we give a click in this year as efficient thoughts and actions on them and next Thursday we will cover the the topics with detail the list of topics is closed but of course we can add additional topics if you have an interest so feel free in general to invite speakers to propose yourself as a speaker if there's something you would like to share and to add a topic to this list so I can try to find a right speaker for that if that's your interest so thank you yeah I want to also to mention that this research seminar is the only mandatory course you have in your PC so it's mandatory you cannot pass your PC proposal without this course okay this is important to know because some people think okay but there's only two things you have to do your PC proposal you have to pass this course and you will see it's not very difficult but still you might have to plan if you want to travel for instance for a research day maybe not in the first year but some people still or if you are doing an industrial PC and you are not here then we have to think about we have to see how we can manage for this course so it's important at least to talk to our area also next week and try to plan I wanted to say that there is one event that we organize every year which is the doctoral student workshop it's an annual workshop for our PC students that takes place here in March we have not days yet a place where people present their ongoing work they present to the department but last year we also have people from other universities for instance we have students from Cramer University of London that came here to present their work and we had also many visitors like we had people from companies and people from other universities in Barcelona so we try to showcase all the research that PC students are doing we will send an email for you to take part and we are always looking for volunteers for organizing it's very interesting experience to organize a workshop and it's also very interesting to take part in the process not only as an attendee but also inside so if anyone is interested to take part you can contact our email or myself and we will also send an email to you and there is also one initiative from the university which is the research in 4 minutes competition that is a competition where PC students not only from our department but from other departments in the US they send the research in 4 minutes and there is a competition so we have been very successful in our department and it's not only a very nice way to present your work but also to check the videos you can see what different people are doing so it's nice to see some of the videos that have inspiration for your work and we will maybe ask you to participate and I think it's in June or at the end of the year apart from your compulsory seminars there are many seminars that people in the department are organizing there's the CVC, the Center for Brain and Condition they have also the seminar series in services seminars from the department which are also very general and then maybe we include also in the research seminars and there's meetups that we support like meetups will be learning there are many things going on so you will have to select also the things you want to attend but we don't force anyone to attend extra seminars this is everything that I wanted to say now I will introduce Mesa Rafa in charge of teaching also in the department also she's the director of the department so she's doing the teaching assignment and she will tell you a little bit so she's the one with both of your teaching grants so that is also important for those of you where the funding is linked to teaching it's very important to do very well with teaching so that everything goes well thank you so let me explain you basically what Emilia suggests so any of you who have probably one of these grants meaning one of the department grants either piece one which means you have some teaching duties 60 hours per year piece two grants meaning you have 40 hours per year FPU, FI FTI, I don't know if you know all of you all these you signed a contract and in that contract you will be written piece one, piece two piece three or then you are applying for all the contracts so if you don't know please let me know my email was at the other slide so and at the end I will repeat it so the thing is basically there are some grants that you have mandatory to teach so depending on the grant 60, 40, 30 hours but you have to teach so I'm the person responsible to assign you the teaching then there are some other grants that maybe because of these industrial people then some of the people FI the ones from the government and then maybe you have your own fellowship from your country then you don't have to teach but you can if you want so let me tell you looking for people that is interested in teaching so you will be paid extra for teaching 70 hours 70 hours per euro I don't think this is a good deal but 70 euros per hour I think it's a much better deal so if you are interested please check the link that I will show you I think in a few hours slide talk also to your supervisor some supervisors are open that you will do some teaching some others not so once you clarify this point and if you're interested contact me and send me the proposal of what you would be interested to teach so everybody is welcome to take some subjects for this year it's almost everything covered but you will be around for some other years so as far as you know please let me know and then there is also even though for the FI there are some restrictions so people with the FBI can teach but they cannot teach 100 hours so they only can teach 60 hours in a second and a third a year so depending on your grant there are some constraints but in any case if you are interested please send me an email and first of all talk to your supervisor and we can talk what can you teach for the next year what does an hour mean some people think okay that one hour mean I'm going to the class to the lab and I'm doing the class and that's it and no it's something else it means that you go to the class you prepare it first you correct the lab, you teach it you try to motivate the students everything is covered in one hour so when I mean one hour 70 hours per hour this hour means all this thing the preparation and the whole thing we assign to seminars or practices one I'm always trying to do it in one hour and one subject it's most true some people ask me three because I want to talk different things and more details directly from the coordinator of the subject so all the people that now has a grant from the department should know what teaching is going to do for this year it is like this everybody knows your name is yeah you know I'll send you an email you're going to teach a structure of that you have an algorithm with Dulos Salas Dulos didn't contact you so okay some coordinators are a little bit slower than I am but I sent you an email and I told you you will be in charge of this and Rafael Ramirez is also in charge of this okay that might be the problem okay then that's a welcome back some extra information so you will be teaching in the second term beginning on January a part of Malalena okay so I hope that everybody that has this the department grants knows what to teach otherwise please again send me an email and usually you will receive information from the coordinators this is the person that knows exactly how it's going to be the subject so I know about the assignment but I don't know the details of the subject if you have to go to that place or the others so for these details please contact the coordinator who is a permanent professor usually in the department and she's going to contact you and then you agree on how you have to okay languages this is important because as Miquel mentioned there is a lot of people from all around the world this means that you have to teach in Spanish, Catalan or English these are the official languages from the university in the first year mainly is Spanish and Catalan even though there are already some groups in English like the one that Magdalena will teach in the next term in the first year but there are some small groups in English then the idea is that in the second year we are introducing the English and actually in the third and the fourth even I would say almost everything is in English so there if you are coming from abroad then you will have more opportunities to subject from the third and the fourth year master some of you it's not usual but some of you teach in some master course so everything will be taught in English and one important thing, one very important thing is that after the first year a mandatory requirement is that you manage to speak in Spanish or Catalan so at least try to communicate that's the point, you should communicate you should be able to communicate with the students some of you, it's not always the case but some of you only can teach subjects in the first year because of your background and if you only can teach in the first year mainly it's in Spanish and Catalan and basically you are only for the students that are coming from a grant of the department but for the ones that have this department grant this is a requirement to renew your content so it should be added that I will add for the last version that this is only a requirement for people that has a grant from the department Catalan I think that the university has some free courses to promote Catalan, it's not the case for Spanish but in the management team we decided to promote also the opportunity that if you are here also learn Spanish and during the first year we will refund the course this is a link to the course that if you can take here the university from there you cannot come and say okay near my home there is no but if you go here and you take this course and you pass then you get the the tuition refund for the first year if you have any doubts about your teaching now because you arrived late I'm assigning something but you prefer to teach something else from next year or maybe when you teach this subject you will expect something else and you would like to change please let me know, this is an email that I would prefer that you contact for all the teaching I don't want from the university but if it's possible I think it's better if you send me the email here because behind here a part of me there is also Diana Zapankova and Luz Bost who helped me from the administrative staff to solve all this all this puzzle I would say so if you send me there everybody is aware of all this information so thank you I don't know if you have any questions some of you already know me because in the second half of September I already gave a seminar on how to teach in our school, in our department so those of you I hope that are teaching in this first quarter in this first term already know the basic of how teaching is organized and which are the main tools which is the support that we offer if not if you are teaching this first quarter and you didn't attend for whatever reason the session that we have in the second half of September please feel free to contact me in this session that we have and then for the rest those of you teaching in the second quarter there will be an additional session on how to teach in our context by the end of this quarter in mid-December I guess so that you are really for the second and third semester in this session what we explain are the practical aspects for the first day of teaching how we organize the clue pins the basic regulations around teaching that the students know very well and that is useful that you also know because you will be communicating with the students all the time and also the spaces that we use to facilitate the students access to the resources that we use for grading etc so it is also good that you know the different resources that we have and the different tools that we are using to support our teaching including also the units at the level of our of our school of our unit also at the level of the university the services that we offer to support you with teaching and learning methods with teacher training etc so there is a unit that you can find here in our building that is the teaching for quality the unit for teaching quality and innovation is a support unit we have a person coming from with an educational background a pedagogue that is here in this floor just beside here so she is available to discuss with you any issues that you may have around your teaching skills essentially and you can also contact me around these aspects because we are in charge of quality in teaching but also their aspect may be the case that you will find us sending you emails or looking for you in your offices so that you participate in the studies that we typically do depending on the or the problems that we identify for example two years ago we did a study that was aimed at understanding what extent you were comfortable with your teaching duties with the the workload how were you were able of combining research and teaching so this is a study that we did two years ago where we identified the interest of having these sessions on how teaching is organized and explaining better your duties and all these things and probably also this year we will do a study that is more related to the satisfaction with the PhD program and all the aspects around the seminars and the organization of the PhD so this is also something that you will find Veronica and myself sending you emails and looking for you because we will make your participation I think there is a lot of information I will end up with two slides or one about our International Data Office some of you have already had some contact when maybe people come applying for a visa or before arriving to the department so there is one international office which is they have a website and also an email that you can contact also and they will just help you also with many things that you may need is practical things practical stuff and finally there is also this welcome package that also will help you and also in the secretory will help you to get emails or get access to email or to campus and the internet we have for teaching or to get a Wi-Fi network at least to know where is the information they will also help you in the secretory which is in the first floor just that side and you can contact the secretory and I think it was the end of our talk so now I will maybe like to invite you to introduce yourself because we have talked a lot but at least maybe we don't know all the faces and all the people so it will be nice if you can just stand up or if you don't want to stand up so that we can or and see your name and also if you have a supervisor and the group and then maybe wear you some more I don't know so it will be very nice for us to at least know the faces and with the names and maybe also who came for that yeah can you thank you so thank you everyone I think it's also nice that you see that different people doing different stuff with different background so it's also a challenge for you to make things together apart from your own groups because you will be mostly in your own group with your supervisor but it's always nice to explore other synergies you may have with people doing different things and it also creates a lot of nice projects and that gives you some other ideas for your research so I think that's all if anyone has a question about what we're playing about is there any question you want to ask now yes we will um um we will put them online on the website of the THC program and we will put the video also there and it's also nice to follow the Twitter because we are, oh now it's not it's just the logo that's it UPS so in Twitter we are also posting all the activities and all the things we are doing so it's also nice to follow and and then we now now we can maybe for the tour to the campus it will be the inside tour in the campus but you can just have a coffee after in the fourth floor because we wanted to use the terrace but it's of course not very not a good idea so you can go to the fourth floor and there will be some coffee there and then we can talk thank you for coming