MINDS CDT 1st Annual Symposium
The first MINDS CDT Symposium took place on the on the 12th of January 2023 in Building 100, Highfield Campus, Southampton. The event was very well attended by 32 students from cohorts 1 to 4.
Cohort 1 students, currently in their final PhD year, presented a 15-minute presentation of their projects and results, followed by questions from the audience. Students from cohorts 2 and 3 gave 5-minute flash presentations with the aim to effectively communicate their projects to their fellow students.
The goal of the Symposium was to inform all MINDS CDT students about the multidisciplinary work taking place across all PhD projects, stimulate collaborations or other interactions, and particularly encourage the cross-pollination among the different Research Themes of the MIND CDT.
Prof Tim Norman, Prof Harold Chong, Dr Dimitra Georgiadou, and Dr Bahar Rastegari, from the MINDS management committee, marked all presentations and awarded a prize to the best long and flash presentation.
After a lot of debate, due to the high calibre of presentations, the committee awarded the best Oral Presentation Prize to Hsuang-Yang Wang, who gave a talk on “Excitation-Inhibition cell Activity Patterns for Binaural Source Localisation”. Yang is supervised by Dr Christine Evers and Prof Philip Nelson.
The Best Flash Presentation prize was awarded to Epifanios Baikas. Fanis is supervised by Prof David Thomas and Dr Danesh Tarapore and his talk was about “Efficient Learning on Resource-Constrained Embedded Systems”.
In a follow-up survey, most participants agreed they particularly enjoyed the fact that they learned more about other students’ projects, as well as the opportunity to practise their presentations skills. They also enjoyed the food and drinks reception and the opportunity to hang out with members of the management team and their fellow students, and to get feedback for their presentations in a relaxed atmosphere.