Organization / logistics concerns
- internet should be improved -- sometimes not even the internal website was working
- we should make sure the website can be easily accessed from outside and everybody is informed about this possibility
- email buttons were not working for several people with combinations of OS and browsers, even when email client was properly set
- bring back the mailing lists!
- water/coffees in the disco room to support hard workers, coffee is too expensive at the bar, we should work out a discount option with the hotel, promising some coffee break time
- more tables are needed in the disco
- anti-mosquito lights for night workers
- social software installed locally to encourage interactions, such as mattermost http://www.mattermost.org/
- shared folder (samba/windows) that can be mounted locally
Science: morning sessions, workgroups, format, topics, etc.
- some of the sessions were hard to follow because the point seemed to be missing, people should have a tutorial first to be on the same page. Maybe the tutorials could go before the coffee break and after the coffee break the format could be more interactive
- many sessions were tutorial-like but some sessions about general topics, givin a sort of a general vision of what the workshop is about and topics to think about, are necessary
- topics could be better interchanging between engineering and biology
- presenters should be encouraged to provide material in advance (papers, keywords, ...) so that morning sessions can be better appreciated
- the debate/talkshow style of last year was very much appreciated and should be repeated in order to encourage the debate
- sessions should be clearly declared as being tutorials/lectures or debates/discussions (e.g., before / after coffee) in order to give people a clear perspective on what's going on
- we need fellowships! It should be easy to convince Frontiers that Capo Caccia is funding a large percentage of the papers appearing in Frontiers in NE
- one morning sessions dedicated to applications, perhaps with a large participation from privates/industry (although it's probably hard to convince them)
- new research seems slow to be integrated in the sessions, instead old ideas were mainly presented and this aspect disappointed many
- we should have a journal club discussion group were the latest research in different fields (comp. neuroscience, biology, engineering, machine learning) is presented to get everyone up to date
- invited people should be rated and suggestions on who to invite should be encouraged sometimes later in the year
- descriptions of the workgroups should be made more clear: is it a tutorial? a development effort? discussion? A template would help but also have better visual elements to distinguish between these classes
- in order to promote interactions prior to the beginning of the workshop, we could list skills, goals and other details for each participant of the workshop (1 or 2 lines) in order to steer the attention of workgroup leaders towards some potentially active participants
- at the same time, the workgroup descriptions should clearly mention what specific skills are preferrable (especially if it is a development workgroup)
- last year's Python tutorial was very much appreciated so every year there should be a tutorial on a topic of broad interest (python programming, deep networks on Theano, soldering, fpga programming, neural network theory, ...)
And to conclude, the best comment ever: bring hardware that actually works! -- Anonymous
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